Nuala Ní Chonchúir

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Biographical note:  Nuala Ní Chonchúir is an Irish short fiction writer and poet, born Dublin 1970. Her short fiction collections The Wind Across the Grass (2004) and To the World of Men, Welcome (2005) were published by Arlen House. Her poetry collections Tattoo:Tatú (2007) and Molly’s Daughter (2003) appeared from the same publisher. She has won many literary prizes, including RTÉ Radio’s Francis MacManus Award and the Cecil Day-Lewis Award. Nuala lives in Galway with her partner and children.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844716425
ISBN:  9781844716425
Author:  Nuala Ní Chonchúir
Title:  Nude
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FNB
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-09
Extent:  144pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  216 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  The women and men in Nude play out their desires and frustrations from Dublin to Paris, Delhi to Barcelona, and beyond. In these stories there are mercurial lovers, illicit affairs and mistakes that cannot be undone. And at the centre of it all is the unclothed body: in bedrooms, in art, and in and out of love.

Award-winning writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir uses her trademark sensual frankness, coupled with poetic language, to weave an intoxicating spell in these stories. If fictional worlds pivot on yearning, then the characters in these stories yearn for passion, for understanding and, sometimes, for freedom.

In the opening tale, a naive painter travels to early 1970’s Paris and meets fellow Irish artist Micheal O’Farrell; there she becomes the model for his iconic political nude ‘Madonna Irlanda’.

Elsewhere, a master art forger is infatuated with his lovingly carved alabaster sculpture of an Egyptian princess, but he eventually falls foul of the Art Squad and loses everything.
The story ‘Sloe Wine’ sees two teenage cousins begin a closer relationship with each other, while their mothers untangle the knots of their own teenage years and, in so doing, unleash a family secret.

These are lush stories of visual art, the heart and the body, in all their beauties and betrayals; there is humour and quirkiness, but beneath that is the reassurance of truth – the hallmark of all quality fiction.

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Table of contents:
Madonna Irlanda
Unmothered
To Drift and to Lift
Ekphrasis
An Amarna Princess up North
Mrs Morison of Haddo
Cowboy and Nelly
Before Losing the Valise, but Mostly After
The Woman in the Waves
As I Look
Jackson and Jerusalem
Xavier
Night Fishing
Roy Lichtenstein’s Nudes in a Mirror:
We are not Fake!
Sloe Wine
Mademoiselle O’Murphy
Amazing Grace
Juno out of Yellow
In Seed Time, Learn

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Unpublished endorsement:  Nakedness rather than sex is the theme of Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s Nude, nakedness and hiding linked like natural opposites, the delicacy of encounters and then the blunt proposition, the subterfuge and the revelation. Over it all is an elegant simplicity of language, a quilt of metaphor. Art and beauty are the threads that hold it together and ravel the lives of her characters. A beautiful collection of stories about beauty.

William Wall, author of ‘This Is The Country’

Unpublished endorsement:  Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s stories in her extraordinary collection, Nude, are at once ravishingly sexual and achingly, vulnerably human.  The title not only refers to the body but to the human heart.  She understands both with profound delicacy and compassion, and she has a pitch-perfect narrative voice to illuminate truths that are rarely spoken.

Robert Olen Butler
author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Previous review quote:  Nuala Ní Chonchúir epitomises the poet/writer who uses the intensity of her poetry skills in prose to produce, in The Wind Across the Grass, sensualist microcosms of love, life and love gone astray. Here is a sharp but compassionate eye that can make us believe that these strange and wonderful characters breathe, hope and suffer….A good writer, like any good artist, should perturb and make us think. So, with this criteria, she fully deserves all accolades accorded to her.

Julia Bohanna
The Short Review

Previous review quote:  . . . a gifted and ambitious artist, with a delicate feel for the accuracies and narrow tolerances of the short story.

Mike McCormack
To the World of Men, Welcome

Previous review quote:  There is passion, mythology and raw human experience. Reading Nuala Ní Chonchúir, you learn that your life is reflected in what she sees. It is this quiet invading honesty of her words that makes her writing real.

Órfhlaith Foyle
The Galway Advertiser

Previous review quote:  Ní Chonchúir has a deft word-touch and is imaginative and resourceful with poetic ideas. [Her] work is vital and often funny and quirky, with a punchy diligence.

Fred Johnston
Kiosque

Previous review quote:  She is a real writer

Jeremy Addis
Books Ireland