Revamped ‘Inis’ has some ideas for our literary city
Inis, the already excellent magazine of Children's Books Ireland (€8), has inaugurated a new era in its summer issue, just out. Both magazine and website (inismagazine.ie) have a fresh new look – and a new outlook – designed for a more global audience. The array of contributing writers is impressive, especially in the welcome given to Dublin's being a Unesco City of Literature. For Siobhán Parkinson, the novelist and Laureate na nÓg, it's an affirmation that we are and have always been a literate people and a people for whom the written word is a treasure beyond the fiscal, the financial and the monetary. "Literature is not going to save our economy. That's not what it's for, as it happens. But it might just save our souls."
The author and illustrator Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick thinks it’s time to start pinning down what the Unesco designation means and comes up with a practical suggestion. The children’s room at the top of Dublin Writers’ Museum is, she says, long in need of a revamp. “How about filling it with the characters of that alternate Dublin, starting with Oscar Wilde and bringing it right up to [Derek] Landy? The only limit will be the size of the room . . . Let’s develop an online literary map showing where various children’s writers worked/lived and where the action in various books takes place.”
Regular short book reviews will now appear online, explain editors Patricia Kennon and David Maybury, while in the magazine they’ll feature multiple responses to each book reviewed, to give a diversity of perspectives.
This issue features Margaret Scanlon on humour and horror in Terry Deary's Horrible Histories series and an interview by Amanda Piesse with Conor Kostick, author of the futuristic Avatar Chronicles – now complete after the recent publication of Eddaby the O'Brien Press. "I think my years of political activity help me create plausible environments and motivations in certain characters – for the benefit of readers who don't know, I am a socialist of the Richard Boyd Barrett/Joe Higgins ilk – but as a reader I dislike didacticism and so try to avoid it as an author," he says.
The next issue is out in November. Meanwhile, the bright and highly accessible website links to continuous blog debate, tweets and, most valuably, the Inis archive.
Matisse’s illustrations for Joyce’s masterpiece
There are many delightful reasons to visit the Art Books of Henri Matisse exhibition, which recently opened at the Chester Beatty Library, in the grounds of Dublin Castle; chief among these has to be the 1935 version of Ulysses(above) illustrated by the French painter. A year earlier George Macy, who founded the Limited Editions Club to publish illustrated books in short runs, had commissioned Matisse to illustrate Joyce's masterpiece. In the past, opinion was voiced that Joyce wasn't pleased when he discovered that Matisse chose the subjects for his etchings and sketches from Homer's Odysseyand not Joyce's own work, but the current Matisse exhibition notes say that the Irish writer had full confidence in the French artist's plan for the illustrations. A total of 1,500 copies of the edition, 250 signed by both writer and artist, were published, and lucky is anyone who owns one of these now. (The drawing featured above is titled Calypso.)
The good news is that when this exhibition, loaned by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, ends, on September 25th, the Matisse-illustrated copy of Ulysses will remain in Dublin, as it belongs to the Chester Beatty.
