THERE IS NOTHING ORDINARY ABOUT IRISH PEOPLE "Quare Hawks is a collision between old and new Ireland. Both heartbreaking and hilarious, and hopeful and despairing. Eddie Stack has a way of making you laugh and cry at the same time. A brilliant collection from a great Irish storyteller." ~~ Willy Vlautin, author of Lean on Pete, Motel Life and Northline
Quare Hawks is Eddie Stack's third collection of stories. It has 13 tales that span Ireland's boom to burst years, and are peopled by weird and wonderful characters. There's the love starved lady poet, a cross dresser who loves flowers, loss of virginity and loss of life, drinkers, psychotic genius, scammers and crustys and an American shrink who attends to the Irish and more.
Reviewing Quare Hawks in The Reading Life blog, Mel Ulm wrote: "The people in his stories may just be "ordinary people" but there is nothing ordinary about the Irish and Stack does a wonderful job of proving this point. I recommend it to anyone who likes a good story, especially one set in the west of Ireland. Stack's stories are a delight to read, wonderfully written and have a strong insight into the human condition."
Praise for Eddie Stack's writing:
"Variously fantastic, comic, elegiac and nostalgic, Mr. Stack's fiction is versatile and engaging...a vivid, compassionate, authentic voice...securing (him) a place in the celebrated tradition of his country's storytelling." - New York Times Book Review
"There's a genuinely wild and fugitive comic sense in these tales that puts one in mind of Myles na Gopaleen as much as the salt spume dam, George Makay Brown. Never sentimental, often funny, always accurate, this is pithy, finely tuned writing of a high order." - The Observer
"Eddie Stack would drive you mad with merriment. He would also make you sigh soulfully for the human condition..." - Irish Edition
"Exceptionally fine tuned...an authentic voice of the migrant Irish." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Haunting stories...filled with beautifully sketched characters. A lively storyteller in a long and hallowed tradition." - Philadelphia Inquirer
Eddie Stack is from County Clare, Ireland. He is the author of three collections of short stories, three novellas and a novel. He has received several accolades for his fiction, including an American Small Press of the Year Award, and a Top 100 Irish-American Award. His work has appeared in literary reviews and anthologies worldwide, including Fiction, Confrontation, Whispers & Shouts, Southwords and Criterion; State of the Art: Stories from New Irish Writers; Irish Christmas Stories, Cuadrivio, The Clare Anthology and Fiction in the Classroom. Eddie Stack teaches at U.C. Berkeley, California.