Beautiful Noise – Helen Seymour Interview
Monday, April 29th, 2013‘Dublin,Ireland. 1985. A war is raging between The Government, RTE [the Irish state broadcaster] and the 28 illegal Pirate radio stations, who have taken control of the Nation’s airwaves and the advertising revenue that goes with it’- so reads the description on the cover of Helen Seymour’s debut novel, Beautiful Noise- a story about an [...]
From the Chalet School to Hunger Games
Wednesday, April 10th, 2013How do British schoolgirl classics like the Chalet School and Mallory Towers translate to todays bestsellers like Twighlight and The Hunger Games? Amy Ellis-Thomas compares the stock situations and rhetoric of the 1950s boarding schools to today’s equally codified young adult literature.
On Losing Iain Banks
Saturday, April 6th, 2013“Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and [...]
Meike Ziervogel’s Magda
Monday, March 18th, 2013Meike Ziervogel is a writer and journalist living in London. She grew up in northern Germany and came to London to study Arabic language and literature. In 2008 she founded Peirene Press, an independent publishing industry dedicated to producing contemporary European novellas in English translation1. In 2012 she was voted as one of the top [...]
Kahlil Gibran and the Fall of the Prophet
Tuesday, March 12th, 2013It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying. - Marcel Proust In the summer of 2011, I was sitting in a packed church. The soon-to-be married couple were exchanging vows. The groom recited the following quote: Love one another, but [...]
Extracting Gold – Mary Costello interview
Friday, March 1st, 2013Mary Costello is the author of The China Factory, a collection of short stories which was published by The Stinging Fly Press. It has received much acclaim and renown for its intensity and sensitivity. Costello has an amazing capacity to reveal characters’ lives through understated encounters, be it the restraint of two strangers in The [...]
‘Hell goes round and round’: Flann O’Brien and the search for identity
Monday, February 11th, 2013Anyone who knows anything about Flann O’Brien knows he was a man of many names. Flann O’Brien was the pen name for Brian O’Nolan, who wrote journalism under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. He used different spellings of his names and most of the discussion and arguments on his
Inhabiting the Narrative – Housekeeping and the Hounds of Love
Wednesday, November 14th, 2012Being 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 [...]
Melville’s Moby Dick in the Digital Age
Thursday, October 4th, 2012From 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 [...]
