Sinéad Gleeson’s blog
The Sensual Walk, a Kate Bush-themed event to mark Bloomsday will take place on Saturday, June 14th. It kicks off at 2pm, meeting on the top of Howth Head, near the car park with a walk around Howth Head. There will be live music from Mumblin’ Deaf Ro, Carol Keogh & Band, Thinguma*jigSaw, Magdeleen van […]
Declan Burke - journalist, blogger and crime novelist - is publishing an entire novel (entitled A Gonzo Noir) online over the next couple of months. If you want to read it in installments, here’s some background and Part 1, and you can follow its progress with Parts two, three and four.
Declan’s second book, The […]
Rose Tremain has been announced this evening as the winner of this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel, The Road Home. I haven’t read it, but then but I’ve read two of Tremain’s other books and found them really tedious. There were three debut novelists - Sadie Jones, Heather O’Neill and Patricia Wood […]
The next installment of Dreadful Thoughts happens tonight. Just read E. F. Benson’s ‘The Man Who Went Too Far’, and head over to Fústar at 9pm tonight to share your thoughts.
More details (and links to the story) here.
Link: About Dreadful Thoughts.
* William Trevor turned 80 over the weekend. BBC7’s I Am A Storyteller celebrated the writer - you can listen back on the BBC iPlayer.
* Having gushed about John Crace’s Digested Read, I was pleasantly surprised to open Saturday’s Guardian Review and spot what appears to be a new section by Crace - Digested Classics. […]
I’m a big fan of John Crace’s Digested Read - where he trawls through a current, much-reviewed book and gives his own synopsis in a few hundred words - in The Guardian. Usually it’s very funny. This week, it’s Cherie Blair’s memoir, Speaking For Myself, and it’s hilarious.
June 2007: Although I hadn’t wanted Gordon ever […]
Since this brief post, I have been meaning to write something about Nuala O’Faolain’s recent passing. I’m a bit late, but here’s a recent column about her. Belfast- based writer June Caldwell, who knew the writer, wrote a very personal piece in the The Guardian last week, which is well worth reading.
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This day last […]
The spooky short story bookclub Dreadful Thoughts rolls on tonight, with a distinctly Irish flavour. Tonight’s author is Dublin-born Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), who is widely acknowledged as one of the masters of supernatural short fiction. The chosen story for tonight’s discussion is ‘Green Tea’ from his famous collection, Through A Glass Darkly. If you […]
“My favorite place to make music is my living room. The Xiu Xiu studio, called “thee fallings out brose studio”, has been there, interrupting my life since I moved into my current apartment in 2005. It is both hyper productive and socially stunting to be able to look at it from my bedroom’s open door.
There […]
Writer Nuala O’Faolain passed away during the night aged 68. The author, best known for her memoirs Are You Somebody? had been battling terminal cancer that had only recently been diagnosed. Last month, she was interviewed by Marian Finucane about facing death, and in the interview she is honest and unsentimenal about her own mortality. […]
If ever there’s a writer who divides people it’s Michel Houellebecq, and quite often this divide occurs along gender lines, with most women loathing his work, accusing him of misogyny and objectification. I was in bookclub once, and we read Atomised (yet another of his books with a semi-naked, skinny girl on the cover). Two […]
Last night on BBC Radio 3 Samantha Morton featured in a programme that might be of interest to anyone participating in Dreadful Thoughts. Words and Music examined various poems that have been inspired by the supernatural, with readings by Morton and Dominic West from The Wire. Poems by Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy and Robert […]