Whole Lotta Shakin’

Voices from the Chorus

Given the historical amnesia that prevails, Katrina Goldstone’s account of the activity of Irish left-wing writers in the Thirties is something of a revelation.

You Lose Again

If country music is three chords and the truth, that truth seems to be couched in a comprehensive, many-shaded rhetoric of subjection, filled with stories…

The Greatest of These

Colbert Kearney comes from a strong republican tradition: his IRB grandfather wrote the words of the national anthem. The grandson’s memoir, however, is less concerned…

The Fire Next Time?

When Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and Hunter S Thompson were in their prime a type of writing flourished that called to account the complacencies and…

Strangers in a Strange Land

Emigration into postwar Britain was encouraged, but the only plan was to secure bodies for no-collar jobs (Irish labourers, Punjabi foundry workers) or to maintain…

Race & Cash & Rock & Roll

The record label owner can be seen as the freebooter who turned up treasure in the buried American lives crying out in the hollers of…

Time, Gentlemen

Rounds of drinks, and rounds of various Dublin pubs, are only the most obvious instances of a more general notion of circulation in a novel…

This Island Now

One of the most distinctive aspects of O’Faoláin’s ‘The Bell’ was its reportage, a genre related to British and American traditions of documentary writing, a…

Not All Fool

Mervyn Wall’s satires are in a playful and sometimes whimsical tradition which resists the uplift of the gods and heroes phase of the Irish revival…

Eating Crow

An arresting debut novel is a notable contribution to the genre of Irish populist gothic and is dark enough to make one wonder if it…

He Had to Do Something

Sean O’Faoláin was not exactly a man of the people but a man who had ideas of the people. He was a Catholic, but he’d…

Hostage to Fortune

Brendan Behan’s brief, self-destructive moment in the American spotlight is a cautionary tale of excess. But we should also ask in whose interest was the…

American Berserk

Philip Roth’s American Pastoral can be seen as the start of his most prolific period, when he turned to focus more on questions of assimilation…

Down Under

Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly is Irish not in a straightforward or obvious way but is rather a metonymy for the citizen-outlier, the alternative history, the…

The Ends of the Earth

In 1936, James Agee and photographer Walker Evans travelled on assignment to Hale County in Alabama, a place inhabited by poor tenant farmers, where the…

Mean Street USA

From the novel of manners to the crime novel of bad manners

Into The Mainstream

According to ethnic fade theory, with the days of “No Irish Need Apply” having been, as it were, officially declared over, there was no longer…

The School of Cool

Tin Pan Alley’s imaginative impoverishment, its slack tempi and banal lyrics, were nothing but expressions of limits and control, as ersatz as they were dispassionate.…