The Best Christmas Gift: A gorgeous Short Story from Irish author, Billy O’Callaghan!
The Cork author writes exclusively for Irish Examiner readers, evoking a harsh winter on the farm, and the warmth of love and longing.
Link Below!
https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsandculture/arid-40770669.html
The art of the short story at its finest. Southern to the core and resounding !
Sugar Baby Endorsements:
“This is storytelling of the highest order, plucking up the reader and transporting us to a world of mystery, spirituality, violence, love, and everything in between.
Sugar Baby is like River Jordan herself: thrilling, tender, tough, and shot through with light.”
Silas House, author, Southernmost
“River Jordan writes with the lyricism and grace of a gospel hymn, and the tales that weave through Sugar Baby ring like the chorus of a choir, rising and falling and then rising again, like all good sinners do.”
Michael Farris Smith, author of Nick and Blackwood
“River Jordan writes to the bone, over and over. Take this book to bed, and expect to stay up late.”
Clyde Edgerton, author, The Night Train, Killer Diller
“Southern Gothic indeed. SPLENDID, Beautiful, haunting, and ultimately a family story that operates on tribal loyalty, devotion, acceptance – it’s ALL there. Unique, suspenseful with an air of mystery.“
Claire Fullerton, author, Little Tea
“River Jordan is a holy truth-teller who can make even the bad things in life seem as sweet as sugar. The stories in
Sugar Baby and Other Stories are as real as life itself, but the language River uses to coat the pain is something from another world. Writer, storyteller, heart healer.
River Jordan is simply the best.”
Wiley Cash, author, The Last Ballad
“River Jordan is the torchbearer for Southern Gothic literature. Her sublime writing conjures up vivid characters of the rural South, their hardscrabble landscape and the determination to persevere. Sugar Baby is a beautiful collection of short stories that will linger in the imagination long after the last page has been turned.”
Michael Morris, author, Man in the Blue Moon
This collection of short stories is not to be missed!
River Jordan is a holy truth-teller who can make even the bad things in life seem as sweet as sugar. The stories in Sugar Baby and Other Stories are as real as life itself, but the language River uses to coat the pain is something from another world. Writer, storyteller, heart healer. River Jordan is simply the best.” Wiley Cash, author, The Last Ballad
Sugar Baby Description:
A union soldier who deserted, a scared girl in an abandoned, antebellum home, a gravedigger looking for a wife, seven sisters who will kill to protect each other, a stake-out at a rundown hotel, a Spanish priest trying to save his people from the Spanish flu, a young girl sneaking off with an encyclopedia salesman, an old woman aiming to use her last bullet. a woman framed for murder on All Saints Day, a one-eyed outcast who lives down by the river.
The characters in Short Baby and Other Stories are infused by desire, touched by love, and seeking retribution and redemption at every turn. Sugar Baby is storytelling of the highest order, plucking up the reader and transporting them to a world of mystery, spirituality, violence, love, and everything in between.”
Author River Jordan:
https://www.riverjordanink.com/
https://www.instagram.com/riverjordanink/
Available on Amazon!
In Mandy Haynes’s collection of Southern tinged short stories, Sharp as a Serpent’s Tooth, characters are as different as Jayhawks and Starlings, they grin like possums, and, if in need while in someone’s bad graces, are told they can go get what they want “their own dang self.” Throughout the assembly of Haynes’s five, compelling stories, her character-intensive narrative is urgent and breathless, so regionally pitch-perfect as to feel indiscreet:
“Now don’t roll your eyes at me,” the narrator of short story, Junebug Fischer says. “You know dang good and well Rita’s daughter did not get pregnant on her honeymoon. And you know same as me that she shouldn’t have married that no count Tucker, pregnant or not.”
Sharp as a Serpent’s Tooth is laser-sharp, finely wrought fiction in each stand alone story. In “Eva,” the abused daughter of a con-artist preacher is depicted with such Southern Gothic surrealism as to make her seem other-worldly. In “Plans for Sweet Lorraine,” a fearlessly headstrong mother is led by gut-intuition to rescue her innocent daughter from the clutches of a smooth-talking charlatan posing as a man of God.
