Eilís Ward writes: In his essay on ideas of selfhood and egocide in philosophical thought (Dublin Review of Books, Autumn 2024), Joseph Rivera asks why my book Self takes a leap from critique of neoliberal selfhood to Buddhist accounts of the same. A large part of the answer comes from my years teaching politics in…
Patrick J Duffy writes: Michelle McGoff-McCann suggests that the role of the coroner as a ‘figure of authority’ in a modernising Ireland after the Famine has been underestimated. Her study highlights the significance of the coroner as a uniquely independent county official in local and legal administrative history throughout the nineteenth century. She also highlights…
Michael J Farrell writes: As I was edging up to middle age, a variety of circumstances landed me at the University of Southern California learning how to write a novel. Scores of students, many recovering from the ecstatic sixties, had descended on Stephen Longstreet’s class. This man seemed to know every word ever written in…
Fredric Jameson died on Sunday, September 22nd, a few weeks after the piece below was written. His death will be mourned, especially but not only on the left, by readers and critics far and near. For generations old and young, he was the old master, great artificer. Except for changed tenses and some few words,…
Rosemary Jenkinson writes: The best way to envisage a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is to start with a story. In September 2022, on my way to Kyiv, I was waiting on a packed platform at a Polish train station when a scuffle broke out. I was oblivious to the cause until I got…
Aimée Walsh writes: There are few writers whose books do that rare thing of being a cultural event that breaks beyond the literary world. Sally Rooney, whose work has become a (reluctant) emblem for millennial angst or ‘sad girl lit’, is a writer who does just that. Her books span the cleft between commercial fiction…
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: In an interview with Jody Randolph-Allen some thirty years ago, Eavan Boland suggested that the “project in the nature poem is a revised way of seeing, rather than the thing that’s seen”. The nature writer, by extension, might be thought of as a figure who contributes clarity and freshness, new complexities, to…
Kieran Murphy writes: How will you ever know someone else? The cask that houses their brain may be familiar to you, but their consciousness and preoccupations will always only be glimpsed. Their nuances, doubts, and ambitions will never be transparent. In 1986, when I was an intern at Jervis Street hospital in Dublin, Eoin O’Brien…
Sean Byrne writes: On a wet and windy October morning in 1975 I presented myself, as instructed in a letter from the Civil Service Commission, at the Department of Posts and Telegraphs to begin work as an Administrative Officer. The main operations of the Department were then in the GPO and the offices were entered…
Katrina Goldstone writes: A month and a half before he died, I wrote to my friend the poet Gerry Dawe proposing we do a book together. A few times over our nearly thirty-year friendship, we’d talked about joint projects where our interests intersected. But it never happened, probably because Gerry was so prolific and disciplined…