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Stories
by Ryan O'Neill
Book Reviewed by:With imagination, wit, and a keen eye, Ryan O'Neill draws the essence of the human experience with a cast of characters who stick with you long after you turn the last page of this brilliant short story collection.
Ranging from Australia and Africa to Europe and Asia and back again, The Weight of a Human Heart heralds a fresh and important new voice in fiction. Ryan O'Neill takes us on a journey that is sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, and wholly original.
A young Tutsi girl flees her village on the brink of the Rwandan genocide. A literary duel - and an affair - play out in the book review section of a national newspaper. A young girl learns her mother's disturbing secrets through the broken key on a typewriter.
With imagination, wit, and a keen eye, Ryan O'Neill draws the essence of the human experience with a cast of characters who stick with you long after you turn the last page of this brilliant short story collection.
Innovative and provocative, The Weight of a Human Heart thoroughly explores what it means to be human—and to have a heart. This varied – and at times seemingly experimental – collection of short stories travels the wide world and brings readers inside the lives of many different characters...continued
Full Review
(682 words)
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(Reviewed by Sarah Tomp).
Ryan O'Neill was born in Glasgow in 1975. He lived in Africa, Europe and Asia before settling in Newcastle, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. His fiction has appeared in The Best Australian Stories, The Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, New Australian Stories, Wet Ink, Etchings, and Westerly. His work has won the Hal Porter and Roland Robinson awards. The Weight of a Human Heart has been shortlisted for the 2012 Queensland Literary Prize—Steele Rudd Award. He teaches at the University of Newcastle.
What most appeals to you about the short story format?
One of the main things that appeals to me about short stories, as both a reader and a writer, is their variety. I love the fact that in a collection or anthology, one story...
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With unflinching honesty and exquisite tenderness, Josh Barkan masterfully introduces us to characters that are full of life, marking the arrival of a new and essential voice in American fiction.
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The Independent (UK)
Playful with content, O'Neill is also joyfully original with format ... [in] this brilliant collection.
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