Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Our Man in Bohemia
His protagonists are wanderers, usually bohemian, invariably troubled, following their distant star across oceans, into deserts, through the orbit of violence and evil or madness, then on into the depths of almost certain obscurity. They live, for the most part,…
The Sea of Anecdotes
While this merriment was afoot, I lay on my bunk straining to understand, and to be admitted to some small share of the pleasure which the rest of the company evidently derived from the recitals. At first the rapid flow…
A Gift of Tongues
With so little available for the general reader on Irish literary culture between 600 and 1600, in either Irish or English, we have to wonder at the failure of most of the few dozen relevant academic Columbuses to report back…
The Big Splatter
What is truly dazzling in Heaney is his descriptive power, his almost hymn to a Conway Stewart fountain pen, or glimpses of his father performing a farmyard task, wrought to a hallucinatory, Van Gogh-like intensity. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus…
Genius For Erasure
Cary Grant’s raised eyebrows were admittedly an awesome spectacle, but you wonder how they might have been harnessed to hasten the building of the Hoover Dam. At least in the 1930s they had Cary Grant. We have Lady Gaga.
Or So I Was Told
Poland is making rapid strides in catching up on the West but there remain areas where there is still much progress to be made. For example, it is perfectly possible – accepted even – for twenty-eight-year-old footballers to have no…
The Dub Republic
Doyle’s fusion of realism and ironic playfulness produces an attempt at counterfactual history in which we still end up where we are. The possibilities offered by fiction are used to imaginatively restore those obscured currents – revolutionary socialism, the working…
A Bit Of Stick
Macaulay was as appreciative as Michael McDowell of the blessings of inequality … He would doubtless have agreed with Archbishop Whately’s view, in his textbook on political economy for Irish children, that if there were no rich people there would…
Flash Fiction Winners
The Dublin Review of Books is pleased to announce the winners of the first drb Flash Fiction Competition and to thank the authors of the 167 stories submitted from around the world. The prize for the winning story is €1,000.
Two By Two
Fairy tales, as the German scholar Max Luthi has pointed out, are one-dimensional, they happen on the surface, the characters are agents who perform actions and express a very limited range of emotions if any. Nonetheless, a central concern ot…
Haunted By Ghosts
The Celtic Tiger years have seen a generation of writers emerge that has found in history a way of thinking about the present. It is unsurprising that four of the most recent high-profile Irish novels produced – from Colum McCann,…
One Of Our Own
Previously Morales insisted that coca was a legitimate crop, a gift from Pachamama, Mother Earth, and that cocaine was a problem for the Americans. “We produce our coca, we bring it to the main markets, we sell it and that’s…