Literary Life

  • Death as a career move

    Paul Doolan writes: Walter Benjamin took his own life at the age of 48. He wrote in his suicide note: ‘I am dying in a village where no one has ever heard of me.’ Had he survived and become an exile in New York, who knows? Perhaps the words ‘no one has ever heard of me’ would still ring true. Living might have proven to be a bad career move.

  • Mahon in the Milky Way

    Michael O’Loughlin writes: Back in the mid-1980s, after several years living in Amsterdam, I rashly decided that what that great city needed was a night of Irish poetry, to introduce Ireland’s leading poets to the Mokummers, as natives of Amsterdam like to call themselves. I thought that the city’s main poetry festival, the idiosyncratic “One…