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LIterature Reviews
Review | Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends
An unforgettable novel about the possibility of love.
So says the blurb on the back of Sally Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends. Unforgettable, it is. This is a story of convergence and collision between two pairs of…
Review | Here and Gone by Haylen Beck
Audra Kinney has finally left her abusive husband. With her two young children, Sean and Louise, Audra makes her way across America for a fresh start on the West coast. Trying to keep a low-profile, Audra avoids the highways. It is on a…
Review | The One Memory of Flora Banks by Emily Barr
Flora Banks has anterograde amnesia. She is seventeen years old but, due to the removal of a tumor on her brain when she was ten, she cannot make new memories. Anything she experiences lasts only a few hours and is then gone. Her parents…
Review | When Light is Like Water by Molly McCloskey
When Alice stays in her mother's condo after her funeral, she is struck by a sense of anticlimax. She cannot fathom how the physical evidence of her mother's life falls short in representing its reality. All she can do is look at the…
Literature on Film | Lolita Really is Un-filmable – Even Kubrick Failed
Lolita was the first novel I really, truly loved. I didn’t read much as a child. I saw it as a ‘nice’ thing adults asked you to do - like brushing your teeth or eating fruit - something virtuous. I read Lolita when I was 16 and it was…
Review | Homecoming by Gimlet Media
For five weeks in the run up to Christmas, Gimlet Media treated us to Homecoming, their first fictional podcast. At a time when almost half of Americans are at least aware of the podcast as a concept, Gimlet have been cornering the market.…
Review| Looking at the Stars Dublin Simon Community
Looking at the Stars is a limited-edition anthology of Irish writing including poetry, prose and non-fiction. Costing €15 per copy with a limited print run of one thousand copies the anthology is hoped to raise €15,000 for the Rough…
Review| The Wolf and Peter by Cois Céim
The Wolf and Peter, the critically acclaimed show by Cois Céim contemporary dance theatre, is a stunning re-imagining of Provokiev’s classic children’s tale. The Dublin based dance theatre has scooped out the best pieces of an old story,…
The HeadStuff Best Books of 2016
Every year I view this list as some kind of challenge – it would be so easy just to pick my ten best writing friends and cajole them into contributing but I really don’t think that that would represent the huge HUGE array of fantastic books…
Review | The Way to the Spring by Ben Ehrenreich
Ben Ehrenreich's account of his time spent in the West Bank, mainly in the village of Nabi Saleh, is a forceful journalistic record of the experience of Palestinians, supported by Israeli and foreign activists, who oppose the Occupation,…