Nuala Ní Chonchúir's Blog, page 4

Reading from 'Joyride to Jupiter' at Kennys Bookshop

GIVEAWAY WINNER!

The names went into the hat and the winner of the giveaway (book and Jupitery purse) is Fergal Lenehan. Congrats, Fergal!

ARENA - JOYRIDE TO JUPITER

I am on Arena tonight on RTE Radio 1 to talk about the book. 7pm on.

BIZ POST & SUN INDO REVIEWS - JOYRIDE TO JUPITER

Two reviews today for the book - another joint one with June Caldwell, from Anne Cunningham in the Sunday Independent. Glowing. A more muted one from Kevin Power in the Sunday Business Post. Interesting the way the laud/loathe thing happens with reviewers over the same story :)

Click and zoom to read.

JOYRIDE TO JUPITER - GALWAY LAUNCH

Galway launch of Joyride to Jupiter in Rosie McGurran's Studio and GalleryBloomsday, 16th June 2017

Artist Gavin Lavelle, who launched the book with artist Úna Spain
Artist Deborah Watkins, me, writer Lisa Carey
Finbar with Michael
Clementine Lavelle, Liam Carey Spalding, Juno and pal
My sons Cúán and Finn, with their Dad, John Dillon


Me with some of the crowd
Some of the crowd in Rosie's gallery
Rosie McGurran welcomes us
Post launch mingling in the kitchen

JOYRIDE TO JUPITER - DUBLIN LAUNCH PICS

The Dublin launch of Joyride to Jupiter in the Gutter Book Shop14th June 2017

With Lia Mills who gave a wonderful speech
With daughter Juno
With my first publisher Alan Hayes and writer Patrick Chapman
With my brother Ronan O'Connor
John Foyle et moi
Writer Niall McArdle
Writer Adam Trodd
Writers Catherine Dunne & Tanya Sweeney

John Foyle, writer Doreen Finn & Gutter bookshop owner Bob Johnston

My editor at New Island Dan Bolger

Wrtier Monica McInerney
Writer Lauren Foley

GIVEAWAY - PUBLICATION DAY - JOYRIDE TO JUPITER

It's publication day for my new short story collection Joyride to Jupiter , whoop! It's already had two stellar reviews in The Sunday Times and Irish Times , and I have two launches this week, in Dublin the 14th and in Galway on Bloomsday, the 16th. ALL WELCOME for books, readings, wine, space-themed buns and chats!

To celebrate publication day I am giving away one copy of the book to a reader of this blog with a bonus gift of this cute little purse decorated with spacy joyriders to jupiter:


To enter, just leave a comment with your name (no anons, please) and a link to your blog, Twitter or Facebook, or your email address, so I can contact you if you win. I won't be chasing people to the end's of the earth (or Jupiter...) so please make yourself contactable when you enter :)

I will post to anywhere in the world. Draw will take place on Tuesday 20th June. Check back then to see if you've won and to send me your address. Good luck!

IRISH TIMES REVIEW - JOYRIDE TO JUPITER

Another cracker of a review for Joyride to Jupiter, this time from Houman Barekat in today's Irish Times. Delighted with it!
'This blending of wry, caustic irreverence and meditative poignancy is central to the success of O’Connor’s storytelling. The mix is just right: the internal monologues are exactly as long as they need to be; the humour is well-timed and effective. The dramatic moments, of which there are a fair few ... are rendered with unobtrusive deftness.' Meep!

Full text of the review:

