What is Mike McCormack reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Mike McCormack, author of four books of fiction, including Notes from a Coma.

His entry begins:

The Death of Sweet Mister… Daniel Woodrell

I was in the mood recently for a sharp, sudden crime novel and a friend of mine handed me this with the caution that while it was indeed a crime novel, it plays to very different rules. Yes, there’s thieving and killing and dope smoking and loose gun play but these are peripheral concerns. The real horror was in the inevitable and bloodless destruction of a soul…. So I read on in an anxious twist, right down to the ashen dawn of the last lines and when I closed the book I put it back on my shelf and decided against passing it on to anyone else for fear...[read on]

About Notes from a Coma, from the publisher:

JJ O’ Malley, adopted from a Romanian orphanage by a single father in the west of Ireland, grows up a permanent outsider, and yet he finds his place in the community. At least until his world is shaken by the death of his best friend, and he volunteers for the “Somnos Project,” an experimental program testing deep coma as a potential option in the EU penal system.

In a prison ship docked in Killary Harbour, JJ is hooked up to monitoring devices that feed out to the Internet, and he and his fellow guinea pigs become global celebrities. A beautifully rendered look at small-town Irish life, and a far-reaching investigation of politics, neuroscience, global communications, and the ethics of incarceration, Notes from a Coma is a major work from one of the world’s bravest and most unusual novelists.

Read more about Notes from a Coma at the publisher's website.

Writers Read: Mike McCormack.

--Marshal Zeringue