From Toni Morrison through to Roddy Doyle, we’ve collected quotes from 50 top writers reflecting on James Joyce and his influence on literature.
How do you begin to describe the soul and funk legend that was / is James Brown? Well, if you’re Rolling Stone you choose one of America’s best contemporary novelists, Jonathan Lethem, and send him to spend time around Brown (who dubbed him ‘Mr Rolling Stone’ – going so far as to sing, off the […]
From Toni Morrison through to Roddy Doyle, we’ve collected quotes from 50 top writers reflecting on James Joyce and his influence on literature.
John le Carre explains the relationship between mysticism and espionage literature, and why he dislikes James Bond.
Marina Warner speaks to TMO about fairy tales, the paradox of the female voice and why we can never experience the picture of a fairy tale from its text. It was with a mixture of trepidation and a kind of amazed star shock that I approach Marina Warner. Along with being a novelist, critic and […]
If a Woman Should Be Messiah If a woman should be Messiah It might not be an impressive drama, It would be but a slight event and unsignaled It could not but be beautiful. And that is about as much as I dare quote from one of the remarkable early poems of Laura Riding (1901-1991) […]
“The struggle of man against power,” Milan Kundera wrote, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’’ As I walked out of the museum of Free Derry I tried to remember Kundera’s words, but instead I got them messed up in my head. I couldn’t remember them. I’d just interviewed John Kelly, one of the guardians […]
Donal Ryan, recently shortlisted for the prestigious International Impac Dublin literary award for his debut novel The Spinning Heart, has cemented his reputation as a heavyweight literary contender and ‘one to watch’ on the world literary stage. Published at the end of 2013, Ryan’s The Spinning Heart has already received acclaim winning both the Guardian […]
Martha C. Nussbaum’s central argument in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010) is that a high quotient of liberal arts education is essential for healthful democracies and human happiness. Education needs to be for something, after all, and this sweeping aim (freedom and joy) would be difficult for most to argue against […]
What do you think of when you think of Richard Nixon? Watergate, Vietnam, the televised debates with John .F. Kennedy? or perhaps you imagine the sweating, nervous, paranoiac portrayed by Antony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s biopic Nixon? Images that emphasise his failures, that suggest a man unfit to be President, a villain and one thus […]
Anyone who knows anything about Flann O’Brien knows he was a man of many names. Flann O’Brien was the pen name for Brian O’Nolan, who wrote journalism under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. He used different spellings of his names and most of the discussion and arguments on his Wikipedia page are about how his […]