Mike McCormack

Sentado ante la mesa de la cocina, con un sándwich y un vaso de leche sobre el blanco mantel, Marcus Conway lee el periódico y escucha la radio. No hay nadie más en casa. Estamos en Louisburgh, Irlanda, es 2 de noviembre, Dia de los Fieles Difuntos, y a mediodia las campanas de la iglesia tocan el Angelus. Esas campanadas desatan el vertigo de la memoria, y a la mente de Marcus acuden los conflictos no resueltos, las heridas, los amores irreconciliables: la esposa a la que ama y a quien sin embargo ha traicionado, el hijo lejano, la hija artista a la que quiza decepciono. Durante una hora, y hasta el proximo boletin informativo, Marcus deshuesa el pasado, repasa mentalmente su vida como hijo, como esposo, como padre, como el ingeniero civil que es, asombrandose ante la milagrosa construccion del mundo y presintiendo a la vez su pronto desmoronamiento. Escrita a partir de una unica frase que como el hilo de la vida, como el fugaz discurrir de la conciencia serpentea imparable por estas paginas, Huesos de sol articula lo existencial y lo ecologico, lo intimo y lo social, el mundo rural y la economia globalizada, y a partir de esa mirada que abarca la familia, el condado, el pais, las catastrofes de una epoca, Mike McCormack construye una obra epica, tierna, emotiva: la vida de un hombre en toda su inabarcable profundidad, en todo su irredimible misterio, en toda su infinita fragilidad. La vida de un hombre en todo lo que esta tiene de cotidiano, tragico y milagroso.

In his second collection of short stories, Mike McCormack joins head andheart in a series of tales which weave a fluid vision of a world morphing between the real and the hyperreal. Amid much hollow laughter a prisoner is drawn from his cell in the middle of the night to play a video game; two rural guards ponder the security threat posed by the only man in Ireland not to have written his memoirs; a child tries to offset his destiny as a serial killer by petitioning his father for a beating; a late night American cop show becomes a savage analysis of a faltering marriage in the west of Ireland; two men turn up at the door of a slacker to give him news of his death and recruit him to some mysterious surveillance mission; an older brother worries about the health of his younger sibling; the prodigal son returns to reveal the fear and hypocrisy which lies at the heart of his brothers life. In twelve stories McCormacks characters find themselves trying to hold onto their identities in a world where love is too often and too easily obscured.

Marcus Conway has come a long way to stand in the kitchen of his home and remember the rhythms and routines of his life. Considering with his engineer''s mind how things are constructed - bridges, banking systems, marriages - and how they may come apart.Mike McCormack captures with tenderness and feeling, in continuous, flowing prose, a whole life, suspended in a single hour.

This reissue of the authors celebrated 1997 debut collection is augmented with an afterword by the author, who reflects on his success and his work since. Here we enter a world where the infatuation with death, ruin and destruction is total. Set in locations ranging from New York to the west of Ireland, and to the nameless realms of the imagination, it is a world where beautiful but deranged children make lethal bombs, talented sculptors spend careers dismembering themselves in pursuit of their art, and wasters rise up with axes and turn into patricides. While tipping his hat to masters such as Borges and Calvino, Poe and Ballard, Mike McCormack is his own man, and Getting It in the Head is richly imaginative, bitterly funny, powerful and original. This edition includes a new Afterword, in which the author reflects on his early work. Getting It in the Head won the Rooney Prize in 1996, and was voted a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1998.

Someone out there believes Nealon has a plan, a global blueprint for nothing less than a whole new beginning. But Nealon has other things on his mind. Returning home after the collapse of his trial he finds himself alone in a cold empty house. No heat or light, no sign of his wife or child anywhere. It seems the world has forgotten that he even existed.Barely in the door, Nealons phone rings. The caller claims to know whats happened to Nealons family. The man will tell him all that he needs to know in return for a conversation thats all the caller wants, an exchange of views. Its an offer Nealon cant refuse.This Plague of Souls is at once a charged thriller of crime and absolution and a metaphysical enquiry into fractured society, fatherhood and the lengths a man might go to in order to save what he loves.

