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Stories
by Jan Carson
Humorous and horrifying, tender and absurd, the stories in Quickly, While They Still Have Horses offer a fresh, irreverent look at life in post-conflict Northern Ireland. From first loves to strained relationships, the thrills and terrors of growing up to the dangers and challenges of parenthood, Carson infuses all her stories with empathy, dark wit, and a surreal edge.
In "A Certain Degree of Ownership," a distracted couple on a beach fail to notice their baby crawl perilously toward the sea. In "Grand So," the ghost of a car's previous owner haunts the backseat. In "Troubling the Water," a rumor of miraculous healing creates chaos at a public swimming pool. Carson never fails to shock and delight as kids go missing in jungle gyms, a baby washes up on a riverbank in a biscuit tin, and a bloody hand appears (and reappears) in a refrigerator. Every so often, these stories travel into alternate versions of our world where pillars of fire are a new treatment for mental illness and animals deemed nonessential are going extinct by legislative orders.
"An admirable collection of stories, saturated with acerbic wit and startling empathy." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A collection of 16 darkly comic short stories that move fluidly between decades and genres... . Carson's blend of dark humor and unwavering compassion for her characters will appeal to fans of Louise Kennedy and Rebecca Miller." —Booklist (starred review)
"Dry-witted and appealing ... Carson holds the reader's attention with her singular observations and turns of phrase." —Publishers Weekly
"[Jan Carson] is most definitely a free-thinking, trailblazing writer of well-observed, quirkily humorous fiction... . This book is a wild but somehow, totally grounded read. Superb." —Sunday Independent
"Surprising, otherworldly, funny, and heartfelt." —My Weekly
"Blending down-to-earth Ulster realism with surreal and fantastical elements, [Carson brings] a fresh and unexpected atmosphere to what at first appear to be familiar settings and characters." —Ballymena Guardian
"A staggeringly brilliant new collection full of wonderful magical realism and utter, crushing everyday life." —Irish Independent
A surreal and darkly comic collection of stories that offer a fresh and irreverent look at life in contemporary Northern Ireland from "one of the most exciting and original Northern Irish writers of her generation" —The Sunday Times (UK)
"What an enormous pleasure it is to read Jan Carson. Each short story is masterful, brilliantly inventive, and moving. Every page reveals the mark of an extraordinary, original, and gifted writer." —Karl Geary, author of Juno Loves Legs
"Story after story glints with the strange, hard magic of the North... . This is a Northern Ireland at once uncanny and familiar, ancient and modern, and a set of stories only Jan could have written. I adored them." —Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days
"Jan Carson is an essential voice from the island of Ireland—an island that holds a wider variety of stories than can be accommodated within strict realism or naturalism. With great skill, assurance, and a tentacular imagination, and by getting the details right, Carson conveys highly complex subjectivities with powerful simplicity. There's something of the fable about each of these stories—troubling, timeless, wistful and wise." —Caoilinn Hughes, author of The Wild Laughter
This information about Quickly, While They Still Have Horses was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast. She is the author of several short story collections and novels including Malcolm Orange Disappears, The Raptures, The Last Resort, and The Fire Starters, winner of the EU Prize for Literature. She has won the Harper's Bazaar short story competition and been shortlisted for many awards, including the BBC National Short Story Award, the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize, and the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year. Jan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and her writing has been translated into over a dozen languages, appeared in numerous journals, and been frequently broadcast on BBC Radio. Quickly, While They Still Have Horses is her first book to be published in North America.
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