ARENA REVIEW - GERRY STEMBRIDGE

I'll be on Arena tonight on RTÉ Radio 1 reviewing Gerard Stembridge's rollicking 1970s novel The Effect of Her. Between 7pm and 8pm.

NEW REVIEW AND 'QUIET' BOOKS

North Carolina based Irish writer Rich Rennicks has just reviewed my novel YOU, which came out three years ago (I can hardly believe it's been three years). Rich reviews it on his blog A Trip to Ireland. I love this about the internet - there is no two-week window for your book to get noticed; there is endless time and scope and space.

A small quote from the review: 'YOU is a quiet, surprising novel, that captures a young girl’s growing perception of the world quite beautifully.' Cheers, Rich, much appreciated :)

As an aside, 'quiet' is a word I often hear about my work. It gets me a bit knicker-knotted because I don't quite get what it means, except I feel I am being told that it is not altogether a good thing to be 'quiet'. The feeling I get is that publishers/reviewers/agents really want fiction a bit more shouty than mine and that's what will make a book a big hit, as opposed to the minor hits that I've had. Anyway, I think, as an introvert, quiet is where I'm at and will continue to be at for a long time to come. For what it's worth, Mr Rennicks didn't seem to think 'quiet' was a negative but others have (agents/publishers who have rejected my work in the past). Anyway, with a publisher I like for my last two books and my next (New Island) and a new agent on the foreshore also, this 'quiet' irritation may belong to the past.

RACHEL TREZISE REVIEW FOR THE SHORT REVIEW

I recently reviewed Rachel Trezise's fab new short story collection Cosmic Latte for RTÉ's Arena. I have now reviewed it for the most excellent The Short Review and you can read it here.

NEW REVIEW OF MOTHER AMERICA

There's a brand new review of Mother America at the UK's The Short Review. Thanks to Susan Haigh and Tania Hershman at the Review.

WRITING AND THE BODY - ABEI PLENARY TEXT & A REVIEW

I went to Natal in Brazil last August to deliver a plenary lecture and read from my fiction and poetry at an Irish Studies Conference, run by ABEI. The paper I gave concerned writing about the body and it has been published in the ABEI Journal - The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies. It's here and starts at page 71.

There is also a thoughtful review of Mother America by Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação on page 143. Thanks once again to Laura Izarra, and all the crew in Brazil, for having me over. I look forward to returning sometime and seeing more of beautiful Brazil.

IRISH INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF TOWN & COUNTRY

Writer, and publisher at Dedalus, Pat Boran reviewed Town and Country, the Faber anthology of New Irish Stories, in yesterday's Irish Independent. He called it 'a compelling if fragmented picture of where we are now.' I will paste in the full text below as these links have a habit of disappearing:

Exploration of our changing landscape is, in short, compelling 08 June 2013, Pat Boran, Irish Independent

Few anthologies of new writing can be read as simply a 'gathering of flowers', as the original Greek might suggest. In Ireland, perhaps more than elsewhere, a new collection of stories is expected to be more than the sum of its parts, and must somehow describe the present state of the nation and perhaps of Irishness itself.

If editor Kevin Barry's introduction is a somewhat perfunctory one from a writer who can usually be relied upon to engage, his claim for a genre "pulsing with great, mad and rude new energies" is for the most part borne out by this selection of well known and emerging names.

Leopold Bloom's assertion that "A nation is the same people living in the same place" is sent up by Ned Hynes ("If that's so I'm a nation for I'm living in the same place for the past five years"). The notion is challenged here too, if not entirely exploded, and Town & Country features stories set in Germany, Barcelona and an unnamed island in the North Sea, among other locations, with one of the most moving and troubling, by Desmond Hogan, having its emotional heart in the post-conflict Balkans.

Even so, geography is a good place to start, and location, properly explored, has often been relied upon to produce story. Thus Town & Country, perhaps fittingly, opens in rural Ireland, with Dermot Healy's typically dialogue-spare and suggestive piece about a photographer visiting (revisiting?) ruins and abandoned houses in the West. Though the historical view is longer, it is difficult not to see here some echo of the more recent ruins and derelict buildings of the Irish landscape.

One of the reasons why Ireland may be a natural home to the short story again is that our society has undergone such change in recent times. And change, whether above or just below the surface, is what the story is best equipped to explore.

The most able writers know how to zoom in on and frame those ongoing changes in precisely observed moments. Mike McCormack's ‘A Winter Harmonic’ brings together a lorry crash and the discovery of medical files, among other things, to tell the story of "how lives in a small village hold together", while Nuala Ní Chonchúir, in a story that has a hint of Roald Dahl about it, shows how the move for his wife into a nursing home (with the creepy title Emerald Sunsets) is one change too many for her doting husband.

Julian Gough's hyper-inventive tale of an exiled Irishman's efforts to create a pop song "as addictive as cocaine" is both extended riff and compelling fable and adds one of the few truly playful notes to a mostly serious if not grim or grey volume.

Contemporary Ireland is, variously, a country "where the young have the run of the place" (Colin Barret in the powerful ‘The Clancy Kid’) or where Celtic Tiger cocktails come in "oversized glasses filled a third of the way" (Eimear Ryan in ‘The Recital’).

But it is also a place where so many relationships are under strain and old models no longer trusted. Michael Harding, in an affecting story of a man coming to terms with illness, sees an unbridgeable gap between past and present in a country where "the church is now so disgraced that all the buildings will probably be Omniplex cinemas by the time I'm 75".

Making no prediction about the future, the stories in Town & Countryinstead offer a compelling if fragmented picture of where we are now.

TOWN & COUNTRY - FABER REVIEWS

Kevin Barry, IMPAC winner & editor of Town & Country (pic: Guardian)

The Faber anthology was published this week and with Kevin Barry's risen star (augmented by his IMPAC win) the reviews are tumbling in. They are a mixed bag, it would have to be said, with reviewers differing entirely on which stories work and don't, and how the book fares as a whole. 

When you have a story in an anthology like this, naturally you are interested to see if reviewers notice or care about your story. My story 'Joyride to Jupiter' got a bit of a thrashing from Valerie Riordan at BookMunch: 'Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s ‘Joyride To Jupiter’ covers the sadness and horror of a partner lost to dementia, and, though it’s decently written, it’s a fairly predictable story, up to and including the ending (no spoilers!); the hints about child abuse are a clever addition, adding ambiguity to the reader’s relationship with the narrator, but I’m not sure, still, that this elevates the story to the level I’d like to see in an anthology like this one.' Ouch.

But the Scotsman review, by Tom Adair, felt differently: 'Thankfully, other stories soar without much effort. “Joyride to Jupiter”, perfectly pitched, a tender love story by the gifted Nuala Ni Chonchuir, is the pre-eminent example, telling its tale of a couple’s cruel disintegration, held somehow together by selfless love, producing an ending that is excruciatingly moving.' Tom - I am tracking you down to hug you and shove a copy of my forthcoming Scotland-set novel into your paw :)

Giles Newington reviews the book in The Irish Times today and he finds it a 'sharp, lively and varied selection', while noting the absent writers and singling out, among others, newcomers Colin Barrett and Lisa McInerney for praise.It's an exciting business having a story in such a prominent anthology and, personally, I think it's a great one - I was gobsmacked by several stories, including Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's and Keith Ridgway's. And it's equally exciting (and nerve-wracking) reading the reviews. Bring 'em on!