A graduate of Northwestern University, Attica Locke was a Fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmakers Lab. She has been a scriptwriter for Paramount, Warner Bros, Twentieth Century Fox, HBO and Dreamworks, and is currently a writer and producer on the Fox drama Empire. Locke’s focus is African-American cultural and political history and her 2010 Read More
Christopher Reid is a big tease. The titles of all 73 poems in his latest collection, The Curiosities, begin with the letter “C”. There’s a wide range of subjects covered between The Contents and The Credits but you won’t actually find THAT c-word in amongst “The Calabash”, “The Collarbone”, “The Celibate”, “The Canoodling”, “The Cufflinks” Read More
The possessing of multiple selves is a theme regularly explored in both psychology and in literature. For the most part, the issue has been treated formally; however this is not the case in Me, Me and Not Me by Tony Frisby. It is a text that, despite its important subject matter, still manages to retain Read More
With 24 hours to go until her daughter Agustina’s wedding, Constanza finds a spot of mildew like substance on her inner thigh. She does an internet search to try and discover what it is and the apparent normality of this reaction belies the truth of the mildew, which, like many aspects of this novel, may Read More
Somerset-born Avril Joy has chosen Depression-era Arkansas as a setting for this her second novel. Joy’s previous work includes the 2007 novel, The Sweet Track, and several short stories, some of which have been shortlisted for awards such as the Bridport and the Raymond Carver Short Story prize. She won the inaugural Costa Short Story Read More
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is a science-fiction novel set in a distant future where humans have reached out beyond our solar system and joined the larger galactic community. It follows the interspecies crew of the industrial ship Wayfarer as they seek their fortune building a wormhole highway to a mysterious and Read More
The car hire company bestows upon you the great gift of abandoning you to the airport overnight. Returned to the eternal striplights of your early travels, you wrap your head in the checkered pakama, place the green Ethiopian Airways eyemask on your face, and insert the orange earplugs which can’t quite block the music of Read More
Not for Andy Jackson the esoteric or the pastoral lark ascending, it is realism that is essential to his work. Jackson has been published in a wide range of magazines and periodicals and had his first collection, The Assassination Museum, published in 2010, also by Red Squirrel Press. In this his second collection, Jackson takes Read More
This book deserves a review other than this one. I must not be its ideal reader. The author, Gillian Rose (1947-1995) was a philosopher, schooled at Oxford, who last held a position as Professor of Social and Political Thought at the University of Warwick. I briefly looked at her book Dialectic of Nihilism (1984) while Read More
Book jackets are interesting indeed, ideally giving generously before even a word inside is seen. Madeline von Foerster’s arresting tempera panel Invasive Species II makes an apt introduction to the complex nature of Caitríona O’Reilly’s third collection, Geis. On the back cover, Patrick Crotty, in The Irish Times, praises The Nowhere Birds (Bloodaxe 2001), shortlisted Read More