Six ans après la publication de son chef-d’œuvre D’os et de lumière, nous retrouvons le grand écrivain irlandais avec un roman inoubliable, entre thriller psychologique et évasion poétique. Lorsque

Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker PrizeWinner of the Goldsmiths PrizeWinner of the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year An Irish Times Book Club Choice"With stylistic gusto, and in rare, spare, precise and poetic prose, Mike McCormack gets to the music of what is happening all around us. One of the best novels of the year." Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic Solar Bones is a masterwork that builds its own style and language one broken line at a time; the result is a visionary accounting of the now.A vital, tender, death-haunted work by one of Irelands most important contemporary writers, Solar Bones is a celebration of the unexpected beauty of life and of language, and our inescapable nearness to our last end. It is All Souls Day, and the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table and remembers. In flowing, relentless prose, Conway recalls his life in rural Ireland: as a boy and man, father, husband, citizen. His ruminations move from childhood memories of his fathers deftness with machines to his own work as a civil engineer, from transformations in the local economy to the tidal wave of global financial collapse. Conways thoughts go still further, outward to the vast systems of time and history that hold us all. He stares down through the vortex of his being, surveying all the linked circumstances that combined to bring him into this single moment, and he makes us feel, if only for an instant, all the terror and gratitude that existence inspires.

Marcus Conway est assis devant la table de sa cuisine, un sandwich et un verre de lait posés sur la nappe blanche. Il lit son journal et écoute la radio dans la maison vide, sa femme et ses deux enfants sont absents. Il est midi et les cloches sonnent lAngelus, nous sommes le 2 novembre dans le village de Louisburgh, en Irlande. Pendant une heure, jusquau prochain bulletin dinformation, Marcus se rememore sa vie depuis lenfance jusqua lage adulte, sa vie de fils, de mari, de pere, dingenieur du genie civil. Il desosse son passe comme il observe les ponts, dun regard aussi rationnel quemerveille. Il se souvient egalement des epreuves quil a traversees comme son combat contre la petite corruption locale qui menace sans cesse de mettre en peril la qualite de son travail, et donc la securite de ses concitoyens.Marcus se rappelle ses premieres annees dhomme marie aux cotes de Mairead, la naissance de leur fille puis celle de leur benjamin lainee deviendra artiste-plasticienne alors que le second partira vivre a lautre bout du monde, en Australie. Puis ce jour ou, comme une large partie de la population du comte, Mairead est prise de violentes douleurs causees par un virus present dans leau du robinet, un veritable desastre sanitaire. Il se souvient ensuite du trajet en voiture pour rapporter des medicaments a sa femme alitee. Il se souvient de sa vie qui sest alors mise a vacillerMike McCormack raconte avec tendresse et emotion lhistoire dun homme. En suspension durant cette heure hors du temps, les souvenirs de Marcus Conway sagregent avec grace pour mettre en regard lintime et la societe, le monde rural et leconomie globalisee, la tradition et les grandes questions contemporaines la democratie ou encore lecologie. Il y a une lumiere singuliere dans ce texte, une langue qui bat au rythme dun cur en peine et qui nous immerge dans les profondeurs de lame celtique. Ecrit dun seul souffle, Dos et de lumiere est un livre qui fera certainement date dans lhistoire de la litterature anglo-saxonne.Traduit de langlais (Irlande) par Nicolas Richard.

A collection of affecting and unsettling Irish science fiction from the Booker-listed author of Solar Bones. For fans of Ted Chiang, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Jorge Luis Borges, near-future speculative stories that explore life, death, memory, and consciousness in an Ireland transformed by surveillance technologies, virtual communities, and artificial intelligence.Mike McCormacks new collection is set in an Ireland filled with sentient AIs and clones, and, in one story, avatars replicating endlessly after the death of the human. The stories in Pilgrim X ask us profound questions about what it means to be human. A sequence of four stories center around the android Sophia, stories which take their cue from a true incident about six or seven years ago when Saudia Arabia gave full citizenship to an android called Sophia . . . These stories take up Sophias story twenty five years after that event when she settles in the west of Ireland. Then there are six interwoven storiesAll the Children Equal, Grieving is done With Your Hair Down, How I Met Welger Holland, Mayo In Excelsis Deo, These Are the Tools God Gave Us and Scrapethat are bound together by a handful of recurring characters, and work as an investigation of the meaning of death and life in a world where technology has increasingly blurred the distinctions between the two.The last and title story, Pilgrim X, is set in a post apocalyptic western where Mayo is now a fully-fledged penal colony populated by inmates who do not know their own pasts or nameMad Max crossed with Riddley Walker and The Third Policeman.

