
Antarctica
Claire Keegan
(Author)Description
Compassionate, witty, and unsettling, Antarctica is the debut collection of one of Ireland's most exciting and versatile new talents. Claire Keegan, winner of several prestigious awards including the William Trevor Prize, writes stories that have a razor-sharp narrative style and unembellished tone, and move from the cruel, hard life of rural Ireland to the hot landscape of the southern United States.
From the title story about a married woman who takes a trip to the city with a single purpose in mind--to sleep with another man--Antarctica draws you into a world of obsession, betrayal, and fragile relationships. In "Love in the Tall Grass," Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date, with her lover, that has been nine years in the waiting. In "Passport Soup," Frank Corso mourns the curious disappearance of his nine-year-old daughter and tries desperately to reach out to his shattered wife who has gone mad with grief.
Keegan's characters inhabit a world where dreams, memory, and chance can have crippling consequences for those involved. Moving in its quiet intensity, the award-winning Antarctica is a rare and arresting debut.
Product Details
Publisher | Grove Press |
Publish Date | May 02, 2002 |
Pages | 224 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9780802139016 |
Dimensions | 8.2 X 5.5 X 0.7 inches | 0.7 pounds |
About the Author
Claire Keegan's works of fiction are internationally acclaimed and have been translated into thirty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award--then the world's richest prize for a short story. Small Things Like These, one of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The Kerry Prize for Irish Novel of the Year. So Late in the Day was longlisted for the Story Prize. She was awarded Woman of the Year for Literature in Ireland (2022), Author of the Year (2023), the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters, and the Siegfried Lenz Award (2024).
Reviews
Praise for Antarctica
"That Keegan has a knack for story-telling is proved many times over, in stories that reject the parable approach for a more informal, intimate style . . . Her ear seems to tune in to the rhythms of life with enviably direct phrasing." --New York Times Book Review
"These stories are diamonds." --Esquire
"Antarctica is an appropriate title for these spare and chilly stories by the up-and-coming Irish writer Claire Keegan. . . . Keegan [is] an authentic talent with a gimlet eye and a distinctive voice." --Boston Globe
"The integrity of emotion Keegan achieves, her combination of male and female personas and perspectives is at time reminiscent of Carver or Annie Proulx."--Irish Times
"In her debut collection, Keegan transcends well-worn themes of adultery and family discord, fashioning resonant stories with fairy-tale simplicity." --Newsweek
"Here really is an exciting first book of deliberate, contemplative short stories . . . The aesthetic here is always the appeal to palpability of language itself. Suggestions of Heaney and Frost travel through the prose."--London Observer
"Where Keegan's writing differs from most psychological thriller-chillers is in its disconcerting calmness of expression . . . The flatness of Keegan's style, her art of implication, and the focus on southern Irish life put one in mind of Joyce's Dubliners . . . With writing of this quality, uneventfulness could be just compelling as crisis."--Times Literary Supplement
"Among the finest contemporary stories written recently in English."--The Observer
"The beautifully crafted stories in her first collection, Antarctica, are like chilling, adult versions of fairy tales--albeit with echoes of Raymond Carver and William Trevor."--Sunday Telegraph
"Keegan has a remarkably poetic vision and she treats hurt and laughter, love and hate, with the same calm, almost ethereal style."--Sunday Tribune
"A collection of tiny stories that read almost like poems, the narratives in Antarctica gleam like cold, sharp-edged gems."--Amber Cowan, The Times (London)
"With Antarctica, Claire Keegan presents us with a series of small worlds under glass, that you shake for snow. Wonderfully detailed and vivid, these are stories of complicity and escape. She is quite unafraid."--Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren
"These stories display a prodigious talent. Claire Keegan's imaginative energy, full of surprising tones and gestures, mixes a very dark vision with a strange lightness. The variety of her characters, her countries and her regions of the mind establish her as a writer of astonishing range. And the pull between the sympathetic and the sardonic in her stories gives them an extraordinary, fresh tension."--Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island
"Claire Keegan is a real writer. Her will is impossible to resist. Her stories are pure. Their effect is cumulative. Their scope is stunning. Ms. Keegan is an enlightened being who in another age might've been a saint or a scientist, who happens to write with the force of a locomotive."--Matthew Klam, author of Who Is Rich?
"These are some of the best short stories I've read in years."--Roddy Doyle, author of Life Without Children
"A beautiful, tender work of great clarity. It's a joy to read work of such energy and even poetry."--Sebastian Barry, author of Old God's Time
Praise for Claire Keegan
"Claire Keegan is one of the greatest fiction writers in the world."--George Saunders
"I did not think realism could be truly feminist until I saw Keegan wield its techniques . . . When realism is more revelatory of the world than reality itself, what can you do but feel grateful for Keegan's mastery of it?" --The Atlantic
"Across her oeuvre, Keegan illuminates violence better than almost anyone, avoiding easy didacticism. She pulls apart the strands of misogyny in individuals and institutions, diagnosing the same problem in both . . . Throughout her career, Keegan seems to emphasize that we take nothing with us and that all that matters is what we give each other." --Washington Post
"Reading Irish-born Claire Keegan is like succumbing to a drug: eerie, hallucinogenic, time-stopping. Her simplest sentences envelop the brain (and all the senses) in a deep, fully dimensional dream . . . Each story is as substantive as a novel, and as breathtaking . . . Unforgettable." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Keegan is the kind of writer whose spare, slippery work you want to reread . . . [her] sentences shape shift the second time 'round, twisting themselves into a more emotionally complicated story." -- NPR
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