Joyride to Jupiter review: a collection of skilfully crafted fictionsHouman Barekat
It is often said that smells can evoke memories more powerfully than sights or sounds. They crop up time and again in Nuala O’Connor’s short story collection, Joyride to Jupiter: the stench of fish guts on a quayside, the sour tang of hotel bedrooms, the soapy odour of an older couple’s bedroom, the mildewy pong of damp-ridden lodgings, the passing whiff of a familiar perfume. The protagonist of one story, Futuretense, writes marketing copy for fragrances. Her reflections on the suicide of her beloved brother, whose scent she helped him choose as a child, are interspersed with corny product blurbs, pointedly juxtaposing personal introspection with the vapid gibberish of commercial puff.
Many of these 19 stories – whose settings range from Dublin and obscure Co Mayo villages to Naples and the Copacabana – are concerned with loss or absence. Room 313 is about a Ukrainian cleaner who only gets to see her young daughter via Skype, while Squidinky tells of a tattooist grieving for her partner: “I am lonely, it’s true, but it’s more more that – I’m alone.” This melancholic timbre is animated by bursts of ironic wit and sprinklings of bawdy humour.
Affairs and infidelities abound. The narrator of Consolata catches her father having sex with a nun (“As I approached I heard a moist slap-slap . . .) and is compelled to keep quiet about it. In Mayo Oh Mayo, a young Irishwoman’s feelings for her American lover dissipate into indifferent contempt, concluding that “there is no getting to the bottom of the man because there are no depths to flounder in”. In Napoli Abú a jaded singleton speaks of her regret at having diminished the frisson of her affair with a married man by googling his wife.
O’Connor does a fine line in unsympathetic narrators who fire off withering put-downs with provocative insouciance. The narrator of The Donor, for example, describes a woman as having “a reality TV face; one of those faces that drips tears when her dough fails to prove, or her house mates vote her out”. Xavier, a sperm donor, is surreptitiously scoping out his biological son by befriending his mother.
At the start of this dubious undertaking he is flush with the optimism and misplaced paternal zeal, but his enthusiasm soon gives way to disappointment and disgust, to the point that the sight of the boy playing with his dog is described thus: “Ludo hunkered down and began to talk absolute shite to the mutt . . .” The narration here is in the third person, but it internalises Xavier’s perspective in a breezily scathing indirect speech.
In Tinnycross, a pair of estranged brothers squabble over their inheritance following the deaths of their parents. Revisiting his rural childhood home elicits, in one of them, a pang of nostalgia for “that precious, pellucid place of scant worldly pain”. He wonders: “Is it possible . . . to be in love with a field? . . . And if it is possible, is it wise?”
In the volume’s title story, the narrator’s dementia-stricken wife regresses to child-like capriciousness: she takes to wearing a tracksuit and buys a garish teeny eyeshadow called Joyride to Jupiter; when her daughter scoffs at this, she gives her a slap.
Both of these tales brim with wistful affection and human warmth. O’Connor moves seamlessly from this to a jovially sardonic portrait of coupledom in Penny and Leo Married Bliss, whose narrator has just trashed her errant boyfriend’s laptop in elaborate fashion (“I knew he was watching that auld porno and I was having none of it”) and is idly pining after the local priest: “God forgive me but I’d bounce up and down on Father Hugh Boylan all night, given a chance.”
This blending of wry, caustic irreverence and meditative poignancy is central to the success of O’Connor’s storytelling. The mix is just right: the internal monologues are exactly as long as they need to be; the humour is well-timed and effective. The dramatic moments, of which there are a fair few – including an illicit lesbian dalliance and the murder of a would-be paedophile by his wife – are rendered with unobtrusive deftness.

O’Connor’s fourth novel is due out in 2018; if these skilfully crafted fictions are anything to go by, it will be one to look out for.

TWO LAUNCHES FOR JOYRIDE TO JUPITER

DUBLIN:


GALWAY:
New Island Books 
requests the pleasure of your company to celebrate the Galway launch of 
Joyride to Jupiter 

by Nuala O'Connor on Friday, June 16th at 7.00pm,
in the Rosie McGurran Gallery and Studio,
Roundstone, Galway.
Guest speaker: Artist Gavin Lavelle 

Please email info@newisland.ie or call 01 – 2784225 to RSVP.Praise for Nuala O'Connor

‘These stories - from a writer of immense talent - are a joy to read.' – Sinéad Gleeson

'A gifted and ambitious artist.' – Mike McCormack‘Nuala O’Connor’s luminous prose has long been one of Ireland’s most treasured literary secrets’ – Dermot BolgerA heartbroken man deals with his wife’s Alzheimer’s as best he can. The Jesus of O’Connell Street reflects on his situation, which isn’t half bad. A too-young girl witnesses her father’s shocking infidelity. A quiet murder on a riverbank.Imperfect lovers and unlikely friends thwart and bolster each other as they act out their dramas on the beaches of Brazil, in the bedrooms of Dublin, and in the wilds of North America. With prose both lyrical and profound, the award-winning Nuala O’Connor writes of maternal love and cross-generational friendship but here, also, are stories of ageing, suicide, and the buoyancy of new love.In these urgent, humane stories of ill-advised couplings, loneliness and burgeoning hope, we find O’Connor’s trademark humour and sensuality, and the quest for longed-for truths.A truly stunning collection by one of Ireland’s finest writers. Nuala O’Connor (AKA Nuala Ní Chonchúir) was born in Dublin and lives in East Galway. A novelist, short story writer and poet, she is the author of three novels, including Miss Emily(Penguin USA/Canada, Sandstone (UK)), about the poet Emily Dickinson and her Irish maid, five short story collections, and four collections of poetry.

Miss Emily was shortlisted for the Novel of the Year award at the 2015 Irish Book Awards, and longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award. Nuala’s fourth novel, Becoming Belle, is published in 2018.

ART OF THE SHORT STORY - BELFAST BOOK FESTIVAL

The Art of the Short Story, Thurs 8 June, 6.30pm – £7 | £5 Crescent Arts Centre at Belfast Book Festival with me, Jan Carson, June Caldwell & Oisín Ó Fágáin.