https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/20/modern-times-by-cathy-sweeney-debut-twisted-tales

The debut Irish author delivers taut, surreal tales that take your breath away

As the first lines of short story collections go, it’s pretty hard to beat the one that opens Modern Times, the debut of Irish writer Cathy Sweeney: “There once was a woman who loved her husband’s cock so much she began taking it to work in her lunchbox.” This, and the darkly funny page-and-a-half (A Love Story) it kicks off, are representative of Sweeney’s off-kilter sensibility. Her writing is direct, no-holds-barred; her sentences are as taut as bow strings.

Each story seems a twisted fable: we meet a woman with too many mouths; a woman whose child is in fact a very old man; a man who goes “striding all over a provincial town, making films without a camera”; a woman who saves for years to buy her husband a sex doll for his birthday.