First, the good stuff, because Kevin Barry is full of good stuff. He’s at his best when his stories veer that little bit off the road into the bizarre and the slightly unexpected. He’s able to capture off-the-wall, perhaps manic voices with believability and aplomb. Which is what he does so well in “Fjord of Killary,” “Wifey Redux,” “Beer Trip of Llandudno,” and “Doctor Sot.”

“Fjords of Killary” is a brilliant story, but you probably knew that because it’s been in the New Yorker and thrown around willy nilly amongst good company.

“Wifey Redux” is a great story in a great voice — a man has a happy marriage, he tells you, and he has a lovely teenage daughter, and she, in turn, has a… boyfriend. And it all goes downhill from there.

“Beer Trip to Llandudno” is a fun story about a traveling beer group who all have some interesting issues and head out to Wales for a bit of serious drinking. It’s an interesting, short sketch of some diverse characters.

“Doctor Sot” tells the story of a doctor who’s taken to the booze pretty seriously and whose practice has been leaking patients while his wife sits at home, happily absent from his crumbling world. A beautiful traveler in town gives him renewed purpose, though, and off he goes on an outreach.

Most of the others, for me, are missing Barry’s unique voice, or, in one case, his voice seems to fall a bit flat. “Ernestine and Kit’” is the kind of wacky premise that you think Barry would knock out of the park — two older ladies run around kidnapping children. But there seems to be a lot of passive voice in the story, which is what makes it lie flat for me. “Across the Rooftops” is a boring, perhaps intentionally so, tale of a failed first coupling. It’s more of a fine(isn) scene than a fully realized short story. “Wistful England” is in the same vein, but is a better story. The narrator seems more like the adolescent (mentally, anyway, which we men can hold on to for far longer than a purely biological definition of adolescence) in “Across the Rooftops,” but more developed. Less of a passive observer of a scene that he should be engaged in.

There are the rough and ready collection: “The Girls and the Dogs” and “White Hitachi” and possibly “The Mainland Campaign,” too, where the narrators are kids on the fringe of society. They were fine stories, “The Mainland Campaign” the weakest of the lot, because the characters felt the most wooden, written from caricatures rather than given a bit of life, but they didn’t sparkle in the way Barry is capable of writing. “Berlin Arkonaplatz – My Lesbian Summer” is a similar story, in terms of narrator and fringes, but it feels like an adolescent story, like Rooftops and Wisftul.

The title story is okay, as well. The writing is fine, it’s just that the tension never really built for me, and I found myself looking for the next story, flicking ahead past a lot of internal strain and strife. “A Cruelty” feels similar to “Dark Lies the Island” because I got the sense that I’d read the story before. It’s a tale of a kid with an OCD/autistic-like mien who goes on a trip with studied regularity in all aspects. Well, one day there’s an obstacle to his happy routine. The End.

I think I was particularly rough in judgement on this collection because Kevin Barry’s first collection, “There are Little Kingdoms” is an amazing collection and his novel “City of Bohane” just blew me away. One of my favorite all-time novels. Overall it’s not a bad read, but I did find myself wishing for the next story to start on a number of occasions.

This, as the entire world before me had discovered, is a beautiful book. It took me a little while to get into it — waiting for some flaw somewhere, however little, that justified why it took me so long to read this book.

And I found the odd word choice here, there. But then even those disappeared and I got sucked into the story.

I think there is some portion of my brain that connected the (horrible) experience of reading The House of Sand and Fog with this book, and so I stayed away. I’m not saying that’s a rational connection, it was just there.

Hosseini does such a great job of narrating this story and stepping out of the way, not beating you over the head with the emotions you’re meant to be feeling, and he builds suspense especially well towards the end of the book (the scene in which you think, “Hmm, that’s odd he mentioned tha… oh God, that’s going to come back pretty soon in a nasty way, isn’t it?” got me hooked).

Now, if only this book could reach a wider readership…

I was on a real Colin Bateman kick when I was younger… in the late nineties and early two-thousands. I blazed through Divorcing Jack, which was a revelation: I loved the narrative voice and the wild plot. Every time I entered a book store I would check first the ‘A’ section of the fiction shelves, and then proceed to the ‘B’ section for a new book by Mr. Bateman.

And Colin’s recent resurgence on Kickstarter and Facebook got me back into his work, which I’d left, for whatever reason (maybe he simply stopped churning out books at a pace that kept up with my book store visits). I enjoyed his re-launched collection of short stories, Dublin Express, and, on the back of it, bought the audiobook of Fire and Brimstone, his latest book not financed by Kickstarter.

And there it was, suddenly, Dan Starkey, like some old buddy, back in the saddle. The voice was the same, after all he’d been through (near divorce, infidelity, by both himself and Trish, the death of their son, numerous beatings) and off he dove into a fresh adventure.

