15th November 2023
‘Words slip on each other, he had thought. We get out from under what we know, we fail to get out from what we think. We never discover what thinking is.’
1st November 2023
A story by Maeve Brennan to mark her 30th anniversary: ‘All that night, she lay awake in a panic, thinking of ways to break with him. It would be heartless to tell him straight out that she had no use for him.’
13th 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.’
9th August 2023
‘When I developed my illness and could no longer work, he took pity on me and gave me a room and an allowance.’
19th July 2023
‘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.’
21st June 2023
A story from Mary O’Donoghue’s new collection, The Hour After Happy Hour.
1st March 2023
‘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.’
2nd February 2023
‘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.’
14th December 2022
‘Something always came down like a guillotine to split her life in two, so that on one side was happiness, and on the other, the present.’
9th November 2022
‘This was in Montpellier, in 2012. He was a legionnaire from Birmingham; his reclaimed name was Roger, and he was the most intelligent murderer I have ever met.’