Asking for a laptop as she lay in a hospital bed during a frightening cancer ordeal, Wicklow woman Elaine Murphy could hardly have imagined that those first taps on the keyboard would lead to her debut work of fiction, See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, a Garden County mystery born from the darkest chapter of her life.
You know, this story is a bit different, right? We always do the Bird-Magic thing where we combine the narratives of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. And really, what I wanted to do with this book was just tilt the camera a little bit differently, change that perspective and zoom in on that origin story in rural Indiana in the 1970s.
Howard Jacobson writes characters at their wits' end; those characters are usually men, and those men are usually Jewish. Additionally, and problematically for both them and everyone around them, their collective wits are capacious: easily enlarged to allow idiosyncrasy to bloom into neurosis, preoccupation into obsession.
Lying in my bed, I listened to what sounded like a woman screaming outside in the dark. I picked up my pen. A month of living in this Icelandic village and I was still unaccustomed to the impenetrable January gloom and the ferocity of the wind; its propensity to sound sentient. I had started to feel like the island was trying to tell me something, had a story it wanted me to write.
Finnegan's Wake: An Immersive Ghost Story, presented by 13th Floor Theater, plunges audience members into the beautiful, dysfunctional Finnegan-Plurabelle family. Scenic designer Treigh Buchet, lighting designer Meghan Schultz, and ephemera designer Michelle Josette Crashette transfigure the San Francisco Mint into an Irish family home on the banks of a mystical river. Audience members are free to explore the spaces before the show begins with libation in hand. When the dinner bell rings, the show commences.
From the outset, in the novel's prologue, Anna tells us she is determined to account for herself and her life. But we are to expect no ordinary narrative, concerned only with actual events, evidence-based or relying on historical data. No, Anna is interested in the climate of the psyche and the vibrations of the soul. Can it be that the very things we cannot quantify or rationalise are what make life meaningful?
The ghost of a previous lover is always a challenge, particularly if you (mistakenly) believe that she's actually dead. This is the unenviable situation for Lily, the protagonist of O'Farrell's second novel, who is swept off her feet by dashing architect Marcus and in short order moves in with him. Lily takes his assurances that her predecessor Sinead is no longer with us to mark a more permanent absence;
Liadan Ní Chuinn was born in Northern Ireland in 1998, the year the Good Friday Agreement ended the Troubles, the decades of violence stemming from England's occupation of Ireland. Other recent fiction about the Troubles-the novels and Trespasses , the TV show Derry Girls (all excellent)-is set firmly in the last century, relegating the violence to history. Ní Chuinn's work does the opposite: Their new book of short stories, Every One Still Her e, is set in contemporary Northern Ireland.
You are leaving work, your suit still damp from the morning's downpour, the skin on your palms peeling. You are clutching two supermarket bags, tins of cream soup and tuna knocking against one another. The rain is hard and your anorak is cheap. You are on your way to Stockbridge, to your parents' house, which only your father inhabits now that your mother is gone.
