A journalist and published poet, Ukrainian writer Liubov Holota became a Shevchenko Laureate after receiving the Shevchenko Premier for her debut novel Episodic Memory. Framed by the forty day vigil for her dead mother, the novel sets up vignettes of one woman’s childhood in the Ukrainian Steppe in the 1950s. Holota’s novel is fully transportive Read More
Having been declared a ‘prodigy’ following her first publication in the New Yorker (1992), Heiny has finally delivered her long-awaited debut collection ‘Single, Carefree, Mellow.’ This collection is populated by middle class New York women, most of whom are striving for success in their lovers’ beds rather than in their work. The majority have embarked Read More
Increasingly, the passive voice in poetry tends to receive bad press. Some particularly ferocious critics are keen to strike out its very existence in verse. Like most polemics, the rhetoric contains truths and interesting pointers to alert the unwary. Also like most polemics, we might not always want to take such an extreme line. What Read More
The author, Nils Schou, a television writer and novelist from Copenhagan, engaged in correspondence with J.D. Salinger, and this was the inspiration for his distinctly Danish feeling novel Salinger’s Letters. The book follows Dan Moller, a writer and trained dentist. Moller has suffered from depression since childhood, a condition that has shaped and defined Read More
Homer’s epic has always prompted strong responses ever since its first appearance during Greece’s archaic period. Poets and playwrights ransacked it for stories in the later centuries BCE (Before the Common Era). The process continued through the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance, on through the various literary Augustan, Romantic, Victorian and Modernist periods, and Read More
Ravaged by grief, Scottish couple John (Paul Higgins) and Karen (Kate Dickie) go feral in the French Pyrenees after losing their son in Tom Green’s suspenseful thriller, Couple in a Hole. Leaving the technology and pressures of civilisation for the calm of the forest is hardly a new concept in cinema (Into the Wild, Antichrist, Read More
It seems that any filmmaker taking on the task of telling their story through one ambitious and seamless take will now, inevitably, have their film compared to Birdman, be labelled a gimmick, or both. Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria has fallen prey to both critiques and comparisons. However, while Victoria shares Birdman’s impeccably sensitive and intelligent camera-work, traces Read More
The cityscape of Cork, in which Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies finds itself unfolding, is a paradoxical M.C. Escheresque backdrop. This is the debut of a seasoned and celebrated blogger, the ‘sweary-lady’ (as McInerney titles herself), and while her first expedition into extended prose fiction comes with a few teething problems, the novel finds itself Read More
This is the first novel by Robyn Cadwallader, an Australian Medieval Scholar who has won several prizes and awards for poetry, short stories and reviews. She has also published a non-fiction book, based on her PhD. The novel is set in the thirteenth century, in an English village. In the Middle Ages, an Anchoress was Read More