Fiction
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Heavy Years, by Augustus Young: A Review
Heavy Years, Augustus Young, Quartet, 2018, ISBN 9780704374478, £20.00 Heavy Years is Augustus Young’s most recent volume of autofiction, or fictionalised memoir, following from his highly praised Light Years and the more recent Brazilian Tequila. In this book, the unnamed narrator is a medical graduate, not quite a doctor, from Cork who moves to London… Continue reading
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On Video: Dylan Thomas reads from Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
An odd little gem. Continue reading
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Augustus Young Review
My review of two recent books by Augustus Young is live on the Dublin Review of Books. The books in question are: Brazilian Tequila: A Journey into the Interior, by Augustus Young, Matador, 160 pp, £10.99, ISBN: 978-1785899874 The Invalidity of all Guarantees: A Conversation between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin (1934), by Augustus Young, Labyrinth… Continue reading
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In Memory of Aidan Higgins: 1927 – 2015
Aidan Higgins, probably the finest Irish novelist since Beckett, died on Sunday aged 88. To mark his sad passing, I thought I’d reblog this piece I wrote for the Guardian Books Blog in 2008: The James Frey controversy once again opened up the age-old debate on where the borderline between “truth” and “fiction” in a… Continue reading
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Finnegans Wake and the Internet
I have a piece on the Guardian Books blog about how the Internet may make Joyce’s baroque masterpiece easier to read. Continue reading
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The Glass Ocean by Lori Baker: A Review
The Glass Ocean by Lori Baker, Virago. £8.99 Sterling. A young woman sits down to write her life story, which is the story of her parents and of her grandparents, with scant sources to draw on. She has a photograph of her mother, her father’s drawings, diaries and letters, and her memories, more or less… Continue reading
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Proust on Intuition and Art
Every event, whether it was the Dreyfus affair or the war, furnished excuses to writers for not deciphering that book; they wanted to assert the triumph of Justice, to recreate the moral unity of the nation and they had no time to think of literature. But those were only excuses because either they did not… Continue reading
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Proust on Music
For instance, this music seemed to me to be something truer than all the books that I knew. Sometimes I thought that this was due to the fact that what we feel in life, not being felt in the form of ideas, its literary (that is to say an intellectual) translation in giving an account… Continue reading
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Proust on Sleep and Dreams
From The Captive, Marcel discourses on the relative merits of the world of dreams and the real world. Because the dream world is not the waking world, it does not follow that the waking world is less genuine, far from it. In the world of sleep, our perceptions are so overcharged, each of them… Continue reading
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Manor Street set by David Bremner
Setting by Mauricio Cristales Armas of Liffey Excerpts– Béal Festival – 2010
Sites I Like
CELT: Irish history, literature and politics
Chapbooks of the Mimeo Revolution at Poets House
Dorothy Richardson Online Exhibition.