{"id":3622,"date":"2020-11-24T12:07:04","date_gmt":"2020-11-24T12:07:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/?p=3622"},"modified":"2020-11-24T12:07:04","modified_gmt":"2020-11-24T12:07:04","slug":"acclaimed-dublin-story-the-corpseman-of-the-liberties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/?p=3622","title":{"rendered":"Acclaimed Dublin Story: The Corpseman of the Liberties"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\n\"\"<\/a>I am delighted to announce that my story The Corpseman of the Liberties has just been published in Portuguese as O Livreiro do Liberties, translated beautifully by Rafael Matias.
\nA young boy in the Liberties of Dublin learns about growing up through his handicapped cousin and a strange bookseller.
\nOpening English extract:
\nAshen, his skin, unsmiling, smokereeking with thin strands of hair like the tines of a fork. I never saw him leave his bookshop even to get a breath of air \u2013 where did he go to eat, to get provisions? There was no name on the facade of his shop in Cuffe Street. Not like Dillon\u2019s, the butcher\u2019s shop next door with its gold plate lettering, or even Gillespie\u2019s sweet shop across the road with its black enamel painting, at least telling people who they were. \u2018In the name of jaysus,\u2019 Anto said, \u2018people should tell you who they are.\u2019 But the front of his shop was a smooth grey almost like an invitation to fill in the blank space. Not that it bothered us at the time. As kids, we paid no heed to things like that. We were just interested in the comics, the second hand buys. He paid us for Toppers, Beanos, Dandies and Hotspurs all categorised neatly in rows on his dark wooden counter. Adult books walled the premises, some hardback, some exotic paperbacks, one with cancan dancers highkicking, showing off their petticoats, a book which Anto whisked away the minute he laid eyes on it. The story of the Moulin Rouge or some such history, of Toulouse Lautrec, I was to learn later, with quite a large section dealing with the Parisian brothels and his frequenting thereof, and Anto drooling over every word. And this had been rubbing shoulders with staid Alan Lane paperbacks in their faded orange or green, a jaded gesture to colour in the place, but the pages were often gelled together in their umber ageing on shelves, out of my reach of course, in a small dingy room. \u2018Not enough room to swing a cat in,\u2019 Aunt Peg would say but it didn\u2019t deter us and, ironically, it was only down the road from Kevin Street public library. Did he even know it was there? But it didn\u2019t take from his business, not by a long shot. The library didn\u2019t do comics or any of the adult books that he apparently sold and for which, judging by Anto, there was no shortage of demand. But Anto said the women \u2018had it all\u2019 because they were able to get the \u2018special books\u2019 from the Dewey-eyed librarian on their doctor\u2019s prescription. Other men would come in of course, jingle the little bell on the door of the shop, women in scarves devouring the \u2018mills and booms\u2019 as I used to call them, and clerks or shift workers with their tweed caps pushed back on their heads looking for their \u2018friction\u2019 perusing the hardbacks, or the lanky man with a walking cane who came in one day looking squinty-eyed through thick lenses. \u2018That could\u2019ve been James Joyce,\u2019 my mother said, for she was with me that day buying a few romances. \u2018He could be home for a visit,\u2019 she said, but sure wasn\u2019t he dead long ago and I not knowing then. \u2018A dirty get,\u2019 she said and I wondered did she mean did he ever wash. \u2018Disgusting the things he put into the books,\u2019 and I wondering were they lollipop sticks or chewing gum and said, \u2018How do you mean, Mam?\u2019 \u2018Everything in time,\u2019 she said. <\/p>\n

Also avaiable in French and English at Amazon bks uk https:\/\/amzn.to\/2CGnHI3 or amazon bks com https:\/\/amzn.to\/2Frp9zJ and in Englshi at
\nSmashwords https:\/\/www.smashwords.com\/books\/view\/903179<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am delighted to announce that my story The Corpseman of the Liberties has just been published in Portuguese as O Livreiro do Liberties, translated beautifully by Rafael Matias. A young boy in the Liberties of Dublin learns about growing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3622"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3636,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622\/revisions\/3636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}