Bullfighting

Reviews

“There is not a writer currently working in English who can match Doyle for the fluency with which he tacks back and forth between the hilarious and the heartbreaking. ‘Sad and good had become the same thing’” thinks a mourner in one story who has attended too many funerals, and in this collection Doyle hits that sweet spot again and again.”

“There are writers who make it look hard, and then there are writers who make it look easy. Roddy Doyle is one of the latter, as he proves in each of the thirteen stories in Bullfighting. The stories are rueful, sad, amusing, stifled, haunting.”

“If there’s one thing the Irish can do, it’s tell stories. Doyle is no exception; he does them proud. He writes with humor and pathos. He has a justly acclaimed ear for the Irish voice. He has keen insights into the Ireland of the twenty-first century and keener insights into the men and women who inhabit it.”

“These rather tenderhearted sketches of how men get old in contemporary Ireland may not be autobiographical but they’re true; they come from life as lived.”

“Probably the finest collection of Irish short stories since James Joyce’s Dubliners. The delicacy of emotion is here, the spare but elegant writing, the heartbreak and humor…There’s laughter and sadness, provided by a writer at his peak, teasing meaning out of the ordinary with exquisite skill and delicacy.”

“Roddy Doyle’s Bullfighting offers a series of rare and beautiful mid-life meditations.”

“The men in Doyle’s sardonic and bittersweet collection are teetering on the edge of middle age, and while they’re not always desperate to stay young, there’s something terrifying about the future for each of them…They’re the men for whom reflection, even when tinged with regret, is cathartic.”

“Doyle has a way with character, and he uses dialogue as much to develop a character as he does to tell a story. Although these stories might depict the mundanity of urban life, they do it with aplomb.”

“Lorcan Cranitch delivers a one-man-show as he interprets Doyle’s second collection of stories. He expertly complements Doyle’s writing style with an authentic Irish brogue and takes it to another level with astounding changes in pitch for women’s, children’s, and even men’s voices. Cranitch’s expressive delivery of Doyle’s works is so complex and entertaining that it nearly makes the content of each story superfluous. One hears Doyle’s dry wit and insights into the Irish male persona as Cranitch deftly leaps from emotion to emotion. Men audibly struggle for their lost power, virility, health, social standing, and love while outwardly taking the culturally expected stance of bravura. Heartrending situations peppered with pub banter and weary women create vivid emotional terrain, both hilarious and moving. Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award, a 2012 Audie Finalist.”

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