Image by Abdul Bacet ‘This operation is important to us. Very important. Even more important than lessons, homework, or solving riddles. We can’t mess this up, because Ziwar’s fate is at stake.’
On this month’s episode, host Nicole Flattery is joined by Ella Gaynor to read from and discuss her essay ‘What About Rain?’ from Issue 53 Volume Two, the climate issue.
‘Thing’ is a broad, elusive category for Erpenbeck: a thing may be a kitchen table or a thing may be, say, the ‘Middle of Nowhere’ or 'The Simple Life'. In these essays, things are always and never specific, always cyclical and changing, always returning in new forms.
On this month’s episode, our poetry editor, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, is joined by Simon Costello and Jane Robinson who read and discuss their poems from Issue 53 Volume Two, the climate issue.
‘I could have no quarrel with the original jury’s verdict, or so Farrington told me anyway. Agent McNally was as dead as dead could be, and by my hand.’
On this month’s episode, host Nicole Flattery is joined by magazine editor Lisa McInerney and former non-fiction editor Róisín Kiberd to discuss putting together The Stinging Fly Issue 53 Volume Two, the climate issue.
Image by Abdul Bacet ‘This operation is important to us. Very important. Even more important than lessons, homework, or solving riddles. We can’t mess this up, because Ziwar’s fate is at stake.’
‘I could have no quarrel with the original jury’s verdict, or so Farrington told me anyway. Agent McNally was as dead as dead could be, and by my hand.’
‘On another night she might join the card game, but she didn’t have it in her to be sociable this evening, to be the carefree Irish girlfriend who loved a party, who smiled at their stories from home as if she recognised the places and people alternately lauded and reviled within.’
‘He still looks like a normal human in front of her, albeit with a well-fitted coat, suited to his frame, to his needs. What does he do in summer, she wonders, what does he do in changing rooms? What does he do in bed? What if he rolls over and kills it?’
‘If you’re going to be a novelist, you write something that is recognisably a novel and that means accepting at least some and probably most of the rules of novels, which include some form of plot and setting because there is nothing without time and space, and some form of narrative because that’s how it is, that’s why readers and writers turn up.’
'Swallows are everywhere. Golondrinas, I say to myself and remember the day on the balcony when Pilar taught me that word. She used to praise them for eating the mosquitos in summer. The balcony, with its view over the town and valley, the factories and slaughterhouses, el río Cinca, and its dry tributary el río Sosa. High on the hill above us, the castle.'
3rd April 2026
10th March 2026
Image by Abdul Bacet ‘This operation is important to us. Very important. Even more important than lessons, homework, or solving riddles. We can’t mess this up, because Ziwar’s fate is at stake.’
‘I could have no quarrel with the original jury’s verdict, or so Farrington told me anyway. Agent McNally was as dead as dead could be, and by my hand.’
‘On another night she might join the card game, but she didn’t have it in her to be sociable this evening, to be the carefree Irish girlfriend who loved a party, who smiled at their stories from home as if she recognised the places and people alternately lauded and reviled within.’