Getting it in the Head Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Getting it in the Head Book

Forget shamrocks and leprechauns--the Ireland of Mike McCormack's imagination is a hellish stew of ax-murderers, self-mutilators, and homicidal toddlers. And these are the humorous stories. The 16 stories Getting It in the Head comprises are by turns grisly, sinister, macabre, and occasionally sacrilegious. The best of them are also undeniably funny in the blackest sense of the word. What kind of a mind, one wonders, would conceive of a character like Thomas Crumlesh, an artist who is literally willing to die for his art by having pieces of himself surgically removed and put on display? Told by the surgeon who performed the operations, "Thomas Crumlesh 1960-1992: A Retrospective" is absolutely deadpan as it details the title character's death by a thousand cuts: upon viewing Thomas's severed arm at a small exhibition of avant-garde art, the doctor intones: "I had no doubt but that I was looking at a postmodern masterpiece." Numerous references to Thomas's future only add to the surreal comedy: after the doctor agrees to perform two operations a year, Thomas "thanked me profusely, pumping my left hand with his, telling me he could rest easy now that his future was secure. In a magniloquent moment that was not without truth he assured me that I had made a friend for life." Naturally a story about multiple amputations is bound to be grisly, and McCormack spares the reader nothing as he describes Crumlesh's final masterpiece. Not every story in Getting It in the Head is as gruesome as "Thomas Crumlesh" or as disturbing as the title story in which two siblings end up locked in a murderous game of dice. In the charming "The Reach of Love," McCormack explores marital and familial love from a child's perspective while in "Estrogen" he recounts a slightly wacky tale of a "cross-dressing queer, part-time hermaphrodite, and owner of a subsistence farm" and his quest for the breasts for which he's always longed. The occasional sweet tale in McCormack's otherwise fierce repertoire gives readers time to catch their breath before they plunge again into the dark regions of Mike McCormack's fertile, brilliant imagination. Read More

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  • Product Description

    A brilliant debut by a young Irish writer who made waves in the U.K., and won the prestigious Rooney Prize in 1996.

    Born in rural Ireland in 1965, Mike McCormack burst onto the U.K. literary scene last year with his first book--a dark, bitterly funny collection called Getting It in the Head. He earned comparisons to masters like Borges, Calvino, and Poe; to compatriots like Patrick McCabe, Ian McEwan, and Will Self. But he also bears in his work a very telling likeness to an American writer, Thom Jones, for both men share a brutally direct, searingly honest, and frequently incandescent vision of humankind's folly and propensity for mayhem.

    In stories like "A is for Axe," "Dead Man's Fuel," "The Stained Glass Violations," "Amor Vincit Omnia," and the dazzling title piece, McCormack shows a range and a dark-hued, neo-Gothic vision that are mesmerizing. Set in various locations, from New York to the west coast of Ireland to the nameless realms of the imagination, his stories conjure a world where beautiful but deranged children make lethal bombs, where talented sculptors spend their careers dismembering themselves in pursuit of their art, where wasters rise up with axes and turn into patricides. Getting It in the Head is a brilliant, bracing tour de force.

  • 0805053719
  • 9780805053715
  • Mike McCormack
  • 31 December 1998
  • Henry Holt & Company Inc
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 243
  • 1st American Ed
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