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3 books match the query 'Mulcahy, Greg'

cover of Carbine: Stories

Carbine

Stories

Greg Mulcahy

University of Massachusetts Press, 2010

Inhabiting a world that offers no guarantee of any veracity, the characters in these peculiar stories are driven to and goaded by compulsive and perhaps pointless reflection. They are haunted by unrelenting consciousness and knowledge of failure, yet are, at best, ambivalent toward any conventional equation of success. Theirs is a world of broken relationships, futile memory, constant appetite, and the certain knowledge that they are winding down in a culture in which it is impossible to do—or know—the right thing. Frustrated and obsessed, they cannot articulate their lives and are entranced by the strangeness of the everyday.

Written with keen intelligence and biting humor, Carbine is a book about the ridiculousness of contemporary life—a book about what cannot be said.
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cover of Driscoe

Driscoe

Greg Mulcahy

University of Alabama Press, 2026

A stark, hypnotic exploration of memory, identity, and the fractured stories we inherit, and invent, to survive

Driscoe is a stylistically daring novel that plunges deep into the unstable terrain of memory, identity, and the stories we tell to endure collapse. Hypnotic and recursive, it moves through contradiction as both method and meaning, tracing how belief hardens, fractures, and reforms under pressure. The prose hums with unease, balancing precision and disorientation as certainty dissolves into overlapping versions of the same events.

At its center is Jouska, a man suspended between narratives of success and failure, loyalty and betrayal, progress and ruin. He is pursued by obsessive memories of his ex-wife, his brother, and the elusive figure of Driscoe, by turns entrepreneur, fraud, chemist, builder, trickster. Everyone claims a story about Driscoe. None align, yet all insist on their authority. Entangled in familial conflict and his own faltering recollections, Jouska can neither trust nor abandon any version of the truth.

When Jouska receives an email announcing the death of his superior, the already fragile architecture of his life splinters further. What follows is a journey through a bureaucratic labyrinth where death is both confirmed and denied, and where greed, doubt, presence, and absence pulse relentlessly. Driscoe emerges as a narrative dirge for a collapsing American middle class and the myths that sustained it, tracing the impossibility of aligning personal loss with cultural unraveling. This novel will resonate with readers drawn to literary fiction that is intellectually demanding, formally inventive, and attuned to the psychic costs of living amid social and economic decay.
 

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cover of O'Hearn

O'Hearn

Greg Mulcahy

University of Alabama Press, 2015

Greg Mulcahy’s new novel opens on a man suffering an accident at his workplace. His colleagues there are known, at least initially, only as O’Hearn and Minouche. In the aftermath of the incident, this trinity begins to fall apart. His career falls apart. His life falls apart.
 
O’Hearn is the story of the story the man tells himself in confused chronology as he struggles to make sense of a world and a landscape where things have stopped making sense.
 
The laws of causation are absent or profoundly obscured in this explanatory narrative, but then so is all individual motivation. Action seems to end only in a world of winners and losers and occurs solely to reinforce that world by further enriching the winners at the, sometimes willful, expense of the losers. 
 
O’Hearn is funny, contradictory, satiric, heartbreaking—a work unlike anything in our contemporary literature.
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