The Black Heart

O'LEARY, Patrick w/ intro by James Morrow

ISBN 10: 1906301808 / ISBN 13: 9781906301804

Published by PS Publishing, 2009

About this Item

148pp, octavo.

Seller Inventory # 111306

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Black Heart
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1906301808
• ISBN 13: 9781906301804
• Binding: HARDCOVER
• Edition: 1st edition.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • SCIENCE-FICTION

About this title

Synopsis

'The Black Heart' is a collection of Patrick O'Leary's stories. Here you will find aliens and apocalypses, God and Satan, witches and geishas, madonnas and mutes, birds and bears, zoos and prisons, weeping robots and knights who work in hardware, pardons and orgasms, men without legs and aliens without hearts.
The contents of this book are:
- Introduction: Patrick O'Leary's Muffled Prayers by James Morrow
- Author's Introduction: The Bears in the Moat
- The Cane
- Catching a Dream
- Yo-Yo, Stradivarius & Me
- The Black Heart
- The Dreaming Bird
- The Whole Schmear
- What Mattered Was Sleep
- The Witch’s Hand
- The Verge of a Pucker
- The Me After the Rock
- The Flying Child
- The Wooden Leg
- The Bearing of Light
- The Oldest Man on Earth

Reviews

O'Leary (Other Voices, Other Doors) presents enigmatic slices-of-life that cut close to the heart in this collection of recent short pieces and novel excerpts, where silence is a third character in a two-person dialogue as is the case in the short story "The Me After the Rock." Many of the stories explore the fraternal bonds between characters. This sort of companionship plays an important role in "Catching a Dream" and "Yo-Yo Stradivarius & Me;" both track the buoyancy of man after heartbreak, whereas in "The Verge of a Pucker," two male characters meet to discover how to please a woman. The collection also features a few of O'Leary's more fantastical writings: In the title story, he toys with the point of view of a female protagonist with second sight who argues for Earth against an alien invader, and includes an encounter with Lucifer and God after September 11th in "The Bearing of Light." Science Fiction, fantasy, or not, the imagination is at great work with these selections; their reoccurring themes of dreams, birds and absent (or failed) mothers transcend genre. While the quality of the stories is quite high, the excerpts are short-several under ten pages, making the collection more like a sampler.
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