Böcker av Tim O'Leary

"Santa Pulmo was a quiet little beach community -- until Corona came calling. Many suspected that Danno was patient zero, exposed at a Juggalo concert in Reno, only to return as a superspreader. But how Corona arrived in Santa Pulmo is only part of the story. In The Corona Verses you will also meet Danno's sidekick Pugs, clad in doctor's garb, hawking bogus cures in a strip mall parking lot; a homeless traveler who discovers redemption; a conspiracy theorist trapped aboard a ship with snake-handling religious nuts, a 1980's sitcom star, and a militia that can't shoot straight; a teenager experiencing new freedom behind his mask; a disenchanted Catholic priest searching for God in a karate dojo; a yacht-rock idol who escapes to Santa Pulmo to finally find peace; and Al the UPS delivery man, who connects the community and saves the town from a race war. The Corona Verses is an unexpected collection that both faces the darkness of the human condition and explores the levity and even comedy that comes with being alive."--

When a controversial judge is murdered in his home, Connor McNeil, a disbarred lawyer and former state representative, is unwittingly pulled into a case reaching from the chambers of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, to the offices of the Archbishop of Boston, and to a mob boss in the back room of an auto body shop in Fall River. In an investigation steeped in misdirection, scandal, and greed, Connor and his wife, Abby, quickly discover that robes neither make judges just, nor priests devout. They are garments signifying a profession, and can be used to hide who and what the wearer is.

Dick Cheney Shot Me in the Face...and Other Tales of Men in Pain is an enthralling and award-winning story collection. Unpredictable, humorous, sometimes dark, and surprisingly heartfelt, these stories explore the secret life of men as they pass into adulthood, middle age, and old age, confronting lust, pain, guilt, bewilderment, and mortality. In eighteen stories we meet: a distraught husband who experiences heartbreak and salvation after his wife dies in a car accident caused by a texting teenager; a successful man who returns to his hometown and finds his first love stacking jars at a local Costco; a sheriff in a Western town who confronts a pedophile and his own past abuse; an Iraq war veteran turned bodyguard who encounters the biggest threat of his life in a Las Vegas Nightclub; a successful attorney who abandons his legal career to play the iPad guitar, and Henry who is shot in the face by...Dick Cheney.

O’Leary’s new collection is a frank, unflinching follow-up to 2017’s successful DICK CHENEY SHOT ME IN THE FACE. Here O’Leary does the impossible: dive into the psyches of the most destructive men– a stalker, a Klansman, public shooters— and creates narratives that neither rationalize, nor over-empathize. Refreshingly, these stories deliver both valuable insight, and perspective-enhancing humor. Employing fiercer social commentary and broader imagination, these new stories are concerned with justice, redemption, mockery of a decaying and violent culture and the often greedy men behind it. But for every grubby and disastrous man, there’s hope in the form of the unexpected: a centenarian whose invisibility is a weapon, a retired Montana rancher, a California tomato farmer, an elderly Black woman from Brooklyn with some powerful knitting needles, two fly fishermen–even the Earth herself. While nostalgia, humor, and blunt delivery hook the reader, O’Leary is dead serious about calling out liars, the indignities of American retirement, contagious gun violence, and other social and political ills.

True poetry has the intellectual and formal rigour to tell us stories of the way we live. In Tim O?Leary?s Manganese Tears, there are wonderful elegies for the village community og the poet?s childhood, and most powerfully the slow dying of his mother whose ?life has moved downstairs / with the vase of shrivelling daffodils? and the limited horizons where ?Each kiss is a kiss goodbye?. The grieving is genuine, but what makes it especially moving is the intellectual honesty, for the poet his mother?s ?thankyous? meaning ?as much as / amens muttered during mass? / religiously bare?. Even for friends in the village, refusing o admit they were ever ill ?the steel is in their gazes, / and the gaze at the abyss?. Love is what holds personal and communal life together, as the chemical element Manganese holds together the health of both body and brain. But with tears. William Bedford