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Cluster index: Conor Robin Madigan

Master Singer.

Chronicler, Novelist, Storyteller By CONOR ROBIN MADIGAN.   N EXHAUSTIVE PUBLISHING of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s children’s stories during his lifetime and well after — beginning with Zletah The Goat in 1966 and ending in 2015 with The Parakeet Named Dreidel — has made the novels and work preceding the juvenilia more interesting and powerful. But […]

First prose.

Conor Robin Madigan: ‘We’re masticating the best of our young novelists into pulp by telling them to get out of their own way (go to more school, find an agent, sign a contract), the novel declines, along with society’s expectations, into a mechanistic drive toward repetition and output.

Mother child.

Conor Robin Madigan: ‘The man slept. The child stared at the stars. Insects and animals made their double-faces into a pond. A lumbering giant plodded past and to the beat of the mystic’s heart. The child wanted so awfully to have a companion, a soul to enjoy, but not one that spoke so much. Too much. Often, he spoke when there was nothing to say.’

From ‘A time to come to a place and introduce oneself’.

Conor Robin Madigan: ‘The south borders of the country rage in conflagration. His happiness at this moves his feet back and forth upon themselves under the covers and he fits an entire halved buttered toast into his mouth before smiling through his orange and soda. After his meal he tries to pull his legs from the tangled bedclothes but falls to the floor and flounders there until he hears the caretaker coming down the great hall and his anxiety mounts him to commit to freeing himself. At once he vanishes to the bathroom. Such a mess of a man.’