Culture Night Dublin returns for its 21st edition on Friday, September 18th. This year’s literary centrepiece is the Irish Writers Centre’s Fierce on Friday!, a promenade showcase through the Centre’s Georgian home at 19 Parnell Square, where each room becomes a stage for a different form. The evening moves floor by floor: novelist Djamel White reads from his debut All Them Dogs, poet Nithy Kasa shares from How To Make Love To A Colonised Body, and Chrissy Donoghue Ward closes with stories from the Irish Traveller oral tradition.
For the breadth of Irish writing today, the Irish Writers’ Union gathers twelve authors to read for five minutes each from recent books, followed by a panel on the long road to publication. At Oxfam Books on Parliament Street, an open mic welcomes poets, musicians and spoken-word artists, in aid of humanitarian work.
Literary pilgrims are spoiled. Sweny’s Pharmacy, where Leopold Bloom bought his lemon soap in Ulysses, hosts a photographic journey through Joyce’s Dublin, while Marsh’s Library, unchanged since 1707, opens its reading cages and hidden garden, where Swift, Joyce and Stoker once walked. The National Library runs a Director’s Tour, and the Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again exhibition centres on the laureate’s writing desk. Skein Press launches a podcast at Chapters Bookshop with activist Oein DeBhairduin, exploring the 1963 Commission on Itinerancy’s legacy for the Traveller community.
See culturenight.ie/
Tomorrow’s pages
In The Irish Times tomorrow, Meg Mason tells Laura Slattery about her new novel, Sophie, Standing There, and Paul Howard talks to Patrick Freyne about his Irish reunification satire, A Nation Once Again. And there is a Q&A with Palestinian-Irish author Naeem Murr about his new novel, Every exit Brings You Home.
Reviews are Brian Hanley on Reds: the Global History of Communism by Paul Mason; Sinéad Gibney on The Castle by Jon Ronson; Greg Londe on A Thought without Collision by Adrian Duncan; Martina Evans on the best new poetry collections; Conor O’Clery on Never Say War by Åsne Seierstad; Neil Hegarty on The Salt King by Natasha Pulley; Mei Chin on Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction by Laura B. McGrath; Lucy Sweeney Byrne on Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman; Catherine Higgins-Moore on Sunrise by Téa Obrecht; Elizabeth McSkeane on Mario Vargas Llosa’s I Give You My Silence; NJ McGarrigle on The Plot Against Ireland by Myles Dungan; Andrew Lynch on Edmund Richardson’s Alexander: God. King. Man; John Gibbons on The Fate of the World: A History and Future of the Climate Crisis by Bill McGuire; and Declan O’Driscoll on If This Be Magic by Daniel Hahn.
Slow Horses on page and screen
Baskerville collects Mick Herron’s Slough House novellas, The List, The Drop, The Catch, The Last Dead Letter and Standing by the Wall, in one volume, Watch The Quiet Snow, on October 22nd. Originally published between 2015-2022 the stories offer character background and insights into the addictive and beloved Slow Horses universe.
A double agent on the loose. Confessions from the Cold War. Another operation bungled. John Bachelor – a spy handler a few rungs lower on the ladder than the slow horses – tries to hold on to his job; spy chief Di Taverner uses blackmail to get her way; Jackson Lamb erases his past life in the Cold War.
The sixth TV series of Slow Horses premieres at Toronto International Film Festival on September 10th and is released on Apple TV on September 16th. The trailer for the series, based on Slough House Books 6 + 7, was released on Tuesday.
Paul Howard live
Dubray presents Paul Howard in a live stage interview with one of broadcaster Matt Cooper for his Path to Power podcast, a wonderful opportunity to hear Howard speak about his hilarious new novel, A Nation Once Again, followed by a book signing.
From the creator of the bestselling Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series, the thought-provoking novel follows near-retired career diplomat Fiac O’Bric, who is strong-armed into managing a top-secret department attempting to prepare for a reunited Ireland.
To book: paviliontheatre.ie/events/view/paul-howard
Jamie O’Connell memoir
Merrion Press is to publish Something Loose Inside My Head, a powerful memoir by the writer Jamie O’Connell, next March. Commissioning editor Síne Quinn and publisher Conor Graham acquired world rights directly from the author.
