FROM OUR ARCHIVES: It seems a fitting time to declare that there is nothing out there as potent as black comedy to capture the absurdity of life in our time.
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If we were to be honest, most of us could fit this description: XYZ is a cranky perfectionist. Obsessively revises everything she/he writes. Agonizes over every damn word. Is a ...
We are, as writers, the solar collector, the hybrid engine: we take energy from what surrounds us or our remembering of surroundings
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Vesna Main’s latest novel, Good Day?, is a masterpiece of understatement and inquiry into intimacy, fidelity, memory, and the business of fiction itself
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With over thirty contributions from as many writers, Common People shines a light on the huge diversity of people in the United Kingdom and celebrates this richness loudly.
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Sparkes and Hilaire have divided in two the work of unearthing and voicing by location, with Sparkes taking North and Hilaire the South of London, demarcated by the river that ...
In “The Choke” characters are trapped by circumstances, doomed to repeat the mistakes of previous generations, as they bid to break free from a cycle of poverty, addiction and violence. ...
In her collection of essays, At Home in the New World, Maria Terrone explores the world through the lens of an Italian-American New Yorker.
This
is a ...
What, a friend who came to visit me asked, is a writing group?
It’s just like a barn, I said. Horses.
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Food is a byword for class, loss, happiness, and a minefield of potential gaffes for the culturally uninitiated.
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The backdrops are real and effectively drawn but it is in charting the contours of the human condition that McNamara succeeds with skilful interpretation.
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The author who would become known internationally as Joseph Conrad was born in 1857 in northern Ukraine, a region home to a significant community of ethnic Poles. ...
In this book Gordon takes five women writers who battled against the social norms and takes us behind the characters they created
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These poems and prose poems are not simply love letters to loyal companions; instead the reader is presented with Blakeian explorations into perspectives: the points of view of animals, their ...
Meet you. You are the hero of Mr. Either/Or, a story told in second person, which creates the feel of a choose-your-own-adventure novel.
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Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich’s latest novel…takes the idea of a ‘retrieval of history’ seriously – not just in its pale liberal version (‘memory’), but as the ...
In the beginning Samuel Orr and Anna Stuart, two of the main protagonists of this novel, have nonchalant sex in Belfast. Lots of nonchalant sex. On the sly. In her ...
The beating heart of these poems is music, not least because of the poet’s own cross-genre creative output and a song’s uncanny ability to situate the reader immediately in a ...
At home I was stubborn and irrational, rejecting all the evidence that would contradict the one belief in which I had invested myself.
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She is right; research can be a double-edged sword. Too little of it and you are left with sketchy facts and errors that weaken your plot’s credibility. ...
