To Avenge a Dead Glacier
To Avenge a Dead Glacier
Couldn't load pickup availability
Winner of the RTÉ Francis McManus Short Story Prize and the John McGahern Award, Shane Tivenan is a remarkable new talent. This debut collection simmers with style, verve, tension and humour. Throughout the stories in To Avenge a Dead Glacier, Tivenan explores the lives of rural Irish outsiders. His characters are artists, sean-nós singers, members of the queer community, the gifted, the neurodivergent, the environmentally concerned, people with memory problems, the spiritual people, the non-human.
In the title story, a man attends the funeral of a glacier in Iceland without fully knowing why he is there. In another, a midlands graffiti artist warns his townspeople through his throw-ups about the dangers of the way they are living, but neglects his own mind in the process. In 'Honey Brown', a ninety-two-year-old woman who suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome tries to celebrate her birthday in a nursing home in Roscommon while fighting back the hallucinations brought on by her condition. In 'Resurrection of a Corncrake', a semi-retired plasterer is haunted by the silencing of the birds in his townland, a silencing which he knows he took part in.
These are stories rich in the essential detail of human life, in the fraught exchanges that make up our every relationship, and very often of life lived beyond the confines of safety or simplicity.
Details
Details
ISBN: 9781843519171
Extent: 264
Published:
Share
Praise and Reviews
-
'Just brilliant. These are stories with sharp edges and big ideas, and Tivenan writes with a depth of feeling and imagination that we should all be in awe of.' Lisa McInerney
-
'There is a psychedelic brilliance to the way Shane Tivenan harnesses language. Paragraph after paragraph thrums with sound, buzzes with energy, delights with beauty. These stories straddle worlds: ancient and digital, human and animal, bog and sky; they sing with freshness and daring. What a truly stunning collection! It was a joy to read.' Danielle McLaughlin
-
‘Shane Tivenan’s is a voice of cyclonic force and originality. Within a couple of pages, it’s clear that he’s taking us — and the Irish short story — into strange, potent, visceral new territory.' Rob Doyle
I was attracted to Shane Tivenan's collection of stories because the catalog description made them seem very humane in their quirkinesses. I was amazed at how vast, deep and wonderful each story was in scope of humanity and compassion about the big story, namely the chaotic, quirky, and ultimately wonderful Earth. My favorite story was "Mother and Deep Blue." I identified with "Mother's" old Humanist approach to art and was very impressed at how Tivenan negotiates the son's postmodern dubiousness of a Humanist approach to art. In the end I was amazed at how Tivenan brought so many vital threads of feeling and dialogue together and with a vital message to artists and writers during the advent of Artificial Intelligence. I also deeply loved and respected "Resurrection of a Corncrake." I look forward to rereading this story many times as it has so many beautiful and sagacious human perspectives. While it made me vividly aware of how much our planet is changing in ways that are going to change us (and not in a gentle way) the story gave me a resurrection of hope in the real life of human "being". To complete this collection with "Endsong" was a stroke of genius tying the theme of human connectivity to life and to Earth to the eponymous story (which was about the vastness and vast uncertainty of human life and human passion). I look forward to reading all of Tivenan's future work. He's a writer of stunning diversity and breath taking skill. Most of all, he doesn't abandon compassion and a sort of stubborn and imperishable spark of joy throughout all the diversity and frequent tenseness of his work.
About the Author
Shane Tivenan grew up close to Athlone Town, County Roscommon. He studied Cultural Anthropology at Maynooth University. His fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine, and has been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1. He was awarded the 2020 RTÉ Francis MacManus Prize, the 2024 John McGahern Award, and was selected for the Bridport Prize Anthology in 2023. His debut collection of short stories, To Avenge a Dead Glacier, will be published by The Lilliput Press in 2025.