‘The Airship Era’ one of O’Reilly’s most finely achieved poems, explores the moment in which modern technology meets the legacy of symbolic traditional cultures. In the figure of the Zeppelin the future is untethered from the earth as air and…
A fictional portrait of Dublin in the years leading up to the Great War and 1916 is brimming with ideas and has a great deal of historical interest, even if its author’s ill-digested anger at his enemies and overschematic approach…
A Russian-Irish writer in the tradition of Bulgakov
John Keats championed the truth of imagination, while the naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt was the first to see nature as a unified organism. Moya Cannon invites both to tea. It’s an edgy business. She serves them in separate rooms and…
Kevin Stevens’s assured new novel explores the difficulties faced by a young immigrant of Arab and Muslim background in small-town America, difficulties which include racism and the weight of overbearing tradition, but which can be countered by friendship, love and…
Dorothy Macardle was a friend of de Valera, an historian of the idea of the Irish Republic and a novelist. Her story ‘The Uninvited’, memorably filmed in 1944 with Ray Milland, is a haunted house tale set in Cornwall but…
The noisy censure of a dramatic performance must, in legal principle, be the expression of the feelings of the moment. If it is premeditated ‘by a number of persons confederated beforehand’ it becomes criminal. Such was the background to the…
Paul Murray’s new novel is fiendishly clever, loosely yet convincingly plotted, as brash and vulgar at times as the world it portrays. It is wild, playful, baggy, perverse, exaggerated, carnivalesque; but it is endlessly engaging, riotously funny and devastatingly serious.
Dermot Bolger knows his characters, knows the schools they went to in the 1970s, the kind of parents they had, the parents’ world of the 1940s. But he also knows their teenage children born in the 90s, the slang they…
The painter and sculptor Brian O’Doherty’s most recent novel, based on the life of an actually existing eighteenth century French diplomat, stands with the very greatest historical fiction. It is also a profound meditation on the nature of fetishism and…