Kevin Barry on reading Annie Dillard, and finding his voice through Saul Bellow

Send us Fan MailLove takes center stage in the short stories of the celebrated Irish writer Kevin Barry, best known for his 2019 novel, Night Boat to Tangier, long listed for The Booker Prize. Barry’s third collection of short stories, That Old Country Music, now out in paperback, is a masterclass in how to write about men undone or remade by love, by turns comic, troubling, and sometimes devastating. “I think every novel I’ve written and every story I’ve written is essentially about people who can’t escape their own past,” he has said. “They can never get past the blood, and they can never get past their background, and they’re constantly striving to break out of that shadow. Unable to escape his past is one way of describing Herzog, who elevated his creator, author Saul Bellow, into the pantheon of great American writers, and onto the bookshelves of a young Kevin Barry. The other book Barry has chosen is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard’s love song to the fecundity and cruelty and majesty of nature.