Almost immediately I was glad I’d given Dan a break for a number of years before tackling this book, I don’t know that I could read them all back-to-back, because Dan is, intentionally, I believe, a pretty unsympathetic character. By the time I’d gotten halfway through I thought the plot was interesting enough, but an unease with the whole book began to settle over me. By the time he runs into his third (or so) bad guy I clocked it: the book feels like one long, drawn-out bad guy monologue. From Harry Frank, the drug dealer, from a high figure in a new cult on the streets of Belfast, from Trish, from Dan, himself, from the leader of the Botanic Boat Crew. They all take the stage, proclaim to the audience how they’re going to do what they’re going to do or why they’re going to do it, and then exeunt, stage left. Except for Dan, who sticks around to chuck witty little quips in everyone’s direction. More than anything else in the book, the tendency of the characters to wibble on a bit grated the most.

The action gets a little predictable, and if you’ve read any other Dan Starkey books you can probably guess the outcome and resolution to a few of the mysteries. But it’s familiar turf to Bateman’s readers, with Belfast getting a little drug and gang makeover, in lieu of sectarian violence, which is entertaining enough.

This is the greatest book ever by the greatest hockey player ever to lace them up.

I got this book from a few people as a gift, which just goes to show there was a pretty good chance I’d like it. Once I got done returning the extra copies, I sat down with this book as if it were delivered in the form of a burning bush. Or stone tablets. Let’s go with the stone tablets analogy, because otherwise I’m going to keep picturing myself in flames in a nice comfy chair, which isn’t how I want to go out.

So I lugged out the stone tablets, settled in on the couch, since the comfy chair was burned to cinders because of the burning bush experience, and began to read. Bobby is more than just a hockey player, as if you didn’t know. He was of my parents era, as a player, but he was an integral part of growing up a sports fan in New England. I got to shake his hand at the opening ceremonies of the Bay State Games in the late eighties, early nineties because one of his sponsors, Bay Bank, played a large part in putting on the competition. He was on television, despite having been out of the game for ten years, every time we watched those bruising Bruins of the 80s my parents would reminisce about Number Four, Bobby Orr as if hockey had been forever ruined by seeing that one fleeting glimpse of how the game might be played in its purest form.

Mr. Orr reflects on his storied career and even a little bit on his downfall, but you get the sense that he’s uncomfortable with all the attention. He maintains the attitude that nothing that he did was remarkable — sure, some of the physical feats may have been, but his approach to the game he loved and, to a lesser extent, life in general, is simply based on a healthy respect for others and hard work.

And that’s the key lesson, here, that he wishes to deliver from the mountaintop: be humble, work hard, parents, let your kids be kids. They’ll figure it out.

I got the sense, just about the time I lost all feeling in my legs, due to the heavy burden of the tablets, that this is the same book Bobby Orr would have written if he went on to become the greatest plumber of all time (maybe a few less stories about the Boston Bruins and Don Cherry, though). He gives himself a little less credit than he deserves, because he obviously had a passion for his sport that I’ve rarely seen in people, and that perhaps kids could do with a bit more pushing (our kids would sit on the couch all day, reading books or watching TV if they weren’t encouraged to get out and play — I don’t see either of them leaping out to go play hockey on the bay, unasked), but I agree with his general principle. While most kids won’t have the talent and ability, like he had, it’s no fun learning systems at too early an age (says the guy who, at 14, was signed by the Boston Bruins). You learn a lot more from a sport than simply how to perform like a professional. And while he may not have been the greatest writer who ever lived, he’s written a lovely book that took me down memory lane and given me a few things to think about, as a coach of youth sports in my spare time.

And if you get the stone tablet edition and leave it on your legs for too long you can feel the pain he likely felt for most of his years on the ice.

I really enjoyed this book. God, she just writes so well, such a gripping story, with great characters. It’d make you jealous.

At any rate, she uses the setting, a bleak and burned out husk of Ireland after the recession, well. Though perhaps, for me, anyway, I felt it was hammered home down the home stretch again and again and again. The characters are great, for the most part, and the plot devices almost Sherlockian (I couldn’t help think of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, and expected the furry invader of the Spain’s house to be a snake of some sort). For the first two thirds of the book it flew along, I was desperate to turn the pages and follow the Murder Squad’s investigation. It started to drag, a little, well… to avoid spoiling anything, about two thirds of the way through. But overall, she kept the suspense up (it could have gotten uglier than it did, and she really picked it up again for the ending).

Of the books of hers that I’ve read this one is up there with Faithful Place for me. A great read.

My son (8) got this book for Christmas, from me. I couldn’t remember having read it before, but James Thurber is a fantastic, wry story teller, and from a quick flick I thought he’d enjoy the story.

