Walk the Blue Fields

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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 Please consider this gorgeous book about Ireland today if you're looking for a non gross and stereotyping way to celebrate the day! Keegan writes with such grace and accuracy that it is impossible not to be drawn into each world she creates. Walk the Blue Fields is a superb collection in which each story is a treat; together, they are pure gold.” – Big Issue

In spare and exact strokes, Keegan transforms these domestic circumstances into universal mirrors. Easy to devour in a single sitting but likely to haunt you for years.” — Oprah Daily, Best Short-Story Collection of 2023 Ana akım batı edebiyatı değil de -hani o "bireyin modern toplumdaki sıkışmışlığı ve varoluş sancılarını" anlatanları kastediyorum- daha kıyıdaki yaşamları, özellikle taşrayı anlatan öyküleri daha çok seviyorum. Perfect short stories . . . flawless structure . . . What makes this collection a particular joy is the run and pleasure of the language.”— Anne Enright, The Guardian I know that road, that cliff, that island, from childhood holidays, so it was with a little racing of the heart, a little skip, a little hop over the edge into a well of forgotten memories that I read the first story in this collection. Keegan is so good at conjuring place that I was there on the edge of the cliff, peering over the rim of the world alongside the woman watcher, feeling the wind whip my eyes and the salt burn my lips while the waves filled my ears with their tremendous sound. Achill really is such a wild outcrop. Anything can happen there, and ideas for great short stories are no exception.Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields is a collection of eight short stories, half of which are pretty darn amazing and half of which aren’t.

A man goes into a bar to drink away his sadness as his lover has left him. He dreams about her returning. Meanwhile, there is solace in beer talk. Th descriptions and characterizations in these stories all have elements of tragedy …. sadness that can turn skin blue. The best stories here are so textured and moving, so universal but utterly distinctive, that it’s easy to imagine readers savoring them many years from now.”— New York Times Book Review

A] stunning second collection . . . Keegan’s stories are the literary counterparts to Picasso’s Blue Period paintings. . . . Keegan’s first collection, Antarctica, led to comparisons with Raymond Carver, but Annie Proulx, with her distilled, poetic prose and attunement to remote landscapes, is a closer match.”— San Francisco Chronicle In the The Parting Gift, a young woman flees from a terrible past embodied in the farmland that her father has cultivated with mute vileness. These short fictions by the Irish author Claire Keegan haven’t a style so much as a microclimate, a chill mist blowing in on a hard wind off the sea. . . . The author’s own storytelling powers have darkened and matured since her first collection, as she takes confident command of her craft.”— Boston Globe Anlatılanlar çoğunlukla acı şeyler olsa da her öyküde bir umut var. Ya da kabullenişin verdiği rahatlık. Modern şehir insanı, en küçük sıkıntıda "bu benim başıma nasıl gelir?" duygusuyla çatışıp bir türlü huzura eremiyor ama bu öykülerin de işaret ettiği taşra insanlarında ya eyleme geçme dürtüsü ya da ağırbaşlı bir kabulleniş var.

These stories are pure magic. They add, using grace, intelligence and an extraordinary ear for rhythm, to the distinguished tradition of the Irish short story. They deal with Ireland now, but have a sort of timeless edge to them, making Claire Keegan both an original and a canonical presence in Irish fiction.” –Colm Toibin, author of The Master and Mothers and Sons Astonishing and beautiful. Her writing is intimately tuned to the landscape, language and ancient storytelling tradition of Ireland. . . . With a few crisp stark sentences, she opens whole worlds into which her reader falls, fully enthralled, captivated and amazed until her very last word.” –Alice Greenway, author of White Ghost Girls Keenly observed and surfaced are the depths of yearning known to everyone who cherishes hope for the future and the insidious grip the past continues to exert over the present. Despite this, evident too is the inward bent to flee, pull oneself up by the bootstraps, get up when one has stumbled, and keep moving forward even when there is no certainty of better days.On her wedding night she felt springs coming up like mortal sins through the mattress.’ - from ’The Forester’s Daughter Visceral, simple and clear, Keegan’s prose refuses indulgence and sinks in deep, drenching bones and visions with calm instants of gazing across the fields, beyond the sharp cliffs and onto the unruly waters that dance with the same blue that tints the baluster of anciently painted skies. Women’s minds were made of glass: so clear and yet their thoughts broke easily, yielding to other glassy thoughts that were even harder. It was enough to attract a man and frighten him all at once. from - Surrender (after McGahern) Balancing Keegan’s delicate, sparing prose and masterful ear for dialogue with a tale that is almost overwhelming in its tenderness, Foster is a heart-wrenching treasure of a book that only serves to confirm Keegan’s place as one of contemporary Irish literature’s leading lights.”— Vogue, The Best Books to Read this Fall Praise for Small Things Like These: s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.” ( from the story “Walk the Blue Fields”)

Hope lurks somewhere in almost all [Keegan’s] stories. . . . You start out on the paths of these simple, rural lives, and not long into each, some bit of rage or unforgivable transgression bubbles up . . . Then the truly amazing happens: Life goes on, limps along, heads for some new chance at beauty.” –Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review A mini-masterpiece . . . There is nothing demonstrative about this prose, which is not spare but restrained, strategically discharging touches of eloquence only when needed, and not through a profusion of descriptive detail, but through choice adjectives and verbs that just stray from the literal . . . Keegan stands almost without rival.” — Irish Times (UK) Bu tür öykülerde hem yabancı hem tanıdık şeyler buluyorum. Bir öykü kişisinin "ayaksuyunu" dışarı dökmezse eve uğursuzluk geleceğine dair inancı bana tuhaf gelse de bu inancın arkasında tanıdık bir geçmiş görüyorum. In another good story, “The Forester’s Daughter,” a woman marries a simple man, initially resistant to marry him because she doesn’t love him, and so you know how this works out, in spite of the birth of children over the years. Claire Keegan's brilliant debut collection, Antarctica, was named a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year and earned her resounding accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. She continues her outstanding work with this new collection of quietly wrenching stories of despair and desire in modern-day Ireland.Tight, potent . . . [Keegan] has chosen her details carefully. Everything means something . . . Her details are so natural that readers might not immediately understand their significance. The stories grow richer with each read . . . [These stories] have new and powerful things to say about the ever-mystifying, ever-colliding worlds of contemporary Irish women and the men who stand in their way.”— Minneapolis Star Tribune A book that makes you excited to discover everything its author has ever written… Absolutely beautiful.”— Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain In stories brimming with Gothic shadows and ancient hurts, Claire Keegan tells of “a rural world of silent men and wild women who, for the most part, make bad marriages, and vivid, uncomprehending children” (Anne Enright, The Guardian). In the never-before-published story “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer awarded a stay to work in Heinrich Böll’s old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder, whose ulterior motives only emerge as the night progresses. In the title story, a priest waits at the altar to perform a marriage and, during the ceremony and the festivities that follow, battles his memories of a love affair with the bride that led him to question all to which he has dedicated his life; later that night, he finds an unlikely answer in the magical healing powers of a seer. The plot in these stories unfolds in the interactions between the characters: words, silence, gestures. Keegan writes a clear prose and adopts narrative styles that convey the intended moods. The Parting Gift is told from a second person perspective. The narration is deliberately muted to distance the young woman from her toxic childhood. Symbolism is subtly employed to good effect, too. In Close to the Water’s Edge, a story in which the young man seeks meaning and authenticity, the sea is a symbol of freedom from the tyranny of life both for him and his grandmother. At the restaurant are a chained parrot and a bound lobster.