“Sometimes the thoughts I could conjure up when my eyes were closed would frighten even me.” The word “fallow” refers to an area of uncultivated land: unseeded, empty, dormant. This proves a fitting title for Shand’s engrossing thriller. The novel reads likes a perverse retelling of stories like John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, or Read More
“The smell would have been there on the way back, too. It is the one constant. It connects the two things in Ann’s mind that she can’t manage to connect otherwise – the drive up the mountain and the drive back down.” Just like the eponymous state, Emily Ruskovich’s debut novel presents a false etymology: Read More
Sema Kaygusuz is critically acclaimed, award-winning, and described as one of Turkey”s leading female writers. She has written novels and screenplays, and The Well of Trapped Words is her most recent collection of short stories. The first story of the collection, “Zilşan’s Feet” sets the tone for the remaining pages. Kaygusuz delivers a description of Read More
The Outside Lands is an evocative and sensitive exploration of the quiet turmoil of self-discovery in 1960s America; it is beautiful and painful. Death intrudes on the lives of Jeannie and Kip when their mother is killed the same week JFK is assassinated. As the nation grieves for its President, Jeannie and Kip grieve for Read More
Michael Longley has been the recipient of some of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world, including the Whitbread, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and most recently the 2017 PEN Pinter Prize. Longley calls his home in Carrigskeewaun, Co Mayo his ‘soul-landscape’; the environment that feeds and inspires his soul. In Angel Read More
I cannot help but question: Does he know the Lord? … So what’s his life about? I want to know. “8” It seems misrepresentative to call this prize-winning début a “collection”. The word implies that each item within has distinctive merit to be effective in its own right. In the case of Apichella’s work, it Read More
At the intersection of poetry, philosophy, and psychoanalysis lies Nuar Alsadir’s Fourth Person Singular. The title is a play on words. If to speak in the third person is to speak removed from the situation, the proposed fourth expands on this separation This manifests in the dreamy detachment and self-reflective awareness that underlines the collection. Teetering in Read More
There is only one road, and there is no choice but to take it; to ride atop that stolen wagon straight down over the guilt and dirt and prejudice of an old town, and to stumble, hands and knees to the ground along Laird Hunt’s gravel road all the way to that 1930 Indianapolis lynching. Read More
TRADE, Hospitalfield’s Autumn Contemporary Art Programme, brings a powerful 2-screen video projection work entitled Nazhad and the Bell by Kurdish-Iraqi artist Hiwa K to a Scottish audience for the first time. Installed within Arbroath’s historic Arts & Crafts property, this is a rare opportunity to view the project – originally commissioned and shown at the Read More
This is Tara Bergin’s second poetry collection; her first, published in 2013, This is Yarrow, won the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine/Strong Award so it comes as no surprise that The Tragic Death of Eleonore Marx should excite much interest. Deservedly so, this is a collection from a unique poetic voice. Playful, dreamlike, with Read More