A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US-with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable. In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it's like to have sex with someone else-and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with "The Ginger Rogers Sermon," when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are "Men and Women," about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set "Ride If You Dare," about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and "Stay Close to the Water's Edge," about a Harvard student who despises-and is despised by-his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are "Storms," told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; "Where the Water's Deepest," a snippet about an au pair afraid of "losing" her charge; or "The Singing Cashier"-based on fact, we're rather pointlessly told-about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit "hideous acts on teenage girls." Keegan's best include the more maturely conceived "Passport Soup," about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; "Quare Name for a Boy," in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interestin, determines that she'll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained "Sisters"-one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent-who come to a symbolically perfect end. Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
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
