This is the Ritual Page 15

  I don’t know if I will ever read Passolet again, if I could re-experience the fervour his words ignited in me when I was young. Perhaps the most I can do to honour Passolet is strive to fulfil what he himself called the sole duty of the artist and the writer: to bear witness to the horror, and to the magnificence.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are due to the following people: Alexa von Hirschberg and her colleagues at Bloomsbury; Antony Farrell and his staff at Lilliput Press, especially Daniel Caffrey; Sarah-Jane Forder; Brendan Barrington; Dave Lordan; Alice Zeniter; Simon Kelly; and all those who generously took the time to read and comment on these stories at the various stages of their development.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Arts Council of Ireland. Stories from this collection have previously been published in the Dublin Review, gorse, the Stinging Fly, the Penny Dreadful, Penduline, Décapage and Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2016.

  ‘Outposts’ contains phrases snatched, often in truncated and/or altered form, from a variety of sources, including dreams, memories, Colm Tóibín, radio, Tõnu Õnnepalu, Georges Bataille, James Salter, television, Blaise Pascal, Desmond Hogan, conversations with patients at Saint Senan’s, German Sadulaev, Roberto Bolaño, Virginia Woolf, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, conversations overheard (or misheard) on the train between Rosslare Europort and Wexford town, E.M. Cioran, news websites, Yi Kwang-Su, James Joyce, Peter Coyote, Fyodor Dostoevsky, graffiti in a ghost estate on the Wexford coast, Georges Simenon, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, chants heard at a football match in Palermo when I hadn’t slept in days, William Burroughs, Killian Turner, Andrei Tarkovsky, an abandoned novel set in Bangkok, my old notebooks, and Aka Morchiladze.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Rob Doyle’s acclaimed first novel, Here Are the Young Men, was published in 2014 by Bloomsbury and the Lilliput Press. It was chosen as a Book of the Year by the Irish Times, Independent, Sunday Times and Sunday Business Post, and shortlisted in the Best Newcomer category for the Bord Gáis Irish Book Awards. Rob Doyle’s fiction, essays and reviews have been published widely.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Here Are the Young Men

  Also available by Rob Doyle

  HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN

  ‘Powerful, passionate and electrifying’ John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

  Meet Matthew, Rez, Cocker and Kearney. Facing the void of their post-school lives, the boys spend their first summer of freedom in a savage apprenticeship on the streets of Dublin. Roaming aimlessly through the city, fuelled by drugs and dark fantasies, the teenagers spiral into self-destruction, fleeing a reality they despise.

  Here Are the Young Men portrays a chilling spiritual fallout, harbinger of the collapse of a national illusion. Visceral and blackly funny, this debut novel marks the arrival of a powerful literary talent who releases an unnerving anarchic energy to devastating effect.

  ‘A portrait of a jilted generation … a brilliant Dublin novel and an exercise in honesty’ Sunday Times

  ‘A dark and intoxicating debut’ Irish Independent

  ‘A lament for the blank generation, the literary equivalent of the song from which it takes its name, Joy Division’s Decades’ Irish Times

  Click here to order

  http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/rob-doyle/

  First published in Great Britain 2016 by Bloomsbury and The Lilliput Press, 62–63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill, Dublin 7, Ireland, www.lilliputpress.ie

  This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  © Rob Doyle, 2016

  Rob Doyle has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 4088 6536 1

  eISBN 978 1 4088 6538 5

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