Poet, Critic & Journalist
Much has been made of the fact that Harper Lee never wrote another book after To Kill a Mockingbird, which was first published fifty years ago tomorrow, but she’s not the literary world’s only one-hit wonder. To name just a few of the more famous, there are Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, […]
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By Greg Baxter. Penguin Ireland, 14.99 sterling At the outset of this book, the narrator finds himself surrounded by the naked calves of women as he retrieves some dropped change in a Dame Street shop. “I wanted to lick them,” he says of these calves. “I often feel one drink away from whatever makes a […]
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Long before I ever set foot in Paris, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his life there in the 1920s had begun my love affair with the French capital. Published in 1964, three years after the author’s suicide, its loving evocation of a vanished time and a vibrant place and its gossip about the writers and artists […]
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William Ryan is an Irish writer, though you’d never guess it from his outstanding debut novel, a thriller that’s set in mid-1930s Moscow at the onset of Stalin’s Great Terror. Formerly a barrister in London, where he still lives, Ryan took a Masters in creative writing five years ago at St Andrew’s University under the […]
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Seventy years after Raymond Chandler’s man of honour Philip Marlowe first ventured down the mean streets of Los Angeles, the private eye remains a staple of crime fiction. He’s an absurdly unrealistic figure, of course, and Declan Hughes acknowledges the fact in his fifth Ed Loy thriller. “The entire PI genre is basically preposterous boys’-own […]
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In a recent newspaper column, author Patrick McCabe said he had spent much of the previous week reading George Orwell. “What baffles me,” he wrote, “is how prescient Orwell was”, and he instances “a great bit where he says everyone now is living the same kinds of lives.” This caused the Clones-born author to reflect […]
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Age, illness, loneliness and the troubling persistence of male sexual desire – these have been the preoccupations of Philip Roth throughout the past decade and they remain so in this 140-page novella by the now 76-year-old author. But while there’s been a defiant and eloquent grandeur to some of his recent fiction, which has raged […]
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The title suggests that you’re about to read a self-help book, and in a way that’s what Sarah Bakewell provides for this age of diaries, blogs, memoirs and endless self-analysis – an age, as she says, that’s “full of people who are full of themselves, fascinated by their own personalities and shouting for attention.” Mindful […]
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What is it about Ian McEwan that has elevated him to the status of “Greatest Contemporary English Novelist?” “He is this country’s unrivalled literary giant,” according to the books critic of the London Independent.
What is it about Ian McEwan that has elevated him to the status of Greatest Contemporary English Novelist? “He is this country’s unrivalled literary giant,” according to the books critic of the Independent in London. “The supreme novelist of his generation,” the Sunday Times has called him, while the Guardian deems him “our de facto […]
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Prior to his arrest by the French authorities in 1942 and his subsequent murder by the Nazis, Michael Epstein left a piece of luggage with his two small daughters. “Never part from this suitcase,” he told them, “it contains your mother’s manuscript.” Their mother had already been deported to Auschwitz, where she died within a […]
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In an essay published five years ago, Julian Barnes observed that since Frank O’Connor’s death in 1966 “a respectful forgetting has settled over him,” and it’s true that in the last four decades his books have not been much read or his name often evoked – this despite the fact that in his lifetime he […]
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No one in literature has written with such dark intensity and sardonic humour about the pleasures and perils of pub life as Patrick Hamilton – and he wasn’t even Irish. Instead, his luckless characters inhabit the bars around Earls Court and the Edgeware Road. Occasionally they’re to be found nursing a pint or a whiskey […]
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Window and floor displays in most bookshops are almost invariably a sea of pink, peach and yellow covers – thereby signifying the latest chick lit titles and thus denoting women writers. On the other end of the literary spectrum, women have been snaffling up most of the prestigious awards – Hilary Mantel winning the Man […]
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The Stories of William Trevor, which comprised his first five collections, was published by Penguin in 1983. Nine years later, Viking published the Collected Stories in a massive, physically unwieldy volume that ran to 1,260 pages and that contained the 87 stories from his his first seven collections. Now we have a new Collected Stories, […]
The Stories of William Trevor, which comprised his first five collections, was published by Penguin in 1983. Nine years later, Viking published the Collected Stories in a massive, physically unwieldy volume that ran to 1,260 pages and that contained the 87 stories from his his first seven collections. Now we have a new Collected Stories, […]
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Is this the great novel of our time? Before his early death in 2003, the Chilean-born Roberto Bolano was widely admired in Spanish-speaking countries, but it was only when he was translated into English that his fame became global and he is now routinely written of as one of the most important literary talents of […]
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On this side of the Atlantic, mention of literary awards automatically causes us to think of the Man Booker Prize, the Costa, the Impac and maybe — if we’re Francophiles — the Prix Goncourt. As regards awards on the other side of the ocean, only the Pulitzer Prize has achieved an international reputation. Yet perhaps […]
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When John McGahern died in March 2006 at the age of 71, he was the most admired Irish fiction writer of his generation and there seems no reason to alter that evaluation today. This is not always the case after a writer’s passing. Graham Greene’s reputation went into a decline on his death in 1991, […]
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Paul Durcan believes that hearing a poet reading his work aloud is crucial to appreciation of the poetry, and in his brief foreword to this volume he enlists the support of TS Eliot in asserting that “public reading is the life blood of the art of poetry.” The words on the page are not enough, […]
