LIterature Reviews

Reading can often have a serendipitous, almost conspiratorial feel to it - just as you begin reading about a topic, suddenly you notice it everywhere. It was there all along, of course, but you hadn’t yet thought to look for it - nor for…

British author Matt Haig is delightfully unsnobbish about what he writes. His recent novels for adults have fallen into that space between ‘general fiction’ and ‘speculative fiction’, with The Humans and How To Stop Time featuring…

Maurice Swift (a name laden with literary significance) is a monster. We don’t know this at first, of course. We encounter him through the eyes of aged novelist Erich Ackermann in the late ‘80s, and see him as a struggling young writer –…

In the first ten panels of Sabrina, we see a woman carefully and silently searching a house until she happily pulls a large grey cat out from beneath a bed. Later, we have two men standing on opposite sides of a door, one with a takeaway…

My Megan Abbott literary crush began a few years back, when she’d paused on reimagining noir tropes of the first part of the twentieth century and instead had delved into the realm of the contemporary, with a particular focus on the…

I know what you’re thinking. Who wants to know what a nation of wine-guzzling, cheese-eating surrender monkeys has to say about war? It may surprise you to learn, however, that the French have one of the better track records in Europe with…

President Michael D. Higgins, in his speech to open Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again at the new Bank of Ireland Cultural and Heritage Centre on College Green commented on the many facets of Heaney, ‘the farmer’s son, the Bellaghy native, the…

Those of us who take pride in Irish literary heritage need to take a good hard look at who is represented in the Irish literary canon, and in contemporary Irish literature. Skein Press, a new press whose first publication is This Hostel…

Where might you see a member of the Dubliners one minute and a member of Led Zeppelin the next, an American Poet Laureate amid two Dames and an ex-priest passing an ex-prisoner? This might seem strange anywhere else but in the Listowel Arms…

Detective Kieran Temple is woken by a 4am phone call from his ex-partner, Mia Burrows. She’s just killed her boyfriend. Compelled to investigate the death, Temple finds he must do so behind the backs of his superiors and his wife. All…