LooseLeaves:Who says book reviews don't matter? Not Richard Ingrams of The Oldiemagazine, which has just launched a new publication, The Oldie Review of Books.
Basically a selective round-up of reviews from publications as wide apart as the Australian and the New Yorker, the idea is to select the best books of the last quarter and give a potted taste of what the reviewers said about them in an effort to help readers pick what suits them.
Then you can buy the books from The Oldie Bookshop in Eastbourne. Among the Irish-related titles included in the 60 featured in the first issue is Clair Wills's That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War (Faber) and William Trevor's Cheating at Canasta (Viking).
Irish Timesreviewers' verdicts are there too including Declan Burke on Michael Dibdin's End Games (Faber), which became the author's last Aurelio Zen mystery when he died after a short illness in Seattle earlier this year and Carlo Gébler on Bernard Cooper's memoir The Bill From My Father (Picador) which Gébler found an "extraordinary story . . . of a parental grotesque and the warped way he coped with pain". In his short editorial Ingrams says they've kept an eye out for the unusual, the unsung, the hidden gems while cruising the book pages for soundbites. Genres covered are biography, fiction, reprints, gardening, history, sport, memoir - and "Miscellaneous", that great catch-all.
Review junkies will enjoy this latest magazine on the block.
Poetic Argentina
The last 40 years of Argentinian poetry is the subject of a bilingual lecture being given in Dublin next week by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Fondebrider. Organised by Ireland Literature Exchange in association with the Cervantes Institute, it takes place on Wednesday at the institute on Dublin's Lincoln Place at 6.30pm.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1956, Fondebrider's most recent poetry collection, Los últimos tres años, came out last year. The author of La Buenos Aires ajena (2000), a history of the city as told by foreigners who visited it from the early part of the 16th century to 2000, and Versiones de la Patagonia (2003), a book about Patagonia, he also edited, with fellow Argentine poet Gerardo Gambolini, the first bilingual anthology of contemporary Irish poetry published in a Spanish speaking country, Poesía irlandesa contemporánea.
While in Dublin, Fondebrider and Gambolini, who is currently translating the stories of John McGahern into Spanish, will read with Irish poets Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Peter Sirr and Gerard Smyth in the Unitarian Church, 112 St Stephen's Green, on September 18th at 6.30pm. Then, on September 21st the Argentinians will read in Clifden Library as part of Clifden Arts Week.
Cronin for Ranelagh fest
The Ranelagh Arts Festival has a strong literary component this year one of the high points of which will be an interview with longtime Ranelagh resident Anthony Cronin. Talking to him will be writer Colm Tóibín who though not from the Dublin 6 village does live just down the road in Dublin 2. Cronin, who can now look back on a long career as a novelist, poet, biographer and chronicler of literary Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s, will be appearing in the Ranelagh Multi-denominational School on Wednesday, September 26th, at 8pm (€20/€12 for students, unwaged and OAPs). Two days later, on September 28th at 8pm there's a free event, Poetry Speakeasy, in the Eatery 120 Restaurant hosted by poet and novelist Anne Haverty, featuring Louise Callaghan, Tony Gilmore and other locals poets.
www.ranelagharts.org
Athlone honours Farrell
James T Farrell, originator of Studs Lonigan, may have been born in Chicago, but two of his grandparents came from Co Westmeath and he was largely reared by an Athlone woman hence the celebration of him at the forthcoming Athlone Literary Festival. When he was seven he was sent to stay for a while with Julia Browne, an Irish emigrant originally from Athlone. "He refused to come home and he grew up with her. His parents had a large family and poor enough circumstances and they accepted it," says George Eaton, chairman of the festival's committee. Now a lecture on Farrell is a central plank in the weekend event: on Saturday morning, September 22nd, in the Prince of Wales Hotel, Charles Fanning from Southern Illinois University, Chicago, will talk about Farrell's fiction including Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day and his evocations of Irish life on the south side of Chicago. The novelist's son, Kevin Farrell, will also speak. The previous night there will be a panel discussion on We are Now an Economy, Not a Society, with speakers including writer Kevin Myers and former TD Joe Higgins.