The follow-up to Booker-listed literary sensation Solar Bones is a terse metaphysical thriller, named a most anticipated book of the year by The Guardian, The Irish Times, and The New Statesman.Nealon returns from prison to his house in the West of Ireland to find it empty. No heat or light, no sign of his wife or child. It is as if the world has forgotten or erased him. Then he starts getting calls from a man who claims to know whats happened to his family-a man wholl tell Nealon all he needs to know in return for a single meeting.In a hotel lobby, in the shadow of an unfolding terrorist attack, Nealon and the man embark on a conversation shot through with secrets and evasions, a verbal game of cat and mouse that leaps from Nealons past and childhood to the motives driving a series of international crimes launched against "a world so wretched it can only be redeemed by an act of revenge." McCormacks existential noir is a terse and brooding exploration of the connections between rural Ireland and the globalized cruelties of the twentyfirst century. It is also an incisive portrait of a young and struggling family, and a ruthless interrogation of what we owe to those nearest to us, and to the world at large.

Originally published in 1998, the first novel from the author of Booker-listed Solar Bones, Crowes Requiem, is an eerie, fable-like work that confirmed Mike McCormack as a stunning new voice in world literature. McCormacks myth-tinged debut novel gives us the unforgettable Crowe and his endlessly curious and self-mythologizing stories. Crowe is born in the remote village of Furnace in the West of Ireland and raised by his grandfather, a man of madness and bullying love, who teaches him grim lessons about existence. Entirely silent until his third birthday, Crowe becomes an observant and isolated teenager, eventually leaving Furnace for university in a wrong-footed and bewildering city. There he meets a woman who will change his life and outlook, but a diagnosis with a rare and fatal aging disease means that his time with her will be cut tragically short. A profound, philosophical, and darkly funny meditation on childhood, aging, and the nature of life and death, Crowes Requiem challenges us with the powers and limits of stories to capture the pains, wonders, and mysteries of being a person in a wrong world.

The acclaimed debut from the author of Booker-listed Solar Bones is a dark, uncanny collection of stunning breadth and audacity.In this gothic, virtuoso debut collection, Mike McCormack dispenses nightmares both stylish and macabre. A Is for Ax offers an alphabetized account of the killing of a parent, while the title story tracks a chilling sibling rivalry. Others tell of a quiz on the road to Calvary, a door-to-door saleswoman trafficking in strange and menacing feats, and a self-mutilating artist pushing himself to the limit. These sly and dangerous stories, balanced on a knifes edge between life and death, showcase a young writers mastery of wicked formal play.

Rescued from the squalor of a Romanian orphanage, and adopted by the rural community of west Mayo, J. J. OMalley should have grown up happy. The boy has no gift for it, though, and his new life has a brutal way of giving him plenty to be unhappy about. After a sudden tragedy, J. J. suffers a catastrophic mental breakdown. Unable to live with himself, he volunteers for an improbable government project which has been set up to explore the possibility of using deep coma as a future option within the EU penal system. When his coma goes online the nation turns to watch, and J. J. is quickly elevated to the status of cultural icon. Sex symbol, existential hero, T-shirt philosopherhis public profile now threatens to obscure the man himself behind a swirl of media profiles, online polls, and EEG tracings. Five narratorshis father, neighbour, teacher, public representative, and sweethearttell us the true story of his life and try to give some clue as to why he is the way he is now: floating in a maintained coma on a prison ship off the west coast of Ireland. Brilliantly imagined and artfully constructedmerging science fiction with an affectionate portrait of small town IrelandNotes from a Coma is both the story of a man cursed with guilt and genius and a compassionate examination of how our identities are safeguarded and held in trust by those who love us.

Mike McCormacks new novel Solar Bones is longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.In his second collection of short stories, Mike McCormack joins head and heart in a series of tales which weave a fluid vision of a world morphing between the real and the hyperreal.Amid much hollow laughter a prisoner is drawn from his cell in the middle of the night to play a video game; two rural guards ponder the security threat posed by the only man in Ireland not to have written his memoirs; a child tries to offset his destiny as a serial killer by petitioning his father for a beating; a late night American cop show becomes a savage analysis of a faltering marriage in the west of Ireland; two men turn up at the door of a slacker to give him news of his death and recruit him to some mysterious surveillance mission; an older brother worries about the health of his younger sibling; the prodigal son returns to reveal the fear and hypocrisy which lies at the heart of his brothers life.In twelve stories McCormacks characters find themselves trying to hold onto their identities in a world where love is too often and too easily obscured.