In each story, the narrator’s voice is chock full of gumption– the sure-footed kind grown and fostered in the hollows of the rural South. They are all unique, memorable narrators. In “The Day I threw the Rock,” the young, red-haired narrator prefers to go barefoot in overalls, in whose pocket she keeps a garden snake as she unfurls the high-drama of events that lead to her throwing the eponymous rock. In “Cussing Snakes and Candy Cigarettes,” a young girl defies common, local opinion of her dead mother’s twin sister, in an eye-opening summer that impacts her coming of age.
Author Mandy Haynes approaches her craft with an uncanny grasp on pace in perfect measure. Her authentic voice is beyond comparison. Her high-stakes stories are layered with utter unpredictability. I cannot recommend this Southern to the core collection of short stories emphatically enough. Each of the five stories in Sharp as a Serpent’s Tooth is the perfect combination of riveting story and character as place.
Mandy Haynes has spent hours on barstools, at backstage venues, and riding in vans listening to some of the best songwriters and storytellers in Nashville, Tennessee. She now lives in Fernandina Beach, Florida with her three dogs, one turtle, and a grateful liver. Her first collection, Walking the Wrong Way Home was a finalist for the Tartt Fiction Award, and selected as a bonus pick for The Pulpwood Queens’ 2020 Reading List.
About me – Mandy Haynes, author of literary fiction with a southern drawl
Mandy Haynes’s Blog http://www.the runawaywriter.com
It’s daunting to think that no matter how I review this exceptional collection of short stories by Billy O’Callaghan, I will never adequately express my full sentiments, for how to articulate that O’Callaghan is simply the best writer I’ve come across in ages? His short stories are a treatise on the human experience, the impressionable psyche, the vulnerable human heart. He crafts his stories with the fluidity of a wave that builds slowly, crests, then turns in on itself after enveloping sight and sight unseen. To read The Boatman and Other Stories is to read a master at his craft. You’ll be swept away by the rich detail and nuance of commonplace in the hands of this powerful storyteller. I cannot recommend this collection hardily enough. Read it, treasure it, then do as I did and put it in pride of place on your bookshelf.
Billy O’Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and is the author of three short story collections: In Exile (2008, Mercier Press), In Too Deep (2009, Mercier Press), and The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind (2013, New Island Books, winner of a 2013 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award and selected as Cork’s One City, One Book for 2017), as well as the bestselling novel The Dead House (2017, Brandon/O’Brien Press and 2018, Arcade/Skyhorse (USA)).
His latest novel, My Coney Island Baby, was published by Jonathan Cape (and Harper in the U.S.) in January 2019 to much acclaim. Read more about it on the Books page.
Billy’s latest short story collection, The Boatman and Other Stories was released in January 2020 and released in the U.S. on April 28.
Billy is the winner of a Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award for the short story, and twice a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Bursary Award for Literature. Among numerous other honors, his story, The Boatman, was a finalist for the 2016 Costa Short Story Award, and more than a hundred of his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in literary journals and magazines around the world, including Absinthe: New European Writing, Agni, the Bellevue Literary Review, the Chattahoochee Review, Confrontation, The Fiddlehead, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Kenyon Review, the Kyoto Journal, the London Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, Salamander, and the Saturday Evening Post.
I read O’Callaghans short story, A Death in the Family, which is included in The Boatman and Other Stories when the prestigious Ploughshares published it as a Kindle solo, here https://amzn.to/2xnqma2
I reviewed A Death in the Family by writing:
It is such a gift that Ploughshares avails this short story here on Amazon. I cannot recommend this story enough, for I consider Billy O’Callaghan the most important literary figure to arrive on the scene in ages. O’Callaghan can take any simple premise and infuse it with deep-seated, soul-stirring insight, and A Death in the Family is just such an example. His use of language is so personal that it shows us our own humanity, in this evocative, finely wrought story. Read this story and be lulled by O’Callaghan’s laser-sharp gift of Irish nuance, character, and place. And when you’ve finished, do yourself a favor and read his debut novel, The Dead House.
Here is my favorite quote on O’Callaghan’s writing:
“I know of no writer on either side of the Atlantic who is better at exploring the human spirit under assault than Billy O’Callaghan.”—Robert Olen Butler
You can read about this world-class author, here:
https://billyocallaghan.ie/en/biography/
Claire Fullerton Author 