LooseLeaves: "I'm not interested in the public eye, but I'm interested in the public ear, and I want our writers to fill it with brilliant sentences," was one of the great sayings of legendary New York Review of Books (NYRB) co-editor and founder Barbara Epstein, who died last week.
Not inappropriately she died on an iconic date - June 16th, Bloomsday. She was 77 and died of lung cancer.
A great guiding spirit at the NYRB for more than 40 years, her co-editor Robert Silvers said that of the thousands of articles published by the fortnightly magazine over the years she contributed something to every one - and was entirely responsible for many. "Gallant, imaginative, original, affectionate" were just some of the ways Silvers, who will continue as editor, remembered her. Recalling her "strong moral and political concern to expose and remedy injustice," he said she had largely created the NYRB and what it stands for.
Top-quality journalism doesn't have many standard bearers as bright as Epstein. Editing was her passion. She hardly ever wrote herself and was proud of the magazine's relentless stance against the war in Iraq, particularly given the acquiescence in much of the mainstream US media. She also loved encouraging - and developing - young writers. The dinner party in 1962 (attended by her husband, publisher Jacob Epstein, and writers Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, then married to each other), at which the idea arose to found what was to become one of the most influential literary journals of the age, must be up there with the most influential dinner parties of all time. And - contributors to these pages please note - so hungry were the literati for an outlet such as the NYRB that at the start many wrote for it for free.
The poet and the piper
Tourists who come to our shores convinced life in Ireland means music and verse on tap all day will be certain this is the case if they wander down Temple Bar in Dublin tomorrow night. As part of this year's 2006 Diversions festival in the area, poet Seamus Heaney and uilleann piper Liam O'Flynn will be performing outdoors together at 8pm in Meeting House Square. Gráinne Millar, head of cultural development with the Temple Bar Cultural Trust, is right when she says it's a rare opportunity to see two of Ireland's top performers in a concert combining poetry and music. And to celebrate Temple Bar's 15th anniversary as a cultural quarter, it's free whereas, says Millar, tickets for The Poet and the Piper would normally be €120.
Tickets from the Temple Bar Cultural Information Centre, 12 East Essex Street, Temple Bar. Tel: 01-6772255. www.templebar.ie
Swansong at the Arts Centre
The big guns are being brought on by Poetry Ireland to mark the closing down of the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre on Dublin's Foster Place, one of the most lamentable events in years on the literary and artistic landscape of the city. Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan will give a valedictory reading there on Tuesday, July 4th, at 7pm, and admission is free.
Boland, who teaches at Stanford University in California, is making another welcome appearance on the Irish scene next Wednesday at 8pm when she will be in conversation with RTÉ presenter and producer Kay Sheehy in the National Library of Ireland as part of its Library Late series, billed as sessions in which the audience gets to "hear great writers speak their minds." Admission is free but booking is essential. Tel: 01-6030271.
New writing prize
Novelist and short story writer Colum McCann is to judge the inaugural Stinging Fly Prize, an annual award for new writing which the periodical is running in association with the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. The prize of €1,000 and a residency at the writers' and artists' retreat in Co Monaghan will go to a writer whose poetry or fiction has been included in one of the three issues of The Stinging Fly published each year, and who has not published a book. The winner will be announced in November.
Meanwhile, the summer 2006 issue of The Stinging Fly - called "These Are Our Lives" - a special all-fiction issue - is an anthology of 22 new short stories. Contributors include Kevin Barry, Claire Keegan, Toby Litt, Martin Malone, Nuala Ní Chonchúir and Philip Ó Ceallaigh. It will be launched at the James Joyce House of the Dead, 15 Usher's Island, Dublin 8, the setting for Joyce's short story The Dead, on July 5th at 6.30pm.