{"product_id":"9781943150144","title":"The Irish Sea","description":"\u003cp\u003eAt a New Year’s Eve party, a dead woman turns up alive again, after passing through a mysterious post-mortem way station located on another planet, and much to the disbelief of her old flame, who interprets the night’s events with the help of his reading of Kafka. A priest is sent by the Vatican to investigate a strange development in the American cattle market: a breed of cows identical in all physical respects to human women. A man leaves his wife and flees to the north of Spain, where he meets a sickly woman in an empty café, introduces himself as Jorge Walser, and makes plans with her to disappear. Aboard a trans-atlantic cruise, a door-to-door vacuum salesman bumps into a woman who appears to be Natassja Kinski, and they swap tall tales as the ship floats them asymptotically toward world’s end. Christ turns out to be a girl who fronts a punk band. The words of such writers as Beckett, Walser, Chekhov, Gombrowicz, Bolaño, Kafka, Blanchot, and Borges are characters in themselves.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Irish Sea\u003c\/i\u003e is a novel masquerading as a book of short stories. A meditation on the paradox of nostalgia, which always seems to pine for what never was. A fevered search for order through writing, of truth through literature, of the nodal point where life and literature intersect. A strange personal gallery curated by a razor-sharp reader and his other, unknown self. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dalkey Archive Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47047964393712,"sku":"9781943150144","price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781943150144_p0.jpg?v=1763788179","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781943150144","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}