#Colin Barrett

[reverie-quotes]

He was back where he always seemed to end up. His life, circling, tighter and tighter, in on itself. It was as if every time he tried to move off, however tentatively, in a new direction, he was wrenched right back to the centre of himself. And that centre was getting smaller and smaller, more decrepit and ferociously reduced.

— Colin Barrett, Wild Houses

[anokatony]

'Wild Houses' by Colin Barrett – After All, It is an Irish Novel

  ‘Wild Houses’ by Colin Barrett    (2024) – 255 pages   At the center of ‘Wild Houses’, the new novel by Irish author Colin Barrett is the hapless Dev Hendrick. Dev is in his late thirties. He lives by himself and keeps to himself out on his family farm, outside of town. He loved his mother, but she died a few years back. “She could bear in on him of course, could berate, hound, and guilt-trip…

[doughmonkey]

Colin Barrett's short story The Alps (no, no, not the mountains 😏) the most hilarious, moving and _most Irish_ short story I have read a long long time. Buy his book! (Homesickness, Jonathan Cape, London 2022)

[usermadripoor]

-Young Skins by Colin Barrett

[dylanowenmusic]

The official music video for “Young Skins” is out now. And it’s my birthday today. Figured I’d do what I love most and share some music from the heart. Myself and my entire small town worked really hard on this one. Fans drove from hours away. People lended their houses, cars, spraypaint. Director Brian Petchers drove up from NYC to make sure the hometown was properly documented. Hope you love it and enjoy. Please watch and show some love. More soon...

[solitaryfossil]

Book Review

Colin Barrett: Young Skins. ★★★★★ Short Stories, Irish Literature. Published 2013

Blurb: Enter the small, rural town of Glanbeigh, a place whose fate took a downturn with the Celtic Tiger, a desolate spot where buffoonery and tension simmer and erupt, and booze-sodden boredom fills the corners of every pub and nightclub. Here, and in the towns beyond, the young live hard and wear the scars.

My review: A brilliant debut, really fine story telling. I enjoyed this collection quite a lot.

[jamespauljones-fiction]

Young Skins - Colin Barrett

Jonathan Cape - 2014

[reverie-quotes]

It was relatively easy to imagine death; death would just be a deep, oblivious sleep, a massive sedation you never come around from. Eternity was harder. Eternity defeated the compulsion to scale, to think in numbers and distance.

— Colin Barrett, Wild Houses

[anokatony]

'Homesickness' by Colin Barrett - Humorous and Eloquent Slices of Irish Life

‘Homesickness’ by Colin Barrett – Humorous and Eloquent Slices of Irish Life

  ‘Homesickness’, stories by Colin Barrett   (2022) – 213 pages   I wanted something a little lighter and less intense than my recent reading and I found it in the collection of stories ‘Homesickness’ by Colin Barrett. What stands out is the expressiveness of many of these stories’ sentences. In the story “The Alps”, we have this description of the three Irish Alps brothers, Rory and Eustace and…

[nyeto]

and silence sounds

no worse than cheers after 

the earth has stopped the ears 

[emberlinsmiscellany]

I’m not interested that much these days in art that, often unintentionally, valorizes the individual, that treats the interior self as the only meaningful subject. The message from the corporate and the ruling classes in the West for the last sixty or so years has been that you can only survive and thrive on your own, that putting yourself first is both desirable and the only feasible way to survive. And that line of thinking is going to get us all killed, frankly. I wanted this story to be about friendship, about its burdens and dependencies, about the hard work of being there for someone, whether friend or family.

Colin Barrett, interview with The New Yorker, here. 

[dylanowenmusic]

My new single “Young Skins” drops this Wednesday night @ midnight EST. September 16th it’s yours. Presave here if you’d like to support: https://ffm.to/youngskinsthesong Cannot wait to share and to get started with this new era. Consistent new single song releases are on the way leading up to an EP, once & for all. Much love to all of my fans and friends who keep me going through the years. We’ll never throw in the white flag DO

[reverie-quotes]

He felt like he was becoming transparent, his skin and organs turning to glass. He felt like he was spinning through an endless void of outer space.

— Colin Barrett, Wild Houses

[mttbll]

There’s definitely an effect you’re going for, and you’re going for it at that level, sentence by sentence. I believe other writers when they tell me they perhaps don’t approach it that way—that they work at a paragraph or even a chapter level—but it’s the only way I do it. It’s the distance I want each unit of my concentration to be trained on at any one time. Sentence by sentence... It can take me a long time to get started on a story, or to get it to go somewhere; it can be the kind of extensive period of time that would probably discourage a lot of other people who would assume they must be doing something wrong. It could take a month to get the first three paragraphs right, but that’s because you’re trying to find the particular register and cadence that you’re going to tune the rest of the story to. I’ve just always loved that kind of writing.

Colin Barrett

[nealdanderson]

For my Editorial Painting class- an illustration to accompany Colin Barrett’s short story, The Ways, which was published in The New Yorker on January 5, 2015.

[hillsidewriting]

Extruding What Is Incipient

Gordon Lish talks about “consecution,” about pulling the language and subject matter out of the previous sentence. Each sentence, even down to its syllabic and acoustical shape, embryonically contains the next. I don’t do it at that microscopic level, but I like to work incrementally with plot, extruding what is, I believe, incipient. Just accruing one small detail after another. The big stuff takes care of itself. What seems like audacious structural or narratorial swerves often aren’t, at the time of construction—they’re just the next step you need to take.

—Colin Barrett, "The Right Kind of Damage" (Interview), The Paris Review