Poet, Critic & Journalist
By Paul Durcan. Harvill Secker, 16.99 sterling 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 […]
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The Kiev-born Irene Nemirovsky was Jewish and in 1918 when she was a teenager she and her family had to flee the October Revolution for the safety of Paris, where in the 1920s and 1930s she became a best-selling novelist. Attempting to fit in, she tried to conceal her Jewishness, befriending and offering her work […]
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By John Carey. Faber & Faber. You can tell a novelist is out of fashion when his publisher feels obliged to subtitle a biography of him with the nervous declaration “The man who wrote Lord of the Flies.” In a postscript to this book, John Carey defends the subtitle as “ironic and purposeful,” hoping it […]
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Aodhan Madden and I were colleagues on the Evening Press and much of what he writes about his experiences there are familiar to me. Well, semi-familiar, anyway. Here he is on subediting, at which both of us toiled for many years: “The subs desk in the Press was like a home for terminal eccentrics. They […]
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Although only published in Ireland this weekend, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin has been on the bookshelves in America since June, where it has been attracting the kind of attention most writers would die for. “The first great 9/11 novel,” Esquire magazine raved. “One of the most electric, profound novels I have read […]
Although only published in Ireland this weekend, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin has been on the bookshelves in America since June, where it has been attracting the kind of attention most writers would die for. “The first great 9/11 novel,” Esquire magazine raved. “One of the most electric, profound novels I have read […]
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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 […]
In the early 1980s, after a decade as Britain’s funniest and sharpest television reviewer, Clive James became an active participant in the medium that had so excercised his marvellous critical faculties. In doing so, as he relates in this fifth volume of his memoirs, he found himself inhabiting “the strange world where everybody knows your […]
Here’s a first – a Thomas Pynchon novel that you can actually read and understand. In his 73rd year, the reclusive author who has furrowed the collective brow of generations of literary students with his dense, complex and often baffling fiction has finally come up with a genial and almost entirely comprehensible shaggy dog story […]
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Clive James is the finest living essayist and many of us have long admired both his supple prose and the bracing wit that enhances rather than undermines his essential and humane seriousness on subjects as diverse as artistic excellence, popular culture, the perils of celebrity and the evils perpetuated by political ideologies. No one, however, […]
By Clive James. Picador, £15.99 sterling Clive James is the finest living essayist and many of us have long admired both his supple prose and the bracing wit that enhances rather than undermines his essential and humane seriousness on subjects as diverse as artistic excellence, popular culture, the perils of celebrity and the evils perpetuated […]
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THE SPRINGS OF AFFECTION. By Maeve Brennan. Counterpoint, €11.99 THE LONG-WINDED LADY. By Maeve Brennan. Counterpoint, €11.99 When Maeve Brennan’s stories of suburban Dublin life were posthumously published in The Springs of Affection twelve years ago, they were greeted with acclaim, and rightly so – here were 21 masterpieces which few had known about unless […]
By Maeve Brennan. Counterpoint, €11.99 When Maeve Brennan’s stories of suburban Dublin life were posthumously published in The Springs of Affection twelve years ago, they were greeted with acclaim, and rightly so – here were 21 masterpieces which few had known about unless they’d been faithful readers of the New Yorker or had been fortunate […]
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By Clinton Heylin. Constable, £20.00 sterling. Bob Dylan has always attracted extreme admirers, but among the goodly number of daft books written about him none was dafter than Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2004), in which eminent literary critic Christopher Ricks chose to regard the songs as lyrics on a page, divorced both from their melodies […]
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Despite his tousled mass of silver hair, it registers as a small shock that Seamus Heaney is now seventy – despite his status as grand old man of Irish poetry, it’s his infectiously boyish openness to both life and literature that has always distinguished him from his peers. Yet grand old man he is and […]
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Hugh Leonard was a notable dramatist and a very successful television scriptwriter, but he always saw himself as an outsider among his peers and was quick to take offence at perceived slights from critics or fellow playwrights. Indeed, in his long-running Sunday Independent column (and before that in Hibernia magazine), he was adept both at […]
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A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. By David Thomson. If you love good prose, provocative insights and witty putdowns and have even a passing interest in the movies, this is the year’s most engaging book. Thomson is an Englishman who moved to the West Coast of America in the 1970s, from where he has been […]
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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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Here is another masterpiece by Irene Nemirovsky, the Jewish emigre from St Petersburg who fled to France with her family in 1919 and became a bestselling novelist there until her capture by the Germans in 1942 and her subsequent death in Auschwitz at the age of thirty-eight. Her posthumous fame is largely due to the […]
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Niall Williams’s novels have a considerable readership, both here and abroad, and it’s not hard to see why. Since the publication of Four Letters of Love 1n 1997 he’s been offering a view of life that puts great stock in chance, coincidence, yearning and questing as ways of leading to personal fulfilment and spiritual redemption. […]
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