It was a good week for academic authors, with UCD's Emilie Pine winning the An Post Irish Book of the Year Award for her wonderful essay collection, Notes to Self, while The Cut Out Girl by Prof Bart van Es of Oxford University won the 2018 Costa Book of the Year.
To mark James Joyce’s birthday on February 2nd, a group of enterprising students from his alma mater, UCD, invented Publiners, a literary pub crawl of hostelries namechecked in Dubliners. Read James Patterson’s account of this “boozier Bloomsday organised by the cast of The Inbetweeners” online tomorrow.
Saturday’s books pages feature a literary guide to middle age by Anne O’Neill; an essay by The Last author Hanna Jameson on the pernicious myth of the suffering artist and the links between poverty and poor mental health; the return of the books quiz; and a new poem by Enda Wyley in memory of Pearse Hutchinson.
Reviews include Karlin Lillington on Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Surveillance Valley: the Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine; John Self on Tamarisk Row and Border District by Gerald Murnane; Laurence Marley on A New History of the Irish in Australia; Houman Barekat on Godsend by John Wray; Tara McEvoy on Quicksand Tales by Keggie Carew; Jaki McCarrick on Why Iris Murdoch Matters; Paschal Donohoe on In Search of Isaiah Berlin; Tommy McKearney on The Negotiators’ Cookbook by Gerry Adams; Éilís Ní Dhuibhne on The Trumpet Shall Sound by Eibhear Walshe; Rob Doyle on Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by RJ Hollingdale; Sarah Gilmartin on The Familiars by Stacey Halls; and Sara Keating on the best new children’s books.
If all that weren’t enough, you can also buy Too Close to Breathe by Olivia Kiernan with your Irish Times purchase for just €4.99 at any Eason branch, a saving of €4.
