Chain-smoking alcoholics, warring academics, gothic stalkers, and aspiring writers are just some of the visitors that browse the mysterious library at the heart of this sinister novel. Idlers and idolizers alike can be referenced, in body or in text, among the crepuscular alcoves and dim staircases of this seemingly unassuming building. The secret to a family curse, a dog-eared first edition of Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium, the gruesome fate of a feminist literary theorist—all are available to simply take down from the shelf. Moving between genres, ranging from gothic horror to English pastoral, from critical theory to Cold War noir, this riveting and voracious story-within-stories crescendos the turbulent voices of culture to an effect equally maddening and exalting.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“The prose, winging between stateliness and the coarsest urban patois, is fluent and flawless.” —Independent
“Strange, creepy, often brilliant” —Financial Times
“Often in the last scene, often in the last line, O'Brien . . . withdraws his offer of a pint of mild in the local piss-palace and nails your bottom lip to the bar instead.” —Times Literary Supplement
About the Author
Sean O’Brien is the former editor of The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland After 1945 and has published seven collections of verse, including Downriver; The Drowned Book, awarded the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize; The Indoor Park, awarded the Somerset Maugham Award; Inferno, The Frighteners; Ghost Train; and HMS Glasshouse.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fun stories; odd translation,
By Grumpy Reader "greader" (Spain) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: I Love You When I'm Drunk (Paperback)
These were funny, mostly topical stories about current fads, movements, affairs and marriages. I definitely recommend them to anyone who likes modern, original, satirical short stories. So I give the book five stars in spite of the translation, which is quite funky in spots. I can't tell whether the translator is trying to imitate some kind of Spanish/Catalan slang in his use of certain odd words and phrases, or if those words are some form of modern British slang. At any rate, there are quite a number of these spots in the stories, and the meaning (sometimes crucial to what is going on) is completely lost on this American reader (and no, the words and phrases didn't show up when I googled them).
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