BARRY Just as a reader really, I suppose. One of the things I’d wanted to do with the anthology was to not just go for obvious short story writers, so there’s a lot of people in there who wouldn’t necessarily be the first thing you thought of when you saw their names. So people like Paul Murray who’s very much a novelist, Michael Harding is known best as a newspaper columnist and an actor in Ireland, I always thought he was an amazing writer. For the last few years I’ve been reading this brilliant young blogger based down in Galway/Claire called Lisa McInerney and I heard on the grapevine that she was writing fiction and I thought “Let’s try her and see what comes in,” you know, and it was really exciting. And there are a few of what you might call bankers in there, I suppose, short story specialists, like Eilis Ni Dhuibhne. You know you’re going to get good stuff in and Dermot Healy is going to send you really good stuff. It was very exciting just to see what this motley crew would send to me. It was really good fun to see the various approaches and ways of attacking a short story. In a way, short story, as a phrase, or as a description. I increasingly like short fiction better. Short story still conjures up an image of something well made, a story with an epiphany in the second last paragraph and I think there are very different ways of attacking a story that are evident in this book. MCVEIGH Not all these stories are set in Ireland. Or by obviously Irish writers. BARRY No it’s quite interesting so Julian Gough is coming in from Berlin, Greg Baxter who is an honorary Irishman. He’s a Texan really but
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