Well, he brought it to school and began reading it during their reading time. And one day he brought it home to me. He wanted me to read it, too. “You’ll see when the scary part comes up,” he said.

So I sat down with it one night and blazed through it in a sitting. It’s a lovely, quick read. Quirky and funny the way James Thurber can be — it reads like he’s having so much fun telling the story and the backstory from the introduction makes it all the sweeter. He maybe overindulges himself sometimes, but you can forgive it, because it sort of fits with his theme of over-the-top villainy and the tenuous nature of the Golux’s solutions and plans for the prince.

It’s the sort of book you want to read out loud. It’s fairy tale-esque, complete with daring, head-spinning leaps from one moment to the next, a sort of propulsion by a water cannon with a kink in the hose. Worth a few hours of your time.

I found this copy in the shelves of my old room at my parent’s house. From the cover, which looks like a couple of kids, one of whom isn’t wearing a shirt, possibly isn’t wearing any pants, either, watching a bunch of turkeys, I thought, “Sure, why not?” figuring the odd cover a harbinger of odd stories inside.

The introduction tells you, right up front, that these stories, this Polish fantasy, is chiefly, if not exclusively, about the Devil, in all his forms. And in the intro the translator and editor Wiesiek Powaga compares one of the stories to Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, and I’m always a sucker for a Flann O’Brien comparison.

The collection starts off so well, too. “Co-Existence” by Slawomir Mrozek is a great funny little story about the devil coming to visit a vicar. On the merit of this story, alone, I took the book back with me and dove in. It’s not the only good, if not great story, but there certainly a lot of stories that drag. I really enjoyed Marek S. Hyberath’s “The Greater Punishment,” Stefan Grabinski’s “The Grey Room,” Kornel Makuszynski’s “The Gentleman with a Goatee,” “The Legs of Isolda Morgan” by Bruno Jasienski, “The White Worms” by Wiktor Woroszylski, and “Dragon” by Andrzej Bursa.

They offered good, crisp story telling and funny little twists on some familiar themes of love, longing, and punishment. Where some of the other stories didn’t do it for me (like "Dinner at Countess Kotlubay’s by Witold Combrowicz) they seemed like stories which could have been told by anyone, and didn’t necessarily have an interesting Polish twist or too much in the way of originality. Where the editor raved about the vision of “The Golden Galley,” the final story in the collection, I found it a bit boring, overly enamored with its own vision of the future/alternate universe.

So you’ll certainly find some gems in here, but you’ll also find yourself bogged down in some fairly pedestrian stories (NB. this isn’t The Best of Polish Fantasy, it’s The Dedalus Book of Polish Fantasy for a reason), like a deal with the devil where maybe the more ineffective stories are like penance for the brilliant ones.

This was a beautiful book. Murakami seems to write hyperfiction without the links and nodes and all the rest. However, I may be biased in reading him this way, since I discovered him through a hyperfictioneer (like a Mousketeer without the benefit of the cool hat).

But this book has all the elegiac tones I tend to associate with hyperfiction, and is funny and imaginative and is a real trip.

I loved his characters, especially the main character, who, from the very start, was entertaining, different, and the situations into which he was thrust a great ride.

The main problem with this book is that it may become too popular, inspiring a zany, Pynchon-esque singles club on the west tower of the Brooklyn Bridge where couples meet up and jaunt around the city and its environs for a day before… well, no spoilers. But before doing something else.

I don’t know that this is the sort of book I’d normally read, but I’m glad I did. It’s well written, and a nice character study of two pretty broken people near the end of their tethers. The switching perspectives between Henry and Christa worked well to move the story along and set the mood of being inside a person’s head who is committed to throwing themselves off a bridge and all that that entails. Which can obviously be a mood-dampener.

About halfway through I did get the feeling that I’d read something similar to this before, not the paean to New York City (though certainly there have been enough books, and there’s enough room for all of them, that are essentially love letters to New York), but the tale of suicide caught at the brink. It’s a little similar to (though less crowded than) Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, the point at which I decided to give Nick Hornby a break for a bit. But I enjoyed the book. I’m not 100% sold on the entire plot and how the characters ended up after their one day reprieve, but I did clamp down my willing suspension of disbelief and enjoyed wondering how it was going to end for both of them for pretty much the whole story, as I knew nothing of the author’s prior work and didn’t know whether she’d twist a sadistic knife at the end or have them fly off on clouds of cotton candy and unicorns at the end.

If you read only one story about incest, whaling, keeping crows as pets, and lost parents this year, read this one!

Janice Clark has compiled a monster of a history of the Rathbones family. I loved the voice in which she wrote — awash in the sea and longing and plenty of humor. The line she has when the second set of seven suitors arrive — “The men must have expected a more formal interview.” — is excellent and probably is funnier in context.

Well worth your time.