Short Non-fiction

A matter of months ago, Smithsonian Magazine recognized Edith Wharton as one of the most significant Americans of all time, alongside household names such as Abraham Lincoln, Henry Ford, and Oprah. It wasn’t Wharton’s first time standing…

Great literature, it has been said, is that which can be revisited at any point in one’s life, continuing to challenge, offer new perspectives, and enlighten the growing reader. Apart from a certain ramble around the streets of  early…

Recently, I visited a café in south county Dublin and noticed that the walls were decorated with shelves chock-full of books. Piles of them, literally, ten and twelve high in some places. They were all hardbacks of a certain era – 1940s/50s…

Don't be put off by swashbuckling pirate adventures on the high seas. Patrick O'Brian's stories are marvellous character studies and breathtakingly exciting tales. Here's why you should read him. Patrick O'Brian is most famous for his…

Haruki Murakami is one of those writers who can be best described as an odd auld creature. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, it is hard to figure out why he has not yet been a winner - in lieu of the likes of recent…

“As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'you are nothing', I will be a writer.” from…

“It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.” As a precocious 14 year old, I idolised Bob Dylan, so this Dylan quote on the back of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road was what made me snap it up in my early teens. My computer broke…

I was twelve when I finished reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It had taken me a year to the day and as soon I closed the cover on those adventures I cried like a five year old. I was distraught that there wasn’t more. Harry Potter had…

It’s really difficult to write or talk about Proust without coming across as a pretentious and irrelevant toolshed. ‘Proust scholar’ has become a pop culture shorthand for the most useless type of individual imaginable. Without even being…

When the idea for the Open Book series was suggested, I really didn’t have to do a lot of thinking about who my favourite author is. What some might find odd about my choice as a sci-fi reviewer, is that the author I picked is a relatively…