- This event has passed.
Kevin Barry Reads from “Dark Lies the Island”
October 11, 2013 @ 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
Free
Author Kevin Barry will read from his new short story collection, Dark Lies the Island, on Friday, October 11 at 4:30 p.m. at the Lewis Center for the Arts’ James M. Stewart ’32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street. The reading is part of a series presented by Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies. The event is free and open to the public.
Barry’s first collection of short stories, There are Little Kingdoms, was published in 2007 and received the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, awarded yearly to an Irish writer under the age of 40. With descriptions of the everyday painted with colorful local language, his stories examine the transformational and dark forces that may lie within seemingly comic or mundane persons and interactions, often grounded in the country towns and cities of his homeland. City of Bohane, Barry’s debut novel published in 2011, depicts a fictional west Irish town in dystopian 2053. Described by Barry as “written in Technicolor,” the book offers a startling treatment of a future without technology where gangs and vice rule the streets. City of Bohane received the Author’s Club First Novel Award, as well as the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Dark Lies the Island (2012), his second book of short stories, expands upon the author’s gift for witty observation, and one story, “Beer Trip to Llandudno” was selected for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.
Barry’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, Best European Fiction, and many other journals and anthologies around the world. He also works as a screenwriter and a playwright.
