Poet, Critic & Journalist
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, […]
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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