Description: 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.

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