LooseLeaves Caroline WalshSummer isn't here yet and already news of books to come makes one yearn for autumn.
This was brought on by news that the maestro Richard Ford (right) who, in 1992, edited and introduced his Granta Book of the American Short Story with stories by Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver and dozens of others, has another one in the pipeline. In the 15 years since publication of that definitive collection, he has been reading new stories and re-reading old ones and his New Granta Book of the American Short Story will be out in November. The anthology, including more than 40 writers, will have stories he was sorry he overlooked last time - and ones by a new generation of writers such as Deborah Eisenberg and Nell Freudenberger. None of the stories was in the first volume, though a few of the writers were.
Also worth waiting for will be Ford's introduction on how a good story is made - by a writer who knows all about it and who thinks of the short story as the high-wire act of literature. "They persuade us that the human beings they show us can be significantly known on the strength of rather slight exposure; and they make us believe that entire lives can change (turn on a dime, so to say) on account of one little manufactured moment of clear-sightedness." Ford's own short story collections include Rock Springs, Women with Men and A Multitude of Sins. In 1999 he edited The Granta Book of the American Long Story. Among the writers who'll be in the new book are Ann Beattie, Louise Erdrich, Edward P Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore, Flannery O'Connor, ZZ Packer and Tobias Wolff. Roll on November.
Meanwhile, Ford will be in Dublin next month to read at the Abbey Theatre on June 6th. It's free but booking is essential. Tel: 01-8787222.
Lucia's Bloomsday
The idea of people dressed up as Leopold and Molly Bloom on Bloomsday standing around the grave of Lucia Joyce (right) in Kingsthorpe cemetery in Northampton, where she died in 1982 after years in St Andrew's mental hospital, sounds incongruous with her sad life. That is, until you talk to the event's organiser, Peter Mulligan, an Irishman who has lived in the English city for 32 years. "The concept is that the Joyce family, like a lot of Irish people in Northampton, left Ireland for a better life elsewhere and we see Lucia as a focus for that. We relate her life to the Irish diaspora of which she was a part."There are usually up to 30 people at the event, singing Love's Old Sweet Song around her grave. This coming June 16th - a Saturday - will be the fourth Bloomsday his group, the Irish Community Arts Project, will be spending at the grave, which they look after throughout the year. "She's buried among east Europeans, Serbs and Yugoslavs, because she was born in Trieste. The nice thing is that she's near the grave of Donall Mac Amhlaigh [ author of The Irish Navvy: The Diary of an Exile] who lived all his life here working on the M1, M6 and Milton Keynes." To read Joyce-related papers, contact the project at pmcelt@aol.com. The event starts at 3pm.
New Ireland in London
"All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born." Yeats's famous lines from Easter 1916 seem as relevant to the changes taking place in Ireland today as they did almost a century ago, says Tony Murray, co-ordinator of a day-long event discussing the changed Ireland at London Metropolitan University's Irish Studies Centre (ISC) on the Holloway Road on Saturday, May 26th. The aim of the day school, titled Ireland in the New Millennium, is to investigate the social, economic, political and cultural changes and transformations Ireland has undergone, especially over the last 10 years. Details from www.londonmet.ac.uk/depts/hal/shortcourses
Silk, sages and Confucius
Any opportunity to browse in Marsh's Library in Dublin should not be missed and an exhibition that's open to the public was launched there this week. Land of Silk and Sages - an exhibition of early printed books on China by western travellers has a case devoted to Confucius; a section on Chinese medicine; illustrations on the silkworm and the making of silk; and a case devoted to the Jesuit mission in China. It's open weekdays (except Tuesdays), 10am-1pm and 2-5pm; Saturdays 10.30am-1pm.