Rating: 
Summary: And a good thing to, as they buried him and all.
Review: Fifteen Irish writers take their turn (one chapter each) at ratcheting up the silliness while developing a story centered on the discovery of James Joyce's final unpublished work. Organized crime, organized crime fighters, and Irish society in general take on a generous helping of ribbing while each author does his or her best to out do the previous. What is funny is how many of the authors take what was written before and then throw in a bizarre twist. Or just simply kill off a character nurtured and developed by a previous writer. One poor soul about halfway through makes some attempt at stabilizing the story, only to be completely blown out of the water by the next. And yet at the same time, a couple of gags presented near the beginning of the book find their way into every chapter up to the end.All in all it is a very fun collection of work, and edifying as well in the sense that the reader may find a new author or two to try out after putting this one down. Because of the nature of this type of work, naturally the writing styles and quality vary greatly from one chapter to the next. This fact in itself will disturb the reader that attempts to take the novel too seriously. Although why this feat is even attempted when you are reading about a ginger haired young Irishman who likes to speak in American ghetto slang is beyond me.
Rating:
Summary: And a good thing to, as they buried him and all.
Review: Fifteen Irish writers take their turn (one chapter each) at ratcheting up the silliness while developing a story centered on the discovery of James Joyce's final unpublished work. Organized crime, organized crime fighters, and Irish society in general take on a generous helping of ribbing while each author does his or her best to out do the previous. What is funny is how many of the authors take what was written before and then throw in a bizarre twist. Or just simply kill off a character nurtured and developed by a previous writer. One poor soul about halfway through makes some attempt at stabilizing the story, only to be completely blown out of the water by the next. And yet at the same time, a couple of gags presented near the beginning of the book find their way into every chapter up to the end. All in all it is a very fun collection of work, and edifying as well in the sense that the reader may find a new author or two to try out after putting this one down. Because of the nature of this type of work, naturally the writing styles and quality vary greatly from one chapter to the next. This fact in itself will disturb the reader that attempts to take the novel too seriously. Although why this feat is even attempted when you are reading about a ginger haired young Irishman who likes to speak in American ghetto slang is beyond me.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious - Do not take this book seriously!
Review: i read this while living in Dublin, and loved it, the writers have a great time with it and the reader can't help but be brought along for the ride. some knowledge of irish slang is really helpful though. and at times the plot gets a bit... fantastic. too many cooks make for a crazy stew. but as long as you aren't expecting a tightly crafted novel and are only out for a quick read (it works well chapter by chapter, so it's good for travel) and a laugh.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Idea with a "PFFT" for an Ending
Review: I was recommended this book by amazon.com. I just can't recall why, but I had it put on my wish list when my brother decided to give it to me for a birthday gift last summer. After going through a long horrendous, yet exciting read of another Irishman John Connolly's "Every Dead Thing", I welcomed the change to the light hearted when my fiance thought it would be cool to go ahead with a story as witty as this one. Witty is one thing, but there were some parts that was truly laugh out loud.(...) Yeats is Dead is a story without being a story itself. Written loosley by 15 Irish authors just out there to have some good old fashioned fun. Theyd o an excellent job with the idea and all, but fall extrememly short when it comes to ending the whole story. Under each author, the characters just seem to be suffering from some sort of schizophrenia with their feeling jumping from one point to another. It's just unbelievable to conceive, unbeliveable to believe, but truly enjoyable to go through it along through the end. The book is an excellent read at just any setting. The beauty of it being not truly knowing how the tory is going to twist and turn so that you come out with the final chapter. I think Frank McCourt just didn't know what to do with it and hastily ended it. All in all, this is a funny book that deserves all the attention. You just love reading an Irishman's (or woman) tale. When they're drunk and in the tell tale mode they're funny and when they're sober, you still can't take anything they say seriously. And that's exactly how it is with this very one book.
Rating:
Summary: Wild ride!
Review: The first few pages almost turned me off because I thought it was a run-of-the mill mystery. But then, after leafing through the succeeding pages, I got a glimpse of Kafkaesque characters in the two stupid cops, who are arguing, philosophically and pathetically, whether the dead man, Tommy Reynolds, was already dead before one of them shot him. I got hooked. I couldn't stop turning the pages until I got acquianted with a network of psychotics and maniacs. Although each author kills more people in every succeeding chapter, the taste of violence is somehow offset by the authors' wits and creativity that revealed the authors' intention to turn Yeats is Dead into a literary piece rather than an ordinary mystery. In Yeats is dead, 15 Irish authors created their dream world, where every living person is a literati. Consider these: a garbage collector, who reveals his aversion to the language of Mills and Boon; a cop who writes poetry; drunken old bums who can appreciate the value of James Joyce's missing manuscripts; and crime bosses who can enumerate a long list of Irish authors. This is a wild and fun read!
