For six weeks, now, Daniel has been keeping a close eye on them, from behind the curtain at the back room window. Several times a day he has come to check on them, to see what they are doing and how much they are advancing. There are four of them. They arrive every day at […]
I can’t remember learning to talk but I do remember learning to read. As the youngest of four, I had an urgent need to be able to read even before I started school. All around me, my family’s heads were buried in Mills and Boon, Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton, Mickey Spillane, Charles Dickens or the […]
Being a Girl You’ve seen the film: a man looks behind an office filing cabinet to find a portal into another man’s consciousness – someone who turns out to be a famous actor. The intruder remains inside this other life for a quarter of an hour or so before being ejected onto the side of […]
From their shared fascination with Moby-Dick, writer Philip Hoare and artist Angela Cockayne came together to curate, first, an installation in Plymouth, England, celebrating the book – Dominion: A Whale Symposium. They put together a book with the same title earlier this year then organised and recently launched the Moby-Dick Big Read (www.mobydickbigread.co.uk), a website […]
Martin Amis’s 1989 London Fields – or ‘The Murderee’ as it was nearly called – is a virtuoso exercise in black humour, deceit, burlesque and biting misogyny. As Simon Schama put it in 2011: “Martin Amis’ glorious fury, London Fields; the never-likely-to-be-bettered bedtime story from the heart of Mrs Thatcher’s darkest Albion; stained with punk […]
Meeting Marianne Lee is as confusing as ordering Wasabi in your dessert- sweet and interesting with an alarming kick that leaves you wondering what to make of it all for hours afterwards. You know that it’s definitely going to be a little different (one of the songs on her debut album is a homage to […]
Amy Waldman’s debut novel The Submission rightfully earned its way onto numerous ‘books of the year’ lists at the end of 2011, and was shortlisted for The Guardian’s First Book Award. Waldman, also a succesful journalist, talks to TMO about the novel, 9/11 fiction, and the links between literature and journalism. Martin Amis noted, in his […]
In his 1921 “Manifesto on the Immediate Futurisation of Life” Bruno Jasieński called for Poland’s national poets – “the stale mummies of mickiewiczes and słowackis” – to make way from the “plazas, squares and streets” for the new: Futurists like himself. Many years later, as Soren Gauger tells us in the afterword to this excellent […]
Stephen Kelman, Booker prize shortlisted novelist, talks to TMO about Pigeon English, his novel that went from a literary agent’s slush pile to critical and commercial success
The controversy over Galway City Council’s proposal to erect a statue to Che Guevara to commemorate his family links to the city (his mother Anna Elizabeth was a Lynch and born in the city), is indicative of a wider discourse in Irish society. There is already a controversial – and popular – Che Guevara Festival in […]
