Modern Times (W&N Essentials)

Review Terrific, eerie short stories that linger in your mind long after you have closed the book. ― Jenny Offill, author of DEPT OF SPECULATION Cathy Sweeney's stories have already attracted a band of fanatical devotees, and this first collection is as marvellous as we could have hoped for. A unique imagination, a brilliant debut. -- Kevin Barry, author of NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER Cathy Sweeney's work is jaw-droppingly good: inventive, funny, lush. One of the best short story writers working today. -- Sinéad Gleeson, author of CONSTELLATIONS Modern Times, Cathy Sweeney's inventive debut collection, offers snapshots of an unsettling, dislocated world. Surprising and uncanny, funny and transgressive, these stories only look like distortions of reality. ― Irish Times I loved this collection. It vibrates with a glorious strangeness! Magnificently weird, hugely entertaining, deeply profound. -- Danielle McLaughlin, author of DINOSAURS ON OTHER PLANETS In Modern Times, Cathy Sweeney gives us fables of the present that are funny, vertiginous and melancholy. -- David Hayden, author of DARKER WITH THE LIGHTS ON With a crispness and clarity and weirdness unlike any other fiction being published now ... Sometimes chilling, eerily accessible - and as wickedly droll as they are horrifying ... The voice running through is lucid and bright and highly readable, each sentence stripped clean and polished ... The stories themselves, long-sweeping, succinctly told anatomies of spectral lives lived in sad rented places or loveless middle-class homes, are absolutely for this moment. ― Irish Independent Sweeney's stories are wacky, bold, form-bending ... Reading Modern Times is a bit like being in a strange dream ... Powerful ... Daring ― Irish Times Taut, surreal tales that take your breath away... As the first lines of short story collections go, it's pretty hard to beat the one that opens Modern Times: "There once was a woman who loved her husband's cock so much she began taking it to work in her lunchbox." This, and the darkly funny page-and-a-half (A Love Story) it kicks off, are representative of Sweeney's off-kilter sensibility. Her writing is direct, no-holds-barred; her sentences are as taut as bow strings... [it's] a breathtakingly weird book, jammed full of peculiar characters and strange scenarios. But Sweeney brings a genuine depth to her writing too, and so the collection is peppered with aphorisms ("No one ever really hears a story until they need to", "There was a subplot, but isn't there always") and probing questions: "How do you overlay words on experience and get anywhere near the feeling of the thing?" There are shades here of Angela Carter, Lydia Davis and Miranda July, but Sweeney's style is all her own. Reading this book in a single sitting feels a bit like getting giddy from eating too many Easter eggs, so moreish is each one of these stories. Modern Times announces the arrival of an unforgettable new voice in Irish fiction. ― Observer Cathy Sweeney's debut collection of short stories comes after more than a decade of publishing slick short fiction... Sweeney is a master of brevity... ['The Cheerleader' and 'A Love Story'] balance absurdist humour with profundity and are highlights of the book. Sweeney's stories stage battles of attrition... there is more than just comic relief to be found in these slantwise tales of modern times. Depression is isolating, but Sweeney's compendium of isolated voices remind us that we are not alone. ― Times Literary Supplement In its sparseness, astonishments, and cyclical twists, the fairy tale has something in common with the 20th-century European absurd, which follows funny, appalling patterns of repetition. Cathy Sweeney brings together these two traditions in her brilliant debut short story collection, Modern Times. ― Catherine Toal, Irish Times Bite-size and bittersweet, Cathy Sweeney writes miniscule short stories that are reminiscent of Beckett and Blindboy... The stories are