Rating:
Summary: THE THRASHING SLIPPERY FISH STORY
Review: This book is a very entertaining read about murder and mayhem delivered in the fantastic style typical of good Irish writers. Each chapter written by another author, one never knows how many twists it will take...the story line rather like a thrashing slippery fish..you just never know where its going to end up! If you've got a good sense of humour this one will bring more than a smirk!
Rating: 
Summary: An Irish Sampler
Review: This ensemble tale by 15 writers is quite good for the continuity of the tale it manages to maintain, and I would suggest this is a testament to the skill with which some of these authors write. The continuity of skill is not as unerringly high and this is partly because they tried to force certain marquee names in to bits of writing they have not shared with the public in the past, and in at least one author's case, it is good that he has not. No one does a better job than Roddy Doyle who opens this 15 chapter book and sets a high water mark that the balance of fourteen must either match, approach or miss miserably. Having this particular writer lead off, in hindsight, may have been an error, for the best the reader could hope for was that others would keep up, or keep quite close. And when they did not the chapters are jarringly poor. The book is worth the read not because the story is unique and clever, it is neither. The story is one you have read variations on before, and as it progresses it runs out of the cleverness it does manage, and only barely at times, and consistently and without pause begins a slow slide to the end. The irony is that the end of the tale, which can be most charitably described as not only raunchy, but just plain poor in its execution, was done by an author that probably had the least claim to be here. Frank McCourt wrote his original memoir that has a firm spot in literary history, its sequel was a shadow of the original, and this chapter numbered 15 will hopefully soon be forgotten. It is true he has sold a mountain of books, but doing it many times is a feat he has yet to prove. Playing anchor, batting clean up, was not the appropriate spot for him here. A good tale requires more than a pair of marquee names as bookends; it requires two solid sides, not one. The best rationale for reading this book is for the gems of writers you will find in between the two men I have named. This is a case where the whole is much less than the sum of its parts, an interesting exercise, but one not tightly controlled or edited. So enjoy the quality and discard the balance, what is left is much shorter than the 15 chapters but you are sure to find several new authors you will follow with great satisfaction.
Rating: 
Summary: "Yeats is dead?" O yes.
Review: Well, of course he is; in fact, has been for some 60 years now. But that's not the point. The point is, or at least seems to be, that "Yeats Is Dead!" is the unpublished last work of the doyen of Irish literature himself, James Joyce. Or is it? Or are the 600 pages of undecipherable scribble that are at the center of this book's wild ride really the chemical formula for a new anti-ageing skin cream? Or something else entirely? In short, what is the point of the chase; or put differently: Is there any point at all? "Yeats Is Dead!" is the literary version of a midrange relay race; or of that party game in which a story is built one word or one sentence at a time, added in turns by each of the participants, often with hilarious results, particularly if the players abandon the idea of creating a story that actually makes sense and take off in whatever direction their fancy takes them. Here, the participants are fifteen Irish writers of varying calibers with a very well-developed sense of humor, who each get to add one chapter to the story, and the results are hilarious indeed. Bodies fall like flies, allusions to Joyce abound, and Irish cliches are jiggled by the dozen, from "O Danny Boy" (here: in a Rasta version) to bars serving whiskey and very strangely named drinks indeed, and accents from working class Dublin to Limerick and beyond. (And can there possibly be a more Irish-sounding name than Grainne O'Kelly?) Even one of Ireland's football - i.e., soccer - heroes, ex-midfielder turned sports journalist Eamon Dunphy (yes, that one) gets his fair share of shots from the authors' collective hips. The book follows the example of the two short story collections "Finbar's Hotel" and "Lady's Night at Finbar's Hotel," likewise collaborative efforts by some of modern Ireland's best-known authors. Unlike those two collections, however, "Yeats Is Dead!" discloses the authors of the individual chapters; and unlike them, it also pretends not to contain several loosely-connected short stories but one continuous, novel-length storyline - for whatever that's worth, though, given the book's general premise and the differing styles and approaches of its writers. Contributors include acclaimed writers Roddy Doyle, Frank McCourt, Gene Kerrigan, Anthony Cronin and Joseph O'Connor (who also served as the book's editor), playwrights Conor McPherson and Gerard Stembridge, comedian Owen O'Neill, sports writer Tom Humphries, and others. Roddy Doyle gets to deliver the opening salvo, which is of course a hard act to follow - personally, I would rather have seen him write the final chapter; and I would also have loved to see a contribution from the editor (and co-contributor) of "Finbar's Hotel," Dermot Bolger. But from the murder by heart attack which starts it all to the surviving cast members' final conclave in (where else?) a bar in County Limerick, this is one great frolicking literary tour de force. It's not great literature; nor does it pretend to be ... just fifteen Irish writers poking fun at themselves, their country and the mystery genre, and they had me laughing out loud a lot in the process. Definitely. O yes.
