The Irish Literary Times

“I think that all I ever wanted was someone to whom I could tell my fears, and from it an imprisoned music would flow”

Collection of late author’s articles due to be published soon

Tributes were paid to the late journalist and author Maeve Binchy at the Dalkey Book Festival in Dublin last night. Speakers included author Roddy Doyle, academic Declan Kiberd, Maeve’s agent Christine Green, former Irish Times colleague Mary Maher and festival director David McWilliams.

Roddy Doyle remembered Maeve Binchy’s “great support” for the creative writing programme at the Fighting Words centre in Dublin, which runs writing workshops for young people. It was set up in January 2009 by Roddy Doyle and Sean Love, former director of Amnesty Ireland.

Alison Flood: Ten 'epiclets' written after Ulysses in 1923, have been published together for the first time, causing a rift among scholars as to how they fit in to the Joyce canon

Deirdre Madden’s new novel is about a slippery subject. But it’s far from being weird, obscure or overly philosophical

An intriguing debut novel reflects its author’s past as a film critic, as well as showing off his love of language

Irish poet’s 90-minute performance the highlight of month-long Marché de la Poésie festival

Irish, Americans, British and French . . . some braved rain and a rail strike to queue outside the Irish College for up to two hours for Seamus Heaney’s reading last night. It was the high point of the month-long Marché de la Poésie festival, where Ireland is the guest of honour, and a key event in Culture Connects, the programme organised by Dublin to mark its presidency of the EU.

It was also the birthday of William Butler Yeats. Thirteen is a lucky number for Irish Nobel laureates: Heaney and Samuel Beckett share April 13th as their birth date.

Bróga Johnny Thomáis is a collection of short stories that reflect the soul’s seasons in all their colours. The title story is a poignant look at a lost soul in London. It is to Mac Donncha’s great credit that, in his hands, the subject matter, the Irish emigrant, is neither tired nor trite. He conveys Johnny’s sense of loss and despair while ensuring he is a human character rather than a literary trope. He skewers the casual racism of Johnny’s supposedly kindly landlady: “ ‘Why

‘Ulysses’ will for the first time be read around the world this Sunday

Elaine Murphy’s ‘Little Gem’ was a slow-burning success, and now her second play, ‘Shush’, is set to premiere on the Abbey’s main stage

Congratulations to Michelle O’Sullivan on being shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for her first collection The Blue End of Stars.

The shortlist for the 2013 prize was announced on 3 June.

The shortlisted books are:

James Brookes, SINS OF THE LEOPARD (Salt)
Oli Hazzard, BETWEEN TWO WINDOWS (Carcanet)
Judith Jedamus, THE SWERVE (Carcanet)
William Letford, BEVEL (Carcanet)
Alistair Noon, EARTH RECORDS (Nine Arches)
Michelle O’Sullivan, THE BLUE END OF THE STARS (The Gallery Press)
Maria Taylor, MELANCHRINI (Nine Arches)
Ahren Warner, CONFER (Bloodaxe)

- See more at: http://www.gallerypress.com/2013/06/04/michael-murphy-memorial-prize-shortlist/#sthash.I9IiE0lj.dpuf

Thursday Taster #2 come from Peter Sheridan's memoir, Break A Leg which we published in december 012 to great acclaim. Peter has since been touring a one-man show based on the memoir to even greate...

Eibhear Walshe reviews Theo Dorgan's 'Making Way' which is about an aging music executive and a young irish woman who meet in Sicily. The Publishers are New Island.

Why

Why so dark, so negative, about death?
you ask of what I write.

I am a loving wife, devoted mother

and yet none of this in poems?

I am all the lists, all the facets
of any woman’s life. Still,

I cannot reassure you that
my words are also features

of an inner world, that won’t

be tamed to play the fashion of...

...And then they started putting bronze plaques on the pavements, and on the walls, to tell you where James Joyce’s characters in Ulysses had eaten their breakfast, or bought a bar of soap, or taken a piss. Walking around Dublin became an involuntary pilgrimage to all these holy sites. Bloomsday itself was like doing the Stations of the Cross, but with a big fry-up at the end of it.

Dear Denis,

We (your eight children) used to make fun of you for remembering WB Yeats’s or James Joyce’s birthdays more easily than ours. But now I am a parent and a writer too, I can sympathise. When I dash off to meet my kids at the school bus stop at the all-too-soon end of my working day, my head is often so full of my fictional creations that I have difficulty focusing on any aspect of real life.

The first poem, Lordship, in Conor O’Callaghan’s new collection, The Sun King (Gallery Press, €18.50/ €11.95), begins in a coastal writing retreat, then shifts to a novel that the protagonist is supposedly writing, before segueing into a feverishly imagined depiction of a London affair.

The three intertwined stories might be material enough for a novel, but they are vividly, memorably brought to life in the three pages of Lordship. O’Callaghan’s lines sing, compressing stories into images, so that ordinary details crystallise and are magicked into mysterious flares of significance, as in “the antique Nokia on the butcher’s block in the bathroom”, which “vibrates at all hours like tropical wildlife”.

No evidence Joyce envisaged Finn’s Hotel pieces as a separate publication, says scholar

Graph Magazine is an online magazine devoted to literature, culture, commentary and all manner of engagements and interventions. It is edited by Peter Sirr, Michael Cronin and Barra O Seaghdha, who edited the original print magazine Graph in Dublin from  1986 to 1998 (funded by Arts Council of Ireland).

A STORY that caught the national imagination when a gifted African-born student studying in Balbriggan faced deportation as he was about to sit his Leaving Certificate was the spark tha

Muezzin's Prayer
Grace Wells

Crossing the Suir at Ferryhouse,
passing the frosted orchards,
a sound in the throat rises—
resonating voice of the land.

Passing the red acacia, this ululation
sweetens to a note. Passing the holly
red with berries, passing the hotel entrance,
aware they hear me...

Some time ago, we had the idea that it might be nice to share a little audio with you once a week. A short reading from one of our new, classic or forthcoming books. We've been talking about it in ...