23rd July 2024
‘The Coming Thing is a complex book… the heightened brevity of its compressed form hits the reader with the full blast of joy and angst that characterise Imelda’s life as we buzz through the pages high on mad panicked anxiety, vicariously sipping Dubonnet and slugging bottles of Stag and Benylin cough mixture.’
13th June 2024
‘Klein’s book also tells us that fear is a trap; what we cannot push away, into a shadow self, we must integrate instead, learning uncomfortable truths about ourselves in the process. What if we stop seeing the doppelganger as the enemy, and start thinking of them as a part of ourselves, gone rogue after years of being neglected and ignored?’
8th May 2024
‘Sensationalised TV dramas may seem to have cornered the mainstream market for depictions of the Dublin underclass Karl Parkinson writes about. But Parkinson’s underrated story collection provides a different window into this world, with stories that portray nihilistic violence and addiction as universal themes, best grasped through visionary poetry and myth.’
11th April 2024
'The four Irish books I have chosen from last year reminded me, in different ways, that what we say is always tied to where and when we say it.'
19th March 2024
'In this respect, The Maniac is as much about the present as the past [...] Von Neumann’s delusions, filtered kaleidoscopically via the imagined reminiscences of those who knew him, prefigure the madcap fantasies of today’s transhumanists, accelerationists and techno-optimists.'
16th January 2024
‘If Nomenclature, principally comprised of Brand’s previous collections, is fundamentally a recollection of things past, it is also a timely reiteration of the need for different futures.’
30th November 2023
‘Their anti-Wild Women narrators yearn to return to society, to recover full citizenship there. They are aware that they had something once, and that they have lost it.’
25th October 2023
New fiction explores existential longing with K-pop and cephalopods.
Gustav Parker HibbettCriticism
27th September 2023
‘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.’
30th August 2023
‘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.’