Rating:
Summary: "Yeats is dead?" O yes.
Review: Well, of course he is; in fact, has been for some 60 years now. But that's not the point. The point is, or at least seems to be, that "Yeats Is Dead!" is the unpublished last work of the doyen of Irish literature himself, James Joyce. Or is it? Or are the 600 pages of undecipherable scribble that are at the center of this book's wild ride really the chemical formula for a new anti-ageing skin cream? Or something else entirely? In short, what is the point of the chase; or put differently: Is there any point at all? "Yeats Is Dead!" is the literary version of a midrange relay race; or of that party game in which a story is built one word or one sentence at a time, added in turns by each of the participants, often with hilarious results, particularly if the players abandon the idea of creating a story that actually makes sense and take off in whatever direction their fancy takes them. Here, the participants are fifteen Irish writers of varying calibers with a very well-developed sense of humor, who each get to add one chapter to the story, and the results are hilarious indeed. Bodies fall like flies, allusions to Joyce abound, and Irish cliches are jiggled by the dozen, from "O Danny Boy" (here: in a Rasta version) to bars serving whiskey and very strangely named drinks indeed, and accents from working class Dublin to Limerick and beyond. (And can there possibly be a more Irish-sounding name than Grainne O'Kelly?) Even one of Ireland's football - i.e., soccer - heroes, ex-midfielder turned sports journalist Eamon Dunphy (yes, that one) gets his fair share of shots from the authors' collective hips. The book follows the example of the two short story collections "Finbar's Hotel" and "Lady's Night at Finbar's Hotel," likewise collaborative efforts by some of modern Ireland's best-known authors. Unlike those two collections, however, "Yeats Is Dead!" discloses the authors of the individual chapters; and unlike them, it also pretends not to contain several loosely-connected short stories but one continuous, novel-length storyline - for whatever that's worth, though, given the book's general premise and the differing styles and approaches of its writers. Contributors include acclaimed writers Roddy Doyle, Frank McCourt, Gene Kerrigan, Anthony Cronin and Joseph O'Connor (who also served as the book's editor), playwrights Conor McPherson and Gerard Stembridge, comedian Owen O'Neill, sports writer Tom Humphries, and others. Roddy Doyle gets to deliver the opening salvo, which is of course a hard act to follow - personally, I would rather have seen him write the final chapter; and I would also have loved to see a contribution from the editor (and co-contributor) of "Finbar's Hotel," Dermot Bolger. But from the murder by heart attack which starts it all to the surviving cast members' final conclave in (where else?) a bar in County Limerick, this is one great frolicking literary tour de force. It's not great literature; nor does it pretend to be ... just fifteen Irish writers poking fun at themselves, their country and the mystery genre, and they had me laughing out loud a lot in the process. Definitely. O yes.
Rating: 
Summary: Conflicting Styles, Obnoxious Story
Review: Yeats is Dead sounds promising enough when you first pick it up, reading the description it sounds as though it could be borderline genius, 15 great Irish authors collaborating on one crime novel? ok i'll read it. A graphically violent twisting plot that sounds reminiscent of Guy Richie's film 'Snatch'? Wow, this book will be awesome. But guess what? It's not.
Yeats is Dead! has its moments of semi glory, but on the whole it is a drawn out pointless caper with little action, characters whose names all sound similar, little development of those characters, and oddly criss crossing situations which make it seem as though some of the authors didn't read the prior chapters close enough.
Add to that the fact that the book claims itself to be "hilarious" and an "elaborate mystery" and that's just the end. The book isn't funny, at least not in the USA, it's just annoying because it seems to move in painful circles. And the elaborate mystery? ha, they only make it seem like an elaborate mystery. Let me tell you, you will be so disappointed by the end of the book....which is basically when it becomes clear that there is any mystery to begin with. Then how about the "gratuitously violent" part? it's really not violent, it's quite tame, at least in comparison with other books, particullarly fellow irish author Irvine Welsh's novels. There seems to be more of a general trend of adding sex where it's not needed in this novel.
In general, Yeats is Dead is a major disappointment when it could have been great. Filled with pointless unlikable characters, a dull half shaped mystery, and a slow plot, i would not recommend this book to anyone. If you're looking for something that is what this book claims to be, go for something by Chuck Palahniuk or Bret Easton Ellis...you'll be far more entertained.
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