#thank you for coming to this round of 'ask jenn for recs from a niche subgenre'

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garglyswoof What are your recs for The Misery of Being

garglyswoof Why does it keep cutting off my last word the fuck is this I did not miss this 1990s technology held together with duct tape

KELLLLLLYYYYY!! I was just looking through some old posts and thinking how much I missed your erudite commentary on my shitposts about gay dinosaur erotica. Sorry tumblr welcomed you back by being incompetent, but really I expect no less from it. 

Sebastian Barry is a good place to start. Most of his books are centered on people being unhappy in Sligo. For bonus misery points, try ‘A Long Long Way’: Irish people in WWI. Lots of despair described in lots of beautiful prose.

Niall Williams’ ‘History of the Rain’, which has quite a lot of humour to it, but basically all the tragedies happen to one family and it rains a lot, even for Ireland.

‘At Swim, Two Boys’ by Jamie O’Neill combines the Irish, gays, and the 1916 Rising, so you can imagine how jolly that is.

‘Ripley Bogle’ by Robert McLiam Wilson features a homeless Cambridge dropout reminiscing about his fucked up childhood in Belfast. Warnings for an extremely unreliable narrator who makes you go, “Dude, what the FUCK” when it’s revealed how he’s lied to you.

And ‘Shadowplay’ by Joseph O’Connor is more about a bunch of 19th century theatre kids being dramatic and gay in London than Celtic existential crises, but Bram Stoker is the main character and he was Irish and has some appropriately over-dramatic sad Celtic thoughts. I’m going to read O’Connor’s ‘Star of the Sea’ next, which is set against the backdrop of the Famine, so it might be more atmospherically wretched.

Edna O’Brien’s ‘Wild Decembers’ is on my to-read, so I can’t personally vouch for it, but you might have a look at that too.

#garglyswoof #thank you for coming to this round of 'ask jenn for recs from a niche subgenre' #jenn reads #books