Something Loose Inside My Head is about growing up gay in a Jehovah’s Witness family in rural Cork in the late 1980s and 1990s. It follows his subsequent years living away from home, rejected by his parents and the Jehovah’s Witness community, navigating the Celtic Tiger world as a young millennial.
O’Connell said: “Writing Something Loose Inside My Head, reflecting on my childhood, has felt like investigating fossils stored in rock, trying to uncover the truth about the past, that enigmatic place that lies within each of us. I am heartened by the faith Conor, Síne and the team at Merrion Press have placed in this endeavour. I am feeling a wide range of emotions that come with publishing a personal account, from delight to terror, but mostly I am feeling hugely grateful for the support of this wonderful team.”
Graham said: “Jamie’s memoir is an exceptional piece of literature which takes memoir writing to the next level. His writing is so carefully crafted, not a word is wasted, and his subtle allusion to darkness that exists as a shadow throughout his childhood is both unsettling and profound in equal measure. I’m thrilled to have signed it and we’re looking forward to a wonderful partnership with Jamie to bring it the success it deserves.”
O’Connell is the author of the novel Diving for Pearls (Doubleday UK, 2021), which was runner-up in The Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize shortlisted for The Newcomer of the Year award at the Irish Book Awards.
Kevin Gildeas Brilliant Bookshop
Kevin Gildeas Brilliant Bookshop, one of Ireland’s best second-hand bookshops, is holding a closing down sale downstairs in Board and Brewed, 75 York Rd, Dún Laoghaire, until September 2nd, from noon till 6pm.
Samuel Beckett’s Stirrings Still
ECM Records, a German label which promotes both music and literature, releases on September 4th an album of Samuel Beckett’s Stirrings Still, narrated by Paul Griffiths, interwoven with new music composed for this release by Trevor Bača, performed by (and written for) the JACK Quartet.
Stirrings Still was Beckett’s last prose piece, completed in 1987 and first published the following year. In 2006, ECM founder and producer Manfred Eicher asked author and critic Paul Griffiths to seek out a composer who could create music that would, without intruding on the words, exist in the closest possible sympathy with a recording of the text. Hearing the Jack Quartet rehearse Trevor Baca’s Akasha at Harvard in 2016, Griffiths knew the ten-year search was over.
Stirrings Still was Samuel Beckett’s last message in prose, completed in 1987, and first published the following year. More monologue than story, it comes from a narrator on the edge between life and what lies beyond, which might be a vast wheat field seen in black-and-white, or a swirl of stumbling memories.
Bobby Sands play
On November 10th, Sagging Meniscus will publish Crux, a play about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands by Jesi Bender, which has attracted advance praise from writer and former hunger striker Laurence McKeown, and which is being produced in New York this week at The Tank.
Crux takes place inside the Maze prison where, in 1981, Bobby Sands is on hunger strike. To distract himself from his pain, Sands contemplates the role of violence in political change, struggling with the competing philosophies of historical radicals that visit him in his cell.
Elizabeth Wassell Montague book launch
Elizabeth Wassell Montague will be launching her new novel, At the Villa Celeste, on Thursday, August 27th from 6pm in Hodges Figgis in Dublin. The book, her sixth novel, will be launched by Christine Dwyer Hickey.
Set in New York and France, At the Villa Celeste weaves past and present to create an unforgettable tale of feminine strength, emotional exile and the courage to return to oneself.
Project Children: The Legacy
Derry author and publisher Jane Buckley explores the extraordinary legacy of Project Children in her new book, Project Children: The Legacy, published by Oakleaf Press.
Founded in 1975 by brothers Denis and Pat Mulcahy, Project Children brought more than 23,000 Catholic and Protestant children from Northern Ireland to the United States for six-week summer breaks during the Troubles. For many, it was their first experience of life away from violence and fear.
With more than four years of research and interviews, Buckley tells the story through the voices of the children, parents, volunteers and American host families who experienced it first-hand. The book includes more than 150 photographs and explores the friendships and connections that grew across communities and across the Atlantic.
Buckley, who grew up in Derry, says the book is about preserving the voices of ordinary people whose lives were changed by Project Children.
Project Children: The Legacy will be published by Oakleaf Press in October. Launches will be held at the Monaghan Peace Campus (October 13th), Belfast (October 14th), and Derry (October 15th).
For more information, visit oakleafpress.co.uk/the-project-children-legacy
