‘With this strikingly intimate approach, we are invited into Sharpe’s project of sifting through the frustrations, the injustices, ‘the wake’ of Black life in order to better spend time with the beauty of Blackness, to explore the quiet of Black interiority that so often goes ignored or unremarked.’
‘I watch myself and I know what I’m thinking. I watch myself and I also know what I’m not thinking. I watch myself and I know I’m thinking, a week ago we were together in that little cottage on the farm in Wales, and now she’s in A&E in the hospital down the road and I’m sitting here waiting for her laundry to finish.’
‘Thinking about friendship now, I think about the ways in which we are able to do things with others that we could never do on our own. The way that friends drag unknown parts out of our bodies, allowing us to be braver than we can feel by ourselves.’
‘The contemporary novel form appears, increasingly, to be the domain of slim, introspective works. The appearance of a sprawling novel like The Bee Sting seems significant.’
Nicole Flattery is joined by writer Kevin Power to read and discuss Eimear Ryan’s short story, ‘Body Clock’.
‘I watch myself and I know what I’m thinking. I watch myself and I also know what I’m not thinking. I watch myself and I know I’m thinking, a week ago we were together in that little cottage on the farm in Wales, and now she’s in A&E in the hospital down the road and I’m sitting here waiting for her laundry to finish.’
‘When I developed my illness and could no longer work, he took pity on me and gave me a room and an allowance.’
‘In the early days, people told me my disease disgusted them. They didn’t say it in those words—they used phrases like ‘I hope this email finds you well,’ but the implications were clear enough.’
A story from Mary O’Donoghue’s new collection, The Hour After Happy Hour.
‘I have a habit of telling stories too fast, expecting a coherent narrative to spring up from a few words flimsily strung together on a string. The problem is words words words. The more neatly I arrange them, the more they lose their flavour.’
‘I remember my uncle cutting his toe nails with a razor blade. I remember my father drunk from Sunday to Sunday. There has to be a monument to the failures as well.’
19th September 2023
15th September 2023
7th September 2023
‘I watch myself and I know what I’m thinking. I watch myself and I also know what I’m not thinking. I watch myself and I know I’m thinking, a week ago we were together in that little cottage on the farm in Wales, and now she’s in A&E in the hospital down the road and I’m sitting here waiting for her laundry to finish.’
‘Thinking about friendship now, I think about the ways in which we are able to do things with others that we could never do on our own. The way that friends drag unknown parts out of our bodies, allowing us to be braver than we can feel by ourselves.’
‘I was not an open-minded person when I first began to publish books. Writers befriended and accepted me with all my fundamentalist baggage. They gave me the time and space to change. They did not judge me.’