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 […]
Books
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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Leaving Ardglass is the very dull title of a very good book, one of the best novels to have come out of Ireland in a long time. I hadn’t heard of its author before and on learning that he is a parish priest in Drumcondra I feared that this story of a young Kerryman who […]
By William King. The Lilliput Press. €12.99 Leaving Ardglass is the very dull title of a very good book, one of the best novels to have come out of Ireland in a long time. I hadn’t heard of its author before and on learning that he is a parish priest in Drumcondra I feared that […]
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The first genuine books I ever read – not The Secret Seven, not Biggles Sweeps the Desert, not even The Wind in the Willows, but real books with adult thoughts and feelings – came courtesy of Rathmines public library, where I spent too many evenings of my teenage years. Yet even though a library is […]
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You can’t go home again, the American writer Thomas Wolfe declared in the title of one of his most famous books. John McGahern would not have agreed. After years spent in Dublin, London and further afield, he returned three decades ago to the countryside of his birth and remained there until his untimely death yesterday. […]
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On the centenary of literature’s most famous day, why we should still rejoice (and read Joyce) Today marks the centenary of a man who never existed, or at least who never existed outside the imagination of a writer and his readers. Yet this non-existent man is perhaps more real to a lot of those readers […]
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