CROWES REQUIEM tells the story of John Crowe, a young man born into a village without any apparent history or contact with the outside world. Coming under the tutelage of his mad, beloved grandfather, Crowe is introduced to an existence he feels compelled to understand but is doomed forever to find elusive and mystifying. Breaking free of the old mans spell - drifting through the city hoping to complete his education - he embarks on a sudden, erotic affair with Marian, a young woman with a broken claim to divinity. Unable to see himself except through a prison of fictions, Crowes life begins to escape him. Love story and gothic fairy tale, teeming with ghosts, sorcerors and vagrants, CROWES REQUIEM is in eerie and treacherous meditation on the nature of storytelling by one of Irelands finest new writers.

Un hombre busca a su familia desaparecida. Otro dice saber la verdad. Todo depende de una conversación que puede poner en duda lo que cree saber sobre sí mismo.Nealon sale de prisión y regresa a su casa, en el oeste de Irlanda. Esta vacia. Su esposa y su hijo han desaparecido sin dejar rastro. No hay señales de huida ni de violencia, solo la evidencia inquietante de una ausencia total, como si nunca hubieran estado alli. Antes de que pueda empezar a entenderlo, recibe una llamada. Un hombre asegura saber que ha ocurrido y donde estan. A cambio, le propone algo insolito: mantener una conversacion.Se citan en el vestibulo de un hotel. Ese hombre no responde a sus preguntas. En su lugar, reconstruye episodios de la vida de Nealon con una precision perturbadora, como si hubiera tenido acceso a todo: decisiones, pensamientos, momentos que ni siquiera el recuerda con claridad. Lo que emerge no es una explicacion de lo ocurrido, sino una version cada vez mas inquietante de su propia vida, en la que cada detalle parece apuntar a algo que se le escapa.A medida que avanza la conversacion, Nealon entiende que no se trata solo de recuperar a su familia, sino de sostener lo que cree saber sobre si mismo. Entre el thriller y la indagacion metafisica, Esta plaga de almas construye una tension sostenida en la que cada palabra pesa y cada omision importa. Ya no se trata de averiguar que ha pasado, sino de resistir la forma en que todo empieza a ser contado. Y donde lo que esta en juego no es solo lo ocurrido, sino cuanto de su propia historia puede sostener todavia.Esta plaga de almas esta escrita con un ritmo perfecto. Plasma con precision quirurgica a un hombre acosado por la perdida y el miedo, por unas fuerzas misteriosas y sobrenaturales que se ciernen sobre el y escapan a su control. Ademas, consolida a Mike McCormack como uno de los mejores novelistas actuales.Colm ToibinEl maestro irlandes de la tension vuelve a la carga.The Times

Premio Dublin Literary AwardUna de las novelas literarias más originales de los últimos añosSentado ante la mesa de la cocina, con un sándwich y un vaso de leche sobre el blanco mantel, Marcus Conway lee el periodico y escucha la radio. No hay nadie mas en casa. Estamos en Louisburgh, Irlanda, es 2 de noviembre, Dia de los Fieles Difuntos, y a mediodia las campanas de la iglesia tocan el Angelus. Esas campanadas desatan el vertigo de la memoria, y a la mente de Marcus acuden los conflictos no resueltos, las heridas, los amores irreconciliables: la esposa a la que ama y a quien sin embargo ha traicionado, el hijo lejano, la hija artista a la que quiza decepciono. Durante una hora, y hasta el proximo boletin informativo, Marcus deshuesa el pasado, repasa mentalmente su vida como hijo, como esposo, como padre, como el ingeniero civil que es, asombrandose ante la milagrosa construccion del mundo y presintiendo a la vez su pronto desmoronamiento.Escrita a partir de una unica frase quecomo el hilo de la vida, como el fugaz discurrir de la concienciaserpentea imparable por estas paginas,Huesos de sol articula lo existencial y lo ecologico, lo intimo y lo social, el mundo rural y la economia globalizada, y a partir de esa mirada que abarca la familia, el condado, el pais, las catastrofes de una epoca, Mike McCormack construye una obra epica, tierna, emotiva: la vida de un hombre en toda su inabarcable profundidad, en todo su irredimible misterio, en toda su infinita fragilidad. La vida de un hombre en todo lo que esta tiene de cotidiano, tragico y milagroso.Huesos de sol es realmente excepcional: un libro extraordinario que sera aclamado por todo aquel que crea que la novela no ha muerto.The GuardianUn libro extraordinariamente original, bello y sencillo.The New York TimesUna lectura hermosa y adictiva.The Sunday TimesProust pasado por el tamiz de FlannO''Brien.Literary Review