Birdie

11th Dec. – READING WITH MÁIGHRÉAD MEDBH

Birdie, Flash Fiction, News

Máighréad Medbh and I will be doing an online flash fiction and poetry reading on Friday December 11th at 7pm, Irish time. We’d be delighted if you’d join us, to hear us read and celebrate the publication of Máighréad’s new book, Imbolg.

Time: Dec 11, 2020 07:00pm GMT
To join the Zoom Event email in advance: maighreadmedbh@gmail.com

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Nuala O’Connor lives in Co. Galway, Ireland. Her forthcoming fifth novel, NORA, is about Nora Barnacle, wife and muse to James Joyce; it appears in January 2021 in the USA and in Ireland in April. Her new chapbook of historical flash fiction, Birdie, was recently published by Arlen House. Nuala is editor at flash e-zine Splonk.

Máighréad Medbh lives in Dublin. Imbolg, just published by Arlen House, is her eighth book of poetry, and incorporates older work with a sequence written this year. Her previous book, Parvit of Agelast, is a verse fantasy and was shortlisted for the 2017 Pigott Prize. She has also published a prose work, Savage Solitude, with Dedalus Press. She has been known as a performance poet, and is currently working on a creative-critical PhD at DCU.

MMedbh Imbolg Cover 2.jpg
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Imbolg can be bought here:https://www.bookdepository.com/Imbolg…/9781851322473

Birdie can be bought as an ebook here: https://books2read.com/u/mKzXkV
For Kindle here: https://amzn.to/3ogSJLO
Hard copy here: https://www.kennys.ie/shop/Birdie-O-Connor-Nuala or here: https://www.bookdepository.com/

Birdie – Irish Times Review

Birdie, Flash Fiction, News, , ,

I’m very pleased with this review of my historical flash fiction chapbook, Birdie, in today’s Irish Times. Thanks to Ruth McKee.

Birdie
By Nuala O’Connor
Arlen House, €10.00 Sat, Dec 5, 2020, 06:00


As you would expect from O’Connor, this collection of flash fiction is a menagerie of exquisite language. The stories transport us to moments in time, and to no-time, as the author paints fragments of history that are palpable with characters who come alive in a brushstroke. Artists and sitters are here as are servants, soldiers, mothers and sisters in stories of losing, longing, and home. Historical fiction can sometimes be clogged with research – not so in these stories which are glances, swift and sensory, with grace-notes of details to let us recognise where we are. Here is the “crookedness of nature,” the lure and lore of home but also the emigrant, the lost lover, the perished child. This collection takes us from the olagón to the “shale-and-ripple of a shell”: a pearl. – Ruth McKee

BIRDIE – where to buy

Birdie, Blog, Flash Fiction, News, Short Stories, , , , , , , , , , ,
Signing copies of birdie in Kennys of Galway

I was awarded a COVID-19 Crisis Response Award for Literature, from the Arts Council of Ireland, to write and compile birdie, a collection of 16 historical and out-of-time flash and micro fictions.

You can buy a digital copy of birdie here at Draft2Digital or a kindle edition here. It costs €5.99 / US$5.99 / £4.99.

Arlen House has produced a limited, hard-copy edition of birdie which can be bought from Kennys, Galway (Kennys now has signed copies!); Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop Galway; Hodges Figgis; The Reading Room in Leitrim; Forever Amber in Meath; Waterstones Cork; Dubrays; and O’Mahonys. Your local shop will order.

Reviewers: please contact Alan Hayes at Arlen House.

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    More about birdie:

    Love is the central force in birdie, a collection of sixteen historical and out-of-time flash fictions that sing with the voices of women loving and losing and learning. The characters here find strength, despite the sorrows of death and deceit: a ghost-child returns to Massachusetts to comfort her grieving mother; the daughter of a Spanish orange tycoon regrets her mother’s terrible choices; an English maid longs for, but can’t be with, her mistress’s son.

    Birdie contains O’Connor’s signature ekphrastic work, drawing on artists as diverse as Matisse, da Vinci, and American painter Edwin Romanzo Elmer. The natural world looms large too: sheep and foxes roam these pages, while seawater washes through them.

    Described by the Toronto Star as a writer of ‘magical imagination’ and by the Washington Post as ‘soaring’, O’Connor’s collection of historical flash will delight her readers, old and new.