Product Description: 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...read more

Rescued from the squalor of a Romanian orphanage and adopted by the rural community, J.J. O'Malley 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.

A first novel cleverly weaves the strange, dark, and supernatural tale of a young man of unknown beginnings and his surreal, yet rapid, journey through life. By the author of Getting It in the Head.

An up-and-coming Irish writer makes his literary debut with a collection of short stories about the propensity of human beings, young and old, for violence and masochism, a novel that won the prestigious 1996 Rooney Prize in Britain. 12,500 first printing. (view table of contents)