Literature

I finished reading Joseph O’Neill’s Good Trouble last week and had said at the time that it was very unusual for me to be able to sit down and read a book of short stories from start to finish in the order that they were ordered.…

So, I went to Smock Alley last night to take a look at the opening night of The Roaring Banshees which was co-written by Peter McGahon and John Morton. This was the second installment in the 'Ripping Yarn Trilogy'. it follows on from the…

Hugh Travers plays have been long-listed for the Bruntwood Prize, the Verity Bargate Award and the Papatango New Writing Prize. His new play These Stupid Things which is running at Smock Alley Theatre is a truly excellent production with…

John William’s Stoner is not one of the best known of novels. Though, it has had its champions. Most recently Julian Barnes wrote a glowing review article and described it as his book of 2013. What Williams did in that novel, perhaps better…

“It is a tremendously Hibernian dilemma—a broken family, lost love, all the melancholy rest of it—and a Hibernian easement for it is suggested: fuck it, we’ll go for an old drink.” There is perhaps no better conspectus or cure for the…

L.P. Hartley once said that the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. For the mostly nameless women in the eight stories which make up Nicole Flattery’s debut, Show Them A Good Time, the present seems like a foreign…

Reading can often have a serendipitous, almost conspiratorial feel to it - just as you begin reading about a topic, suddenly you notice it everywhere. It was there all along, of course, but you hadn’t yet thought to look for it - nor for…

After a sell-out run with positive reviews at the Dublin Fringe Festival last year, Beat. got a reprieve this May in Trinity College Dublin’s Samuel Beckett Theatre to packed crowds. Larney's exploration of toxic masculinity has now been…

The O'Reilly's Corner Shop on Misery Hill might be struggling but they're not going down without a fight.

David Toms lives and works in Norway. His new poetry collection is Northly from Turas Press. Which poets/writers most influenced you in your new collection, Northly? You know, it's hard to say whether such a poet…