Sweeney Astray
Breakdown, by Cathy Sweeney, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 218 pp, £18.99, ISBN: 978-1399617789 Modern Times, by Cathy Sweeney, The Stinging Fly Press, 148 pp, €15, ISBN: 978-1906539832 ‘A Story Of Our Time: Notes on Kafka’s The Judgement’, by Cathy Sweeney, The Stinging Fly, Issue 44, Volume 2: Summer 2021 ‘“First Love” by Samuel Beckett’, by Cathy […]
Live Differently
Nothing Special, by Nicole Flattery, Bloomsbury, 230 pp, £16.99, ISBN: 978-1526612120 ‘There was nothing special about our seed,’ says the eponymous narrator, Michael, to his pregnant lover in John McGahern’s 1979 novel The Pornographer, a line echoed, unintentionally or otherwise, in the title of Nicole Flattery’s bracingly provocative debut novel, Nothing Special. Though Flattery’s restrained […]
Westward Dreams
The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy, Picador, 400 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-1524712396 Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy, Picador, 192 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-1447294016 ‘Tell a dream and lose a reader,’ Henry James warned us, but Cormac McCarthy hasn’t been listening. For sixty years he’s been writing novels that, at critical moments, use dreams to spin parables […]