This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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Posts Tagged: Dublin
Writing toward Meaning: A Conversation with Ethel Rohan
Ethel Rohan discusses her new story collection, IN THE EVENT OF CONTACT.
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The Plague within a Plague: Ethel Rohan’s In the Event of Contact
Rohan is masterful at mining these triads for their palpable uneasiness and unavoidable suffering.
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A Poetics of Questions: The Bower by Connie Voisine
To learn is perhaps Voisine’s primary goal in writing the poems in The Bower.
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Traveler in Residence
Then a light turns on and a panic sets in, like noise: unassailable, unnameable.
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Voices on Addiction: Jack and the Boss
My sobriety is still a mystery to me. Forty years this December.
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Love under Capitalism: Sally Rooney’s Normal People
[I]n Normal People love acts as a school.
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The Alienation of an Irish Abortion
Was it a dream? A nightmare? I felt like I’d been sold a lie. There was no husband or caring partner, no safe home or solid income. Just me, pregnant and alone, in an abortion clinic with my rapist.
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The Lonely Voice #27: William Trevor, What Haunts Us Is Us
And this is the majesty of William Trevor. He creates—and at the same time affirms—the dark we’ve all got inside us. He gives our nightmares flesh.
...moreCancer and Other Space Journeys
Aoife Mannix is a novelist and poet who grew up in Dublin and lives in London. This week she underwent surgery for cancer. Here is a wonderful poem she wrote and posted on her blog, Living as an Alien, before she entered the hospital.
...moreOur Literary Footpaths
Over at The Toast, Rebecca Turkewitz writes about the intersections between literary geography and the real, from Joyce’s Dublin and Tolkien’s Middle Europe to Faulkner’s Mississippi and Munro’s Ontario—how we explore these places by walking through pages, and how they map to our homes and street corners.
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His Greatest Masterpiece
The banality of evil hides in people, and who they unleash it upon become forever tainted by their names. They become one. Creator and monster. Evil by association.
...moreFinding Dublin in Joyce’s Dubliners
Why would a writer elicit that kind of hatred? What kind of threat did he pose? I asked my dad if I could borrow a copy of Ulysses, went to my room and began to read. An hour later I came back downstairs. Is there an easier one? I asked. That’s when he gave me […]
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A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
McBride has said that she wants this book to be read fast, letting it wash over you, but the struggle to make sense and to fill in the unsaid is hard to resist.
...moreFamed Ulysses Pharmacy Faces Taxman
Sweny’s, the pharmacy made famous in Joyce’s Ulysses (when Leopold Bloom visits the Dublin shop to purchase lotion and soap for his wife Molly), opened more than 167 years ago and has remained more or less unchanged for most of that time. In more recent years, it has operated as a museum and a shrine to […]
...moreWhere Betty Byrne Lived
Story is an integral part of the city of Dublin. Bronze statues of beloved writers roam the landscape, immortal: Wilde lounges “languidly on a crag in the park at Merrion Square,” while Joyce is “depicted rather more severely in bronze, leaning on his cane as he strolls down North Earl Street.” Ever wondered what the tower in the opening scene of […]
...moreSend A Letter Commemorating Irish Letters
What a cool way to celebrate Ireland’s storytelling tradition: a new Irish stamp features the text of an entire short-short by 17-year-old Dubliner Eoin Moore. Moore’s piece, about how “[t]he city embodies the people, and the people embody the city,” won out over “a host” of other entries at Roddy Doyle’s Fighting Words Centre. Take […]
...moreKaren Russell Shortlisted for an IMPAC
Exciting news! Recent Rumpus interviewee Karen Russell is shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for her novel Swamplandia! Nominations for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award are submitted by public libraries worldwide, and any book can be nominated as long as it has an English translation. Winning authors receive, £100,000, the most valuable literary prize […]
...moreThe Last City I Loved: Dublin
When an Irish person up and leaves for the United States, oftentimes the party thrown in their honor is referred to as an American Wake.
...moreHappy Bloomsday!
Today is the 105th anniversary of Leopold Bloom’s one-day passage through the ordinary streets of Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Dubliners and Joyce-lovers around the world are celebrating the author as well as the book, with readings, races, reenactments, and even Twitter (don’t worry, they only adapted the tenth chapter).
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