viragohaus's reviews
237 reviews

Like a pack of cards consisting almost entirely of jokers but shuffled with a brace of barbed wire, O'Neill's collection is funny, adventurous, carelessly genre-hopping and occasionally deeply effecting.
The best stories marry the author's natural inventiveness to a heart and are a precise marriage of form and content.
'The Weight of a Human Heart' announces to a broader readership a very considerable talent.

'Collected Stories'
'The Cockroach'
'Four Letter Words'
'Last Words'
'Understand, Understood, Understood'

Thick with thoughts, thoughtfully nimble.

The various cultural impacts of comics is a potentially fascinating subject. From its adult readership in WWII, its consolidation of the Teenager in the 60s, its often chaotic work practices, to today's artwork as a celebration of reading's physicality are just some of the pegs that a look at comics could be hung on.
But this book ignores any cultural or textual analysis. It is rather a dull company history which tends to hustle out potential interesting conflicts on attribution with detail on figures whose significance is unexplained or marginal.

Narrative non-fiction to be gulped down, lest you pay too much attention to your rising doubts.

A tale of identity and dispossession that can't be told often enough.

This book's certainty and unmodulated voice is less of a challenge to prevailing attitudes on 'people smugglers' than it imagines.

Beautifully balanced between recognition and throat-tightening fear, Floundering is a novel of completely necessary yet brittle attachments.

In the revivifying tradition of Angela Carter, Sea Hearts knows every spiral of the larger mythological currents but has a fluidity, a course, all of its own.

A speculative verse novel of some power but as many missteps.