A literary roundup
Bestsellers on the bust
The Irish non-fiction bestseller lists have rarely been so interesting, with some of the country's most high-profile journalists jockeying for position in the influential run-up to Christmas with books on our economic woes. This week, Shane Ross is at No 1 with The Bankers, followed closely at No 2 by Fintan O Toole's Ship of Fools. David McWilliams is at No 3 and Matt Cooper at No 5.
The other book in the top five is Aidan Storey's autobiography about the healing power of angels. One might have thought the gloom was so pervasive that people would run a mile from reading about its genesis, but sales figures belie that. As witnessed by the popularity of Pat Kenny's The Frontline, there's a hunger out there to understand what's happened – and find a way out of it.
It will be interesting to see how these books do outside Ireland, where the saga of what’s happened here has been widely broadcast. With the Irish boom-to-bust story set to be studied for years to come, they’ll also have a life long after Christmas – as textbooks on the time when things went wrong for Ireland.
Ford reading sells out
When he prepares to read in Trinity College Dublin on Monday night, US novelist Richard Ford won’t have the worries some writers do: that the hall won’t fill.
Within 24 hours of advertising that the great short story writer and author of novels The Sportswriter and The Lay of the Land would appear in the 400-seat Edmund Burke Theatre, all tickets were gone. Since 2008, Ford has been adjunct professor with the School of English in TCD teaching on the Masters programme in creative writing.
Irish poets from abroad
Are powerful new poetries in the making from people who immigrated to Ireland during the boom years? Poet Paula Meehan has fascinating thoughts on this in an interview with Jody Allen Randolph, published in PN Review190.
What comes in, says Meehan, must connect with what’s here – and vice versa. “Underneath the rampant egotism, the greed, and the destruction, there is real work going on, connections being made. The new poetries, the new modes of expression, are going to come out of the meeting of these two powerful channels,’’ says Meehan in what is an excerpt from a longer interview that will appear in an oral history of cultural change in Ireland over the past 20 years, Close to the Next Moment, to be published by Carcanet Press next year.
“We’re actually poised on the brink of a very interesting moment, where the whole of the future of Irish poetry is probably in the hands of children of people who’ve just arrived on the island, and that all feels natural and the way it should be. I have never believed in tradition as a narrow thing.”
PN Review 190. Vol 36 No 2, November/December, £6.99
Man Booker chair decided
Poet and former British poet laureate Andrew Motion is to chair the 2010 Man Booker Prize. Motion, who is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London and co-founder of the online Poetry Archive says he’s looking forward to a year of reading voraciously and that a lot of difficult decisions lie ahead.The longlist will be announced in July.
themanbookerprize.com
