LISTEN HERE OR ON iTunes • Spotify • Overcast • Soundcloud
Like the show? Support it on Patreon! The show is funded exclusively by listeners like you, and your contribution is vital and deeply appreciated!
Friends,
What an honor to talk to one of the greatest living fiction writers, Kevin Barry. And to talk with him not about “how do you get your ideas?” or “what’s your writing practice like”? But instead about witches, healers, fairies, violence, the radical history of Ireland, and more.
Kevin’s latest novel, The Night Boat To Tangier , was longlisted for the Booker Prize. His novel before that, Beatlbone follows John Lennon on a mystical vision quest to find an island off the Irish coast. It’s a novel so strange and moving that you wouldn’t have to even like The Beatles to be caught up in its weird web.
Also, Kevin reads his absolutely brutal story, “A Cruelty” in his excellent, sinister Christian Bale-esque reading voice.
Apologies – the episode gets cut off just as we start discussing Twin Peaks. But we only spoke for about five more minutes after that. And besides, I’ll have Kevin back on. This is a great conversation and I absolutely want to continue it.
We talk:
- Kevin’s superstitions
- Animism and fiction
- Irish writers and writers of the American South
- how accents change fiction
- How we add to the landscape as we walk through it
- Kevin’s encounters with
- Writing and dreams
- The fairies and The Pixies
- When Kevin was healed by witchcraft before playing video games
- The non-linearity of time
- Primal scream therapy in Ireland
- Evil’s home in art
LISTEN ON: 
