BRANDON, the Dingle based publisher, has undoubtedly been an Irish success story, even though at the outset everyone told its boss, Steve McDonogh, that he was mad to set up the enterprise in such a remote spot.
And now it seems to be an international success story as well Alice Taylor's To School Through the Fields has just been published in Polish (with her second book, Quench the Lamp, to be translated next year) Stephen Rynne's 1938 farming classic, Green Fields, is due for publication in Japan next year Sean Rooney's Easy Many a Morning is coming out in German later this year while Patrick Quigley's first novel, Borderland, has just been published in German.
Back home this autumn, Brandon will be launching what it calls "the most notable memoir of the year". This is Before the Dawn, by Gerry Adams, and it will also be published in Britain, the US, France, Germany and the Netherlands, while negotiations are "at an advanced stage" for Greek, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian editions.
All of this should give Steve McDonogh plenty to talk about when he speaks in the Irish Writers' Centre next Thursday at 7pm, followed by readings from three of his writers Brian Leyden, Phil O'Keefe and Vincent McDonnell.
SHOULD one help biographers in their research? Martin Amis angry at the unflattering diary of father Kingsley's last days written by his official biographer Eric Jacobs, certainly isn't giving Mr Jacobs any further help he has denied him the opportunity to edit Kingsley's letters.
Auberon Waugh is more sanguine about such things. He tells us in the current issue of his lively Literary Review that he was recently approached by a writer called Nick Foulkes who wished to write a biography of Alec Waugh. Nephew Auberon agonised about whether to assist him his uncle, after all, had led a rather exuberant life and had left a few orphans behind him. Should the man's memory not be left in peace?
His decision was simple "One can scarcely talk of a memory being left in peace if the person concerned has been completely forgotten. Practically nobody in England now remembers Alec Waugh. I should have thought it the kindest thing to do to anyone's memory to revive it, even if the portrait reveals a wart or two."
Of course, he has had considerable experience of biographers there have been three of his father, Evelyn, and all have received his co-operation, even though the second, "by a provincial academic called Martin Stannard is made almost unreadable by the author's inability to see any point to his subject at all."
If you want to know the real Evelyn, Auberon recommends the "intelligent, sympathetic and enjoyable" biography by Selina, Hastings, to complement the Letters edited by Mark Amory and the final version of the Diaries edited by Michael Davis "all three most excellent books, which no literary household should be without."
THE fad for writing sequels and prequels to the classics continues unabated. We've had revampings of Jane Austen and Raymond Chandler (Robert B. Parker has written two gruesomely arch pastiches of the latter), and now we're going to be lumbered with a follow up to the Bible.
This is the, er, brain child of Alexandra Ripley, who wrote Scarlett, the sequel to Gone With the Wind. Entitled A Love Divine, it takes up the story of Joseph of Arimathea who, we learn, was an ardent lover and an even more ardent sailor and ended up in Britain as a Christian missionary. There's no historical evidence for any of this, but Ms Ripley would probably point out that God moves in mysterious ways.
SHAKESPEARE moved in mysterious ways, too, according to David Honneyman. In a new book, Shakespeare's Son nets and the Court of Navarre (Merlin Books, £9.95 in UK), Belfast based Mr Honneyman argues that the Dark Lady, far from being the Bard's mistress, was actually French.
He further argues that Shakespeare didn't write the sonnets at all, but merely translated and adapted them from French originals by a Huguenot soldier poet called Agrippa d'Aubigne. These, Mr Honneyman says, have either been lost or were destroyed by Shakespeare to cover up his tracks.
Methinks I hear the whirring of the Shakespeare academic machine as it prepares to spew out a thousand theses rebutting Mr Honneyman.
I see that Honor Bright (Elo Publicatons) by my old friend, nonagenarian John Finegan, has gone into a second printing. Like many Irish people of his generation, John was always fascinated by the murder of the 25 year old Honor at Ticknock in 1925, and his book racily documents the shock waves sent through polite Dublin society when the facts of her life were revealed in the ensuing court case.
Now some enterprising publisher should persuade John to write his memoirs from a lifetime of play going (including decades as theatre critic of the Evening Herald), he knows more about theatre in this country than anyone else I've ever met. Over the years, his friends have constantly suggested such a book, but he has always been too modest to countenance the idea.