Kevin Power: Literary magazines are all the more vital for operating off the commercial grid
This rich universe of words includes The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Ragaire, Splonk, Sonder, The Four-Faced Liar, The Pig’s Back, Profiles and Southword
Kevin Power: I took a deep dive into Irish literary magazines and would do it again without hesitation
Between Holy Show, Dublin Review of Books, Tolka and the Dublin Review, I had a high stack on my desk
ChatGPT on campus: ‘Silicon Valley overlords have unleashed one of their ingenious, idiotic products, dismissing the downsides’
Trinity College Dublin lecturer and author Kevin Power gives his take on students’ use of AI to help them with exam papers
Paul Auster: a magician who assembled mosaics of meaning and memory
Author and academic Kevin Power assesses the career of the New Yorker, whose fiction was a game of hide and seek
Wild Houses by Colin Barrett: Superbly observed world framed by crime-caper plot
Novel set in Ballina unfolds around characters who are abandoned, bereaved and trapped by circumstance
Kevin Power on Werner Herzog: A memoir of extremes that goes out of its way to avoid looking in the mirror
Herzog’s life and films dwell in the haunted house of the Third Reich
A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel
A substantial anthology of Mantel’s non-fiction work, one that would appeal to anyone with an interest in lucid thought
This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack: creates an utterly distinctive, utterly contemporary mood
Weighing in at a slender 179 pages, McCormack’s quarry is the elusive stuff of consciousness itself
Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford: Small-time crooks and big-time bootleggers
There is no clumsy expository dialogue in this gripping, moving story set in an ‘altered America’ of 1922
North Woods by Daniel Mason: A frustrating, involving, virtuoso, sentimental, unconvincing novel
Can you stay glued to a novel if its protagonist is not a human being but a house?
Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction – A critical machete wielded mercilessly
Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel, John Banville and Roddy Doyle might wince at some of the judgments contained within
I live in a child’s world, know all members of Paw Patrol and the words to Let it Go
Kevin Power: I catch myself singing ‘Yes, yes, bedtime’s good for you’. All day. All week
Ruth & Pen by Emilie Pine: a novel full of empathy and goodwill
Author has followed her essays Notes to Self with a contemporary Dublin Mrs Dalloway
Hi. My name is Kevin and I can’t stop buying books
‘You have a problem,’ my wife told me during lockdown. And she’s absolutely right
Young Mungo: Heartfelt book of love in Glasgow marred by cliche
Douglas Stuart’s novel about gay teenager and tenement life in 1990s is let down by language