Blogs

Edna O’Brien’s The Light of Evening follows a familiar mother-daughter path. Dilly is dying in a Dublin hospital. Her daughter, Elenaora, has inherited her beautiful hair, which features in every novel. A writer whose debut novel scandalized her Irish neighbours, and an ultra-Catholic nation because it showed women’s desire from the inside. She has fled to London and married an older man (who already had a wife and child). Her dad is a brute...

I watched the film and now I’ve read the book. With few exceptions such as Ben Hur , books are better. David Chariandy’s slim novel won a slew of awards. And rightly so. It’s beautifully written. You’d imagine the screen adaptation to be pretty simple. Opening page. Michael and Francis. Opening scene. Michael and Francis. ‘Once he showed me his place in the sky. The hydro pole in the parking lot all weed-broke and abandoned. Looking up you’d see...

I used to read Séamas O’Reilly’s whimsical weekly column in The Observer . I didn’t know much about him, other than he was Irish. His 2021 memoir, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? won biography of the year in the Irish book awards. He makes light work of his mum dying when he was five. It’s in the title. His incomprehension about why so many people were pouring into his house to see his mum and dad. Mum died from breast cancer when she was forty-three...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent In December 1913, I was in El Paso covering the border for a wire service. The Mexican Revolution was in its third year. Pancho Villa had taken Ciudad Juárez. The streets of El Paso were full of journalists, arms dealers, refugees, and men whose occupations fell somewhere between all three. It was the kind of assignment where the story changed every hour and the correspondents drank every night,...

Happy birthday Jacques! Min dae! Few days! V

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZw0bW4Pvzw Pamela Doherty had a baby when she was sixteen. The kind of mother Prime Minister David Cameron warned us about. The kind of mother that was fodder for The Jeremy Kyle Show and for the Tory boo-boys. Ironically, this was the kind of crap loved by the working class as just a bit of harmless fun. Most of us remember Paige Doherty going missing, because she was one of us. We know the shop she was killed...

I am very pleased to announce the publication of 'For All We Know We Don't' - a collection of short stories by our very own Sean McNulty. It's available to order from Amazon here: https://tinyurl.com/msw6b5js FOR ALL WE KNOW WE DON'T is a darkly comic picture of adolescence in Ireland's boisterous and poetic northeast. A coming-of-age story cycle from the glory days of VHS, Samantha Fox, and escaped paramilitaries. Ireland in the late 1980s. It'...