Irish Literature

Now the story is all over the press — that the famed author of The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy, was cuckolded by not one but two Guinness brothers who consorted with his wife while staying in Donleavy’s twin gate lodges when attending the American actress Mary Wilson Price’s fab hunt parties. Give this author...Read more »

Flann O’Brien, an all-timer among somersaulting absurdists who repaint gran’s reality, along with fellow Omnium U. nuncios like Laurence Tristram Shandy Sterne, Jonathan Lilliputian Swift, John Kennedy Confederacy of Dunces O’Toole, and Patrick Breakfast on Pluto McCabe ) would be 100 years old in October — if he...Read more »

Recently back from Boston, Connecticut, and New York City in support of my new book of this blog’s title, IRELAND UNHINGED. Book tours are notoriously quirky affairs, especially when interviewers have not even opened the book under discussion. But they possibly reach their peak oddity when one is writing about Ireland. Thus we had...Read more »

Ireland’s economy may be in a shambles, but its tongue remains silver and there is no better way to savour its cadences than to attend a few of the astonishing number of literary festivals dedicated to the country’s signature art. From Joyce’s Dublin to “Yeats Country” in Sligo and Frank O’Connor’s Cork, Ireland every...Read more »

I journeyed this week to County Mayo to attend the funeral of a dear cousin, who had moved to the lovely town of Westport with his partner Tricia a few years ago to open a marvellous used bookshop, called Gibbons Interesting Books. John was an extraordinary figure, wiry, world-travelled, and knowing. He was in...Read more »

The last few days ducked in  I did to the latest Irish literature festival here in Cork and  many transporting moments were afoot. For me, the thing kicked off when the lovely Tom McCarthy (pictured), an extraordinarily gifted  and meticulous poet who doubles as a guardian angel for many Irish writers — a friend...Read more »