Good Trouble: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

"Funny and fierce. . . . An essential book, full of unexpected bursts of meaning and beauty." --Ploughshares

"Wonderful. . . . Comforting. . . . What remains uniformly dazzling throughout is O'Neill's remarkable dialogue." --AM New York

"Elegant, often challenging, and always entertaining." --The Washington Times

"O'Neill writes with an urgent timeliness. . . . The thrill of seeing the here and now transmuted into morally serious and comically rich prose is heightened once you realize its rarity." --Guernica

"Beautifully crafted. . . . Wonderful. . . . Gloriously Kafkaesque. . . . O'Neill's tales often echo [David Foster] Wallace's mixture of humor and profundity, demonstrating a similar, almost preternatural eye for the absurdities of contemporary life." --Booklist

"[A] fine collection . . . Compelling." --Houston Chronicle

"[O'Neill's] subversive humor finds new angles. . . . The angst of modern life pervades the daily lives of the characters." --Time

"Poignant. . . . Fascinating. . . . The characters are subtly crafted, nuanced in their observations of others, and understated. . . . [O'Neill] quietly leads us toward a reflection of ourselves that, perhaps, makes us just a bit more appreciative of all the 'good trouble' we have." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Sly and winningly offbeat. . . . Conventional masculinity needs shrewd anatomists like Joseph O'Neill more than ever before." --The Observer (London)

"Elegant. . . . Remarkable. . . . Shot through with a subtle psychology and human attention. . . . In Good Trouble, what is left unsaid and unanalysed returns, is unburied, and both its comic and quietly tragic potential is set loose." --The Irish Times

"Mordantly funny. . . . Powerfully felt. . . . Examin[es] what makes us tick with humour, verve and sharp insight." --The Herald (Scotland)

"Powerful. . . . Compelling. . . . O'Neill's stories impeccably capture the minutiae of modern life and the interior struggles that are both molehills and mountains." --Lincoln Journal-Star

"A thoroughly enjoyable collection in which O'Neill treats his characters with a wry sympathy and a sense of fun. . . . There's often a subversive, comic element in O'Neill's writing. . . . He probes the frictions that make marriages and families fissure or fight for survival, the situations where discomfort breeds anxiety and resentment mushrooms into malaise." --Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"O'Neill's writing is always inventive. . . . The reader is delightfully tossed about. . . . The collection will please fans of quirky short fiction." --Publishers Weekly

"Absorbing. . . . In his typically sharp, smart language, [O'Neill] shows us characters undone by contemporary life, not grandly but in the small, essential ways that define our culture." --Library Journal

Joseph O'Neill is the author of the novels The Dog, Netherland (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), The Breezes, and This Is the Life. He has also written a family history, Blood-Dark Track. He lives in New York City and teaches at Bard College.