IT's good to see, a mere two months after the Manchester bomb destroyed its offices, that the enterprising Carcanet Press is back in business.
Working from temporary offices and trying to reconstruct records that were burnt by the blast, Michael Schmidt and his Carcanet colleagues are about to launch a new paperback fiction list devoted to neglected classics, new writing and translations.
"At its heart," Michael says, "is Ford Madox Ford, one of the century's great writers." I think so, too, having first encountered Ford in my late teens when I borrowed the Bodley Head edition of The Good Soldier from Rathmines library and read its magnificent opening line: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard."
Graham Greene wrote the fine introduction to that edition - pointing out that Ford had wanted to call the novel The Saddest Story, but against his better judgment had been persuaded that The Good Soldier sounded a bit more appropriate for a novel being published in 1914.
Now Carcanet is bringing it out in a new edition - "the only one available in the UK," Michael says (is the Penguin edition out of print?), and each year he'll be publishing other Ford titles, including the magnificent tetralogy Parade's End next year.
Also on the new Carcanet list will be fiction by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Natalia Ginzburg, Gabriel Josipovici and Stuart Hood, "along with new voices we've discovered". Indeed, by the year 2000, Michael boldly claims, "this world-class list will be a substantial resource for fiction readers and students alike."
THAT Bord Failte flagship, Ireland of the Welcomes, is devoting its September-October issue to Irish writing, and very good it is, too.
Edited by Derek Mahon, it's aimed essentially at a non-Irish audience, especially at the North American subscribers who make up most of the magazine's readership, but there's a quirkiness about the issue that puts it beyond the usual touristic pieties and stereotypes.
Aidan Higgins contributes a characteristically idiosyncratic piece about literary Dublin in the Fifties and about Myles in particular - even if he includes that hoary old joke about the workman wheeling a barrow of dung along a Dublin road and an observer remarking "I see Paddy Kavanagh is moving house" (he attributes the remark to Seamus O'Sullivan).
John McGahern has a lovely piece about the Leitrim in which he lives (he thinks of Mohill as "one of the happiest towns in the world"), Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill likens writing in Irish to "being a living fossil", Joseph O'Connor wonders if "diaspora" is really the word for exile, and there are poems by Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Brendan Kennelly, Francis Stuart, Mary O'Donnell and Peter Fallon.
Expect to see this lively issue prominently displayed by Bord Failte at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
PERHAPS it's just me, but I could never see the point of a book club. Yes, I know it's nice to receive parcels in the post, and I can understand why Kenny's in Galway have had such success with their scheme (aimed at overseas readers) whereby you pay them whatever sum of money you like and they'll send out to you an assortment of Irish books of their choice.
In the main, though, part of the pleasure of buying books lies in actually going into bookshops to get them and perhaps coming across something other than the title you initially wanted, or thought you wanted.
So the notion of The Sunday Times Bookshop ("open 24 hours a day, seven days a week") doesn't madly appeal to me. "Buying books," the newspaper says, "is now simply a case of picking up the telephone, using a credit card and receiving your book within seven to ten days.
"It would help," it adds, "if you have available the title, author and publisher of the books to give to our operator.
Now where's the fun in that?
No, the novel is not dead, and that's final; Salman Rushdie says so in an essay entitled "The novel is not dead. It's just buried" in last Sunday's edition of the Observer.
"What is happening," Rushdie says, "is not so much the death (of the novel) as the bewilderment of the reader . .. An obsession by publishers with turnover has replaced the ability to distinguish good books from bad ... Readers, unable to hack their way through the rainforest of junk fiction, made cynical by the debased language of hyperbole with which every book is garlanded, give up . . . Over-published and over-hyping creates under-reading. It is not just a question of too many novels chasing too few readers, but a question of too many novels actually chasing readers away.
I couldn't have put it better myself.