Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Abeeb, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with

countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an

engaging and accessible way. This week's guest is, well, I've got to say I'm honored to speak to him,

one of the greatest living fiction writers, Kevin Barry.

Kevin is the author of the novel The Nightboat to Tangier, which was long listed for the Booker Prize,

the novel Beetlebone, the City of Bohan, collections of stories, Dark Lies, the Island.

He's also the editor of an annual anthology that's much beloved here in Ireland,

along with his wife, Olivia Smith, the Winter Papers, which features art, stories, poetry, and literature.

One of the things that's so great about this episode is that Kevin and I don't talk about just

the sort of standard stuff that writers get asked about all the time.

In fact, we end up mostly talking about witches, healers, fairies, violence, the radical history

of Ireland.

Now, I know I just said we mainly talk about, and then I said like a bunch of things, but

really what I mean is that there's some sort of dark spiritual matter going on that plays itself out in these kinds

of supernatural, super violent, sometimes dramatic, sometimes funny ways in Kevin's work.

And they all emanate from Ireland even when the work is not set there.

And I love it. So if you haven't read

Kevin's books, you should. I first came across Dark Lies the Island in 2016 when I was visiting

Ireland before moving here. And it was a time in my life where I wasn't reading a lot of fiction.

I was reading lots of nonfiction,

theory, philosophy, that kind of stuff. And part of it was just like none of it was hitting me,

you know? Maybe that's just me being kind of lazy, but I had sort of lost a feeling or

...