Dermot Healy – författare

Long Time, No See introduces us to the unforgettable world of Mister Psyche .In the isolated coastal townland of Ballintra in the Northwest of Ireland Recent school-leaver, occasional worker, full-time companion and Malibu-provider to Uncle Joe-Joe and his friend, The Blackbird, Psyche is a boy on the cusp of adulthood, undone by a recent traumatic event.Hanging out with men some forty-plus years his senior proves hazardous for Mister Psyche when the appearance of a bullet-hole in Uncle Joe-Joe's window draws him into a series of (mis)-adventures which unsettle and bemuse. Perhaps The Blackbird is losing it? Or perhaps The General has decided to act on a decades-old grudge? Whichever way, as the paranoia grabs a creeping hold of Uncle Joe-Joe, his fragile world threatens to collapse. And it is Mister Psyche who must digest this and acknowledge the new world taking shape in the old ...An epic in miniature peopled by a cast of innocents and broken misfits, Long Time, No See's lyrical power casts a miraculous literary spell.

Discover the classic novel of 'a modern master' (Irish Times), described by Stephen Mangan on BBC2s Between the Covers as 'a gorgeous, gorgeous book' 'His great masterpiece.' Kevin Barry'A rare and powerful book.' E. Annie Proulx'One of those books that makes its own language.' Anne EnrightJack Ferris, playwright, drunk, is mired in contemplative misery in a fisherman's cottage on the windy bleak west coast of Ireland. Mourning his love affair with Catherine Adams, an actress and Protestant from the North, he summons her instead in his imagination. In doing so, he tells the story of her father Jonathan, failed parson and retired RUC man, shamed into exile by a moment of violence in Derry years ago. Masterly, elegiac, A Goat's Song conjures the contrasting landscapes and opposing myths of a nation divided.

Ollie Ewing is barely surviving. Back home in Sligo after 'a few experiences' in London, he collects trolleys in a supermarket car park and lives in a run-down house with a group of art students. Tormented by old regrets and terrible fears -- vague recollections of his brother's violent demise, and his best friend's grisly end as a pile of charred bones in the back of a lorry -- he decides at last to confront his demons.

One day, years after he's moved away from his childhood home in rural Ireland, Dermot Healy returns to care for his ailing mother. Out of the blue she hands him the forgotten diary he had kept as a fifteen-year-old. He is amazed to find the makings of the writer he has become, as well as taken aback at the changes his memory has wrought. The silhouettes who have haunted his past come back to inhabit his pages: his father, a kind policeman who plays cards and drinks stout with his cronies; his mother, whose stories young Dermot has heard so often that he believes they are his own; or Aunt Maisie, whose early disappointment in love has left her both dreamy and cynical. Funny, direct and moving, The Bend For Home is a family portrait like no other, and a hugely engaging account of a childhood in small-town Ireland.

Initially published in 1984, Dermot Healy’s stunning first novel, Fighting with Shadows, returns to print after almost thirty years. Largely set in the border village of Fanacross, Co. Fermanagh, as Ireland stumbles clumsily toward modernity, the Allen family negotiate a bitter and troubled terrain. Fighting with Shadows offers extraordinary and poetic glimpses of the compelling lives of ordinary people. The novel’s landscape is of borderlands, of in-between spaces; it tells of violently sundered geographical borders, of maddening religious differences, of the anguished gaps between people as they struggle to find each other, and of how the dead reside among its inhabitants long after they’ve passed. At once realist account and nightmarish magic realist fable, Fighting with Shadows occupies a truly important position in the history of modern Irish fiction.

Like many of the great Irish writers before him, Dermot Healy first announced himself as a writer of intricate and innovative short stories. Healy’s stories are set in small-town Ireland and its rural environs, and in the equally suffocating confines of the Irish expat communities in London. Throughout these texts, Healy demonstrates a deep sense of compassion towards the marginalized and the dispossessed, without ever becoming sentimental or clichéd. The language is earthy and imagistic by turn, and he continually seeks to extend the formal boundaries of the genre.Gathering all of Healy’s stories together for the first time, this collection includes the long prose-drama “Before the Off” and Healy’s final short works, “Along the Lines” and “Images.”

Although Dermot Healy (1947-2014) is probably best known as a novelist and poet, he was also a prolific playwright, screenwriter, and actor. Healy’s interest in drama was long-standing, and was central to his development as a writer. Between 1985 and 2010 he wrote thirteen stage plays, all of which are gathered here for the first time. Although the settings of Healy’s plays are often local and regional by design, their energy and vision transcend those boundaries. In this respect, the publication of The Collected Plays will be of interest to all scholars and practitioners of contemporary drama.