These Precious Hours is a collection of related and interconnected stories concerning loss and recovery. At the end, many of the characters meet.
Declan Mulligan has lost a wife and visits Ireland to connect with a remote past. Dexter Flanagan has lost a beautiful woman to another, but writes a great love song. After a personal tragedy, Sean Dineen joins his ailing ex-wife to see the wedding of their son in Paraguay.
About the author: Michael Corrigan holds an MA in English from San Francisco State and attended the American Film Institute. He worked with several theatre artists, including Sam Shepard and Peter Coyote, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize for his story, 'Free Fall'. Idaho State University Press published his grief memoir, A Year and a Day, dedicated to his late wife, Karen. These Precious Hours is his fifth book.
Broken dreams aren't always the pits. With this collection of interconnected stories, Corrigan weaves together a narrative of love and loss as Declan Mulligan visits Ireland after the loss of his wife, Dexter Flanagan writes a love song and Sean Dineen travels to Paraguay for his son’s weeding.
'Narrator Alex Hyde-White changes locale, accent, and personality in an instant as he moves from an Idaho Shoshone reservation invaded by Mexican gangs to a Gettysburg battlefield where a relative who is a Civil War hero rests.' – AudioFile
After a fatal one night stand, a young film student named Steven Demko kills a hitman in self defense and steals mob money to help fund his film. He attends the American Film Institute, but while facing temptation in the Hollywood world of glamor and hidden gold, he finds himself the object of a hunt by a police detective and the mob, including the hitman's brother. Will the film ever get made? Who will show up on the set, and might be an odd collaborator? In the tradition of 'Get Shorty,' this thriller explores the violent world of mobsters, addiction and Hollywood filmmakers. It is also a love story.
Idaho author Michael Corrigan joins together his series of short stories of doppelganger Michael Mulligan, circa 1860's to early 20th Century, into this lyrical and surreal historical fiction biography.
Can a person born into a nomadic culture find a home? When Michael Mulligan and Maria Burke flee Ireland during the famine, she leaves her tyrannical husband, Nathaniel Burke, and Mulligan abandons a secret society of Irish freedom fighters.
Confessions of a Shanty Irishman is a hybrid memoir, with some fictional elements about an Irish American Catholic family in San Francisco during the mid to late 20th century. It is a coming of age story. It is also a love story.
Here is an excerpt from a review: ''Michael Corrigan proves that the American Irish have their own magical way with words in his spellbinding memoir of growing up on the wrong side of Market Street in San Francisco…But the secularization of a good Irish Catholic boy under the too strong temptations of the later 20th century is just the bare bones of what ‘Confessions of a Shanty Irishman’ is about. Like all great Irish literature, this book is about death and family, what holds people together and what pulls them apart.” Gerald Nicosia, San Francisco Chronicle.
