After a Dance
Selected Stories
by Bridget O'Connor
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Pub Date 15 Feb 2024 | Archive Date 15 Feb 2024
Pan Macmillan | Picador
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Description
Discover a classic short story writer whose sharp, gritty, and stylish stories encapsulated 90s London.
‘Think Irvine Welsh meets Edna O’Brien.’ The Times
‘A storytelling genius before her time’ The Irish Times
‘Wickedly funny, stylishly written’ Patrick McCabe
‘Some of the wildest, arresting, just plain brilliant short stories I've read in a long time’ Roddy Doyle
‘Every O’Connor story is a performance, a live fight with time and decay, disgust and the human body’ Martina Evans
Bridget O’Connor was one of the great talents of her generation. She had a voice that was viscerally funny and an eye for both the glaring reality and the absurdity of the everyday.
In After a Dance, a newly compiled collection of her finest work, we meet a selection of her most memorable characters: dark, cruel, lonely, people living on the margins of their own lives. From unravelling narcissists to melancholy romantics, male villains to monstrous women, all human life is here — at its best and at its delightful worst.
This visceral and unforgettable collection is a moment of celebration that will make readers wonder how they ever overlooked Bridget O’Connor.
Advance Praise
'To call them characterful is to undersell these Technicolor prose screams, these screeching narrative sprints, this filthy feast of stories. Think Irvine Welsh meets Edna O'Brien.' The Times
'Every O’Connor story is a performance, a live fight with time and decay, disgust and the human body. She wrote intensely from her time and place; to read her now is to be catapulted back to 1990s London. Yet the voice, the themes are more relevant than ever. No wonder she was so preoccupied with temporality: she was before her time.' Martina Evans, The Irish Times
'These are some of the wildest, arresting, just plain brilliant short stories I've read in a long time' Roddy Doyle
'A storytelling genius before her time' The Irish Times
'Wickedly funny, stylishly written, I relished each and every one of these stories' Patrick McCabe
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781035024896 |
| PRICE | £16.99 (GBP) |
| PAGES | 160 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Gail H, Reviewer
I don’t think I've ever read a short story as surreal and compelling as Heavy Petting by Bridget O'connor. A goldfish is hooped at a fairground, brought home to join a menagerie of other pets, and named Godfrey. Godfrey watches and swims for his life as a family disintegrates. Majella, a promising student, turns to drugs. Mum is on medication and becomes obsessive about making soup, even using Godfrey's bowl as a receptacle. Dad is a shadow of his former self, on painkillers.
O' Connor was an author and playwright who shone humour into dark corners. She died in 2010 aged 49.
This taster of 3 short stories is an exquisite tasting of a talent that was extinguished too soon.
Morgan S, Reviewer
These are some good, weird, Irish short stories, in a year of excellent, weird, Irish short story collections in America. This one is definitely more gonzo than some of the other literary efforts, but in a very relatable way. Family dysfunction and female ennui at its best, with a 90s beat for those who remember…
Kerry H, Educator
There's a compelling weirdness about O'Connor's writing - and I mean that in the best possible way. This is a collection that is brilliant in its construction of character and its use of language to hypnotise the reader. Moving, too. Reading these stories was more than simply a reading experience, it was a sensation of something similar to the writing process itself. Excellent and highly recommended. What a privilege to have read this ahead of publication. My grateful thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the ARC.
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