Art Kavanagh

My latest post in Talk about books is about two novels from the early 2010s dealing with rural Ireland in the wake of the economic crash a few years earlier: Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart and Belinda McKeon’s Solace 📖

About a week ago, I posted on my personal site my second look at Caoilinn Hughes’s second novel, The Wild Laughter (2020). It’s a novel that I’ve found myself coming back to, though not because I particularly like it. At first it came as a shock: not at all what I had been expecting after her first novel and the short stories. My impulse was to dismiss it, but how could I then account for its enthusiastic critical reception?

On a third reading of Caoilinn Hughes’s second novel 📖, I’m still confused as to what’s going on in the court case at the end. So is the first-person narrator: Further remarks about Caoilinn Hughes’s The Wild Laughter

I’m watching a YouTube video of an interview with automatically generated subtitles. In the space of a minute, it has rendered “dreaming” as “streaming” and “themes” as “teams”. So offputting and distracting. If people are going to bother with this crap, couldn’t they at least correct it?

My resistance to the idea that I’m going to have to read (and buy, though not necessarily in that order) Bridget Hourican’s bio of James Clarence Mangan 📖 has now almost completely crumbled.

Here’s an unusually informative story on Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). Nice to have confirmation that others have similar experiences to mine, and that I’m not just imagining it. Sadie Dingfelder in The Guardian

Claire Kilroy published her fifth novel, Soldier Sailor, last year and it caused a stir. The three previous novels look like an unusually varied bunch but what they have in common (Faustian bargains, for a start) may come as a surprise. Deal with the devil 📖

Claire Kilroy’s fifth novel, Soldier Sailor (2023) has made a huge impression on its readers. I’m not one of them yet, though I certainly intend to read it before too long. Another book of hers that I haven’t yet read is her first, All Summer (2003) — though again I’ll emphasize the “yet”. I have read the three novels in between, Tenderwire (2006), All Names Have Been Changed (2009) and The Devil I Know (2012), and my first impression of them was that they’re a very varied body of work.

The latest post from Talk about books is about Melissa Bank’s two books 📖. They look like collections of “linked short stories”, but the links are deeper and the stories or episodes more tightly integrated into an artistic wholeness than that might imply.

Keith Ridgway and the publishers of A Shock (2021) are very clear that the book is a novel, not a collection of “linked short stories”. In an Irish Times interview with John Self, Ridgway said: I’m going to get people insisting that this is a short story collection, and it’s absolutely not, it’s a novel. It’s a polyptych, one of those altar pieces made of panels. You can take one of the panels away but they only really work together.

If it’s anything, journalism is the war of facts against narrative. Conspiracists swallow the narrative and ignore the facts.

Helen Lewis, commenting on the New Yorker piece about RFK Jr

The Corporation’s durability is remarkable. Already half a millennium old when Shakespeare arrived in London, its supporters see the survival of its rights and institutions as crucial to its modern success.

They can’t be literally the same supporters, can they? The Goose and the Golden Egg

Hi @manton, I thought I’d have another go at crossposting to BlueSky, having given it a miss for a few months. It still doesn’t seem to work. Any idea why? It’s not a big deal for me, so no urgency, but it’s nice to be able to post proper links there occasionally. Thanks.

When I started my newsletter, I used to write my posts every second Wednesday. As they got longer and I got older and tireder, I’d start my posts every second Wednesday. Today, I’ve taken advantage of the Irish bank holiday to get 950 words ahead of myself, so I might finish on Wednesday 😎

I forgot that I’d switched to Hex keyboard input so as to type a “thin space”, and thought that my Option key had stopped working! Panic over.

The Stand describes a world laid waste by a weaponised super-flu virus nicknamed “Captain Trips” that has escaped from a biolab.

Donal Ryan on Stephen King. So that’s why so many people believe that Covid originated in a lab leak.

Katie Herzog recently learned that she has aphantasia. It sounds to me as if she has SDAM too. She’s refreshingly sceptical of the consensus view that it’s not a disorder or disability. Aphantasia is very analogous to dyslexia, which is treated as a disability for some purposes; via Helen Lewis

Here’s another post from Talk about books. This time, I’m discussing Scott Turow’s third and fourth novels, 📖 Pleading Guilty (1993) and The Laws of Our Fathers (1996). Impeaching his own witness.

I’ve written about Scott Turow’s novels twice before in Talk about books. First, I discussed judicial corruption and aggressive prosecution, which together constitute one of his major recurring themes. Later, I pointed out that each of his novels differs markedly from the ones that went before, as if he’s determined to avoid writing to a formula or even to a vaguer pattern. Taken together, these two posts provide as good an overview of Turow’s fiction as I’m capable of.

I’m going to have to stop buying secondhand books from the UK. I recently ordered a book via Alibris; it was posted on 2 July and it still hasn’t arrived. This is the third time this has happened: the first book never came at all, the second took two months! An ordinary letter took 3 weeks 😡

Gosh, Stuart Jeffries didn’t like Paul Foot very much, did he? Review of Margaret Renn’s Foot biography 📚

I just noticed that because of an error on the index page of my personal site my post “Did William Empson have ADHD?” has till now been inaccessible from the index page. I thought it might be worthwhile to reup it anyway.

Here’s a list of “5 great underrated film performances by Nicolas Cage” that doesn’t include either of my two favourites, Brian de Palma’s Snake Eyes (1998) or John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1993) 🍿