Getting it in the Head

This reissue of the author's celebrated 1997 debut collection is augmented with an afterword by the author, who reflects on his success and his work since. Here we enter a world where the infatuation with death, ruin and destruction is total. Set in locations ranging from New York to the west of Ireland, and to the nameless realms of the imagination, it is a world where beautiful but deranged children make lethal bombs, talented sculptors spend careers dismembering themselves in pursuit of their art, and wasters rise up with axes and turn into patricides. While tipping his hat to masters such as Borges and Calvino, Poe and Ballard, Mike McCormack is his own man, and Getting it in the Head is richly imaginative, bitterly funny, powerful and original. This edition includes a new Afterword, in which the author reflects on his early work. Getting it in the Head won the Rooney Prize in 1996, and was voted a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1998. Mike McCormack is the author of two novels, Crowe's Requiem (1998), and Notes on a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award in 2006 and described by John Waters from The Irish Times as 'the greatest Irish novel of the decade just ended'. In 2012 Lilliput published Mike McCormack's latest short story collection Forensic Songs. Praise for Getting it in the Head: 'Remarkable, even at the most extreme moments. The mind, not the emotions, is McCormack's target and these deadly, exact stories score several bulls-eyes.' – Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times 'Funny, fantastical tales that trample on the toes of the twentieth century itself. As for the formal constraints he imposes on himself let's just say that they serve as a rack on which he stretches his nightmares skin tight.' – Michael Upchurch, New York Times 'McCormack's first collection of short stories ranges from the west of Ireland to New York to Purgatory. Whatever the location, the emotional landscape remains the same: a helpless howl of protest that presages not only the end of the century but the end of civilisation itself.' – Times Literary Supplement