Never Love a Gambler

by Keith Ridgway

Overview

Marvelous stories by the Irish writer acclaimed by Zadie Smith as “idiosyncratic and fascinating”

Never Love a Gambler is a showcase for the exceptional talents of Keith Ridgway. The Times (London) praised his stories as “flawlessly structured yarns told in lovingly crafted prose.” Ridgway’s characters negotiate their way through love, madness, lust, anger, religious obsession, crime, and absence in stories told with innovative mastery — brightened by fiercely vivid dialogues. Never Love a Gambler is a mental rust-remover: refreshing, bracing, and often violently funny.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811222952
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/13/2014
Series:	New Directions Pearls
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	84
File size:	184 KB

About the Author

Keith Ridgway is a Dubliner and the author of the award-winning novels The Long Falling, The Parts, and Animals, as well as the collection of stories Standard Time and novella Horses. He lived in North London for eleven years. He now lives somewhere else.

Editorial Reviews

04/21/2014
This three-story collection presents the same black-and-bloody humor as Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child, complete with menace, surrealism, and plain old evil. The Pinter-esque title story follows a hard-luck lady named Dodo as she tries to save her son from her husband’s thuggish debtors and encounters a city of abandoned children and mad dogs. “Shame” is the confession of a haunted servant indentured to a nefarious master, trying to forget the unsavory business he is party to. These two stories succeed because of what they leave unsaid, but the third, “Ross and Kinder,” is explicit in the actions of murderer-for-hire Ross, whose list of victims is written on his hands, and Kinder, his cadaverous employer. The line between guilty party and the sucker who’ll swing for the crime is constantly blurred. This means that you can reread these stories without resolving the Beckett-like emptiness that gnaws at the conscience. Ridgway has clearly arrived to trouble our sleep with wit and violence, and, as this excellent sampling of his wares confirms, he is unlikely to leave, even if you ask him nicely. (June)

Publishers Weekly

06/01/2014
Ridgway struck gold last year with Hawthorn & Child, a noirish, London-set almost-thriller, and the three stories in this collection have the same dark urgency and ghostliness. A servant is puzzled by the behavior of his employer and his own disturbing dreams; a grown son and his mother on the way to meet the young man's father encounter a malodorous stray dog, portending the story's unexpectedly violent ending. VERDICT For those who like their thrills literate.

Library Journal