Literature Features

Reading a book for the first time can have the flavor of a walk in an unknown wood – the way seems long because everything in front of you is new. Re-reading a book is like a retracing of your footsteps. Certain signposts tell you where you…

Donal Fogarty talks to Caroline Doherty de Novoa about her book 'Was Gabo an Irishman?' exploring the parallels with Irish culture in the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Being that rather rare species – an Irish-English teacher…

One of my favourite jokes in Blackadder occurs in the episode titled “Ink and Incapability” of Blackadder the Third in which Blackadder mentions to Baldrick that he wrote his novel under a female pseudonym because “everybody’s doing it…

“Mharaigh mé mo leanbh de bhrí gur cailín í. Fásann gach cailín suas ina bean. Ach tá m’iníon saor. Ta sí saor. Ní bheigh sí ina hóinsín bhog ghéilliúil ag aon fhear. Tá sí saor” “I murdered my daughter because she is a girl. Every girl…

We have asked some of Ireland's top literary types to give us their top picks for Books of the Year 2017. Did we miss any of your favourites? Let us know in the comments. Let's get stuck in: Here are the HeadStuff Books of the Year 2017…

This week literary and culture themed podcast Words To That Effect joins the HeadStuff Podcast Network. Episode 12 delves into the history of zombies in myth, literature and science, and like other episodes offers up a listening…

From its broadest strokes to its tiniest details, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman is built out of weirdness. Weirdness is not only its dominant style but its very element, its operating logic, its final destination, and its means of…

It makes sense that many women writers of the scene chose to report their experience through the genre of memoir since drawing on life experience and autobiographical details was a literary technique employed by many of the male Beat…

I first met On the Road when I was twenty years old. It was unlike anything I had read before. The intensity, hedonism, friendships, freedom and rebellion resonated deeply. I loved how the sentences pulsed and flowed with an audacious…

I find it apt that it was a brilliantly bright, shining day when I met Molly McCloskey. I had finished her newest novel When Light is Like Water the previous week, and had just written a review of it. On the journey to meet her I was …