We are happy to invite you to the post-lockdown IRL launch of Trouble by Philip Ó Ceallaigh in Books Upstairs, Dublin on Friday 22nd April at 6pm.
All are welcome.
Philip Ó Ceallaigh has published more than fifty stories, most of which are collected here and in his two previous collections, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and The Pleasant Light of Day. He is a recipient of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, among other awards. He lives in Bucharest.
“Trouble has all the danger and lucklessness of the author’s finest work…[It] is his comeback after 12 years and it shows him at the height of his art.”
—Maggie Armstrong, The Irish Independent
“A different writer, perhaps a less self-assured one, might have produced a novel at this juncture. But Ó Ceallaigh persists with the short form, and his latest collection, Trouble, is testament to why. Short stories speak differently than novels. They can accommodate more craziness, sustain things that longer, more establishment form won’t tolerate. The tormented peculiarity, the dark humour and saturation of Ó Ceallaigh’s work could not be captured any other way.”
—Niamh Donnelly, The Irish Times
“Philip Ó Ceallaigh is my favourite living writer of short stories, and Trouble is full of what makes his work stand apart: the vision at once insistently carnal and mysteriously spiritual; the singular tone, so bright and bracing and clear; the wit and vagrant cheerfulness that animate these tales of run-down men and fed-up women in decaying cities.”
—Rob Doyle