To adapt a saying of the boxer Tyson Fury, you can take a writer out of Ireland but you can’t take Ireland out of the writer. Or so The News From Dublin, the new volume of Colm Tóibín’s short fiction, will suggest to readers. Tóibín, a Wexford-born expatriate, has never lost sight of certain themes and concerns. In the nine tales collected here, characters who live in Ireland or have moved abroad grapple with how to cross sectarian, class, and ideological gulfs and navigate firestorms of hate and strife without compromising their principles or giving in to cowardice and sycophancy.
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
The Growing Importance of Personal Support for Older Adults
Getting older doesn’t automatically mean losing independence. Many older adults continue to enjoy active social lives, familiar routines, and the freedom to make their own decisions. However, as health and mobility needs change, certain everyday activities can become more challenging.…
A Specific Type of Fear: Unheimlich in David Ryan’s Alligator
Alligator is a collection of short stories that are alive and dynamic. The unheimlich moves the reader through fictional landscapes and through something inside our unconscious minds: some deep need to read about other people’s lives and, because we are empathetic to these characters, experience a lovely catharsis. Our unconscious is a reserve of repressed emotions yearning to push at our consciousness. Ryan’s work is good, really good, because it feeds us.
A review of Casual Mysteries and Aperçus by Charles Rammelkamp
A number of the stories turn at the aperçu, the character’s life coming full circle. Not all stories are ominous and not all mysteries are solved, but collectively the stories in Casual Mysteries and Aperçus shine a light on prejudice, anti-semitism, homophobia, misogyny, the unreliability of memoir and perhaps how even dire situations tend to work itself out over time. As you might expect from a poet, Casual Mysteries and Aperçus contains poetry, insight, intrigue, and a whole lot of fun.
A review of The Boy Who Loved Trees by M.M. De Voe
Although we see the inner journey of Artie and a couple of his closest friends, the story steps out of introspection enough to show us a good view of the 1980s-era occupied nation. Train stations, nightclubs, folk music, hotels and tourist sites, and the countryside and ordinary people’s homes paint a portrait of a nation with a vibrant culture, even under occupation.
A review of One More for the Ditch: A Triptych by Eric McLaughlin
The plots of these three stories unfold slowly. All three have many characters, and each character is necessary, each plays a part in moving their story to its conclusion. In the first two stories the main characters are well intentioned but become victims of their own righteousness. Ironically the protagonist of “A Fully Clothed Breakfast” wins the war, not on the battlefield but within himself.
A review of Gone Guru by Nadine Browne
The story is so easy to read and humorous, that it’s easy to miss how much ground Browne covers. Gone Guru manages to balance post-modernist reflexiveness with a fast-paced mystery. This is very much a book about the process of its own construction
A review of Rupture Anthem by Hera Naguib
The poems in Rupture Anthem chronicle one woman’s quest for personal independence in the face of so many obstacles. The daughter of Pakistani foreign workers in Saudi Arabia, she experiences both sexual repression from strict patriarchal Islamic clerics, in educational settings, and the exploitation of migrant workers that her family endures.
A review of Mine by Adam Ouston
There are several narrative threads and poetic refrains that twist in and out of the narrative as we move through the arc of this unnamed mind in the mine. Sometimes he is pragmatic and precise, working through his dilemma in logical steps, and sometimes he’s feverish and wild. I found the writing and the way in which it traveled through time and space, history, trauma, love and loss to be haunting and yet surprisingly compelling.
A review of The Book of the After by Rebecca Higgie
I won’t give anything away here other than to say that The Book of the After is most certainly an epic, as beautiful and grand as Otto, the 24-metre blue whale skeleton from the Boola Bardip museum in Perth who features so prominently in this story.