The Irish Sea [Paperback]

At a New Year???s Eve party, a dead woman turns up alive again, after passing through a mysterious post-mortem way station located on another planet, and much to the disbelief of her old flame, who interprets the night???s events with the help of his reading of Kafka. A priest is sent by the Vatican to investigate a strange development in the American cattle market: a breed of cows identical in all physical respects to human women. A man leaves his wife and flees to the north of Spain, where he meets a sickly woman in an empty caf??, introduces himself as Jorge Walser, and makes plans with her to disappear. Aboard a trans-atlantic cruise, a door-to-door vacuum salesman bumps into a woman who appears to be Natassja Kinski, and they swap tall tales as the ship floats them asymptotically toward world???s end. Christ turns out to be a girl who fronts a punk band. The words of such writers as Beckett, Walser, Chekhov, Gombrowicz, Bola??o, Kafka, Blanchot, and Borges are characters in themselves.

The Irish Seais a novel masquerading as a book of short stories. A meditation on the paradox of nostalgia, which always seems to pine for what never was. A fevered search for order through writing, of truth through literature, of the nodal point where life and literature intersect. A strange personal gallery curated by a razor-sharp reader and his other, unknown self.

The Irish Seais a set of thematically connected short stories. Each of the stories is a fantasized, nightmarish response by the narrator to the loss of a woman he loved. The stories are dreamlike and surreal, narrating imagined murders, drug binges, conversations with movie characters, as well as encounters with beings seemingly arriving from other planets. These surreal elements are generally introduced in one story and then reintroduced in one or more later stories, giving the collection the appearance of a series of overlapping, frightening dreams by a heartbroken man.