Acts of Desperation: Bracing, poignant and devastatingly accurate

Book review: Megan Nolan’s ‘raw’ debut novel of a young woman’s awakening

Parents who regularly take three or more drinks a day may be abusing children

Addiction specialist warns parents on impact of their drinking on family

Motor Neurone Disease is 'a nightmare but I’m adapting', says priest

Walk While You Can: Fr Tony Coote travelling Ireland to raise funds to tackle disease

4th of July: Eileen Battersby’s best short stories for Independence Day

From Cheever to Ron Rash, Carver to Eudora Welty, O’Connor to Richard Ford, some of the finest American writing is to be found in the short form

Bear’s Den - Red Earth & Pouring Rain album review: moody and beautiful

The Clasp by Sloane Crosley: Latching on to love

A comedy of manners about modern America steeped in literature

Booze as muse: writers and alcohol, from Ernest Hemingway to Patricia Highsmith

Nobel laureates Faulkner, O’Neill, Hemingway and Steinbeck were alcoholics, as were Brendan Behan, Dylan Thomas, Jean Rhys and many more. Anne O’Neill explores why

David Butler: ‘Great writers enrich experience, even the mundane’

Brought to Book Q&A: Author of The Judas Kiss and City of Dis on what he reads and how he writes

A series on great symphonies searches for meaning in music

In the first Great Symphonies Close Up concert, Charles Hazlewood explores Dvorák and shows a flair for the apt metaphor

The nostalgic homespun philosophy of Rachel Ries

The singer-songwriter has carried her style from her childhood among the Mennonites in South Dakota, and her vintage dresses evoke that world

Brought to Book: Andrej Longo on his literary life

Reviews are essential. I enjoy looking at my book as if I were another person

Willy Vlautin: ‘You try to make something that is a story, and is about life, but also says something that matters’

Whether in his outstanding debut, ‘The Motel Life’, or his latest novel, ‘The Free’, the American writer – and key member of Richmond Fontaine – understands the marginalised lives that his characters endure

Funeral of ‘woman of extraordinary courage’

She was ‘my Mom, my first love, my hero, my best friend’, says son Conor

Account of a not so young man in Paris

A wonderfully eccentric, conversational and personalised cultural history of Paris