I’ve held off writing about the disaster until now for a number of reasons:a) After the hours of saturation coverage (no pun intended), I thought what’s there to add?b) I felt guilty at not having paid sufficient attention to that equally awful but now almost forgotten contemporaneous calamity in Baghdad.c) I didn’t want to join […]
Last night’s performance by the Irish soccer (I have to use that term instead of “football” to avoid growls from GAA supporters) team in the World Cup qualifying game might have disheartened many, but for those who hanker after submerging their individuality in the warm bath of patriotism can shake their fists with joy this […]
The New York Times has a profile of the reclusive author, S. E. Hinton, author of such teen classics as The Outsiders, and Rumblefish.The enduring popularity of her work is staggering:”Her most famous book, “The Outsiders,” about teenage gangs and alienated youth in Tulsa during the 1960’s, transformed young-adult fiction from a genre mostly about […]
Blogging might be a bit patchy over the coming days (when isn’t it, some might argue). Apart from noisome tasks associated with contract work, I’m doing some reading in my spare time (well, spare spare time, assuming that non-working hours should be spent being a good and patient father) for an interview I hope to […]
Born in Derry in 1969, Sean O’Reilly is currently one of the most interesting writers working today, Irish or otherwise. His latest work, Watermark, may be set in contemporary Ireland but it eschews shiny portrayals of the modern city, preferring to focus on the psychological and sexual adversities of a group of characters who seem […]
At least two of the nominees on the Booker Prize longlist were not even reviewed let alone widely available when the roster was announced. Now Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty are getting pre-publication press attention. John Updike offers some mixed praise for the former in the New Yorker, chiding Rushdie […]
Publishers appear to assume that once autumn arrives, people cast aside their Dan Browns and J.K.Rowlings, and endeavour to tackle some serious literature. Ireland’s leading novelist, John McGahern has written “Memoir“, a non-fiction account due out in September of his childhood spent in the fairly grim milieu of the Irish border county, Leitrim, during the […]
OK, picking on John Irving and now Sebastian Faulks might get me accused of shooting fish in the proverbial. But I couldn’t let this go. There’s a profile of the popular novelist in the last Observer— the strapline caught my attention:”He’s the Balzac of Holland Park, a ‘must-read’ novelist who seems happiest writing about turn-of-the-century […]
Occasionally my friends mock me. There are plenty of reasons why they do so but one among many is that I sometimes make pronouncements on a book without having gone to the bother of actually reading the thing. It’s not that I haven’t done some research–I might have read the opinions of quite a few […]
Just when you thought they were gone, the novelists-from-the-eighties-who-the-critics-couldn’t-kill are back in force. First, we had Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, now the writer that Ellis fondly refers to as “The Jayster” is back, with “The Good Life.”Jay McInerney’s first novel in more than six years deals with ‘story of Luke, who is late for […]
