Literature

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 Limerick there once was a poem, Of its origin very little was known And this satirical verse That’s both amusing and terse In August we’ll be bringing it home.  Limerick isn't often remarked upon for its way with rhymes but the…

Ribs Shannen Malone They would not speak of it tomorrow. Lucy thought this as she walked to work in the morning, the shiny sound of her tights rubbing together at the thighs finding her ears. She picked at a loose flap of skin at the corner…

An Innocent Question By Sarah Valeika Do people wear shoes in Hell? she asked, tugging her mother’s black slacks, and poking her stilettos with one toe. Why? her mother asks, laughing the way someone does when they’ve never considered how…

Those who have dipped into this series on a regular basis will probably have picked up on a few things. Namely I’m skeptical of the merit of writing ‘reviews'. I’m not sure critical distance is real. I don’t like when the writer doesn’t…

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…

Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright and Marie Curie scholar, works in the digital humanities and is a certified Iyengar yoga teacher. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On…

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to be in Dublin at the same time that Poetry Ireland held an event at their building off Parnell Square on the place of Edmund Spenser in Irish poetry. The discussion involved Trevor Joyce, Leanne…

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…

Homestead By Grace O'Doherty Back where I began, the room with the bunk beds. What’s past happens still: a jar of shells, an uncle’s old love letters grandmother kept, that I showed to friends after school. Faded canvas stickers with names…