LOOSE LEAVES:Small publishers everywhere should celebrate this week's news that the Stinging Fly Press's most recent publication, The China Factory, a short-story collection by Mary Costello, above, is one of 11 titles longlisted for the £10,000 Guardian First Book Award. The prize, in its 14th year, is open to all first-time writers in English, or translated into English; previous winners include Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Reviewing Costello’s stories for The Irish Times in April, Molly McCloskey wrote that “the very best of them have a dignity and a quiet confidence that bring to mind the stories of William Trevor”. The book’s success completes a comeback for Costello, who was first published in the Sunday Tribune in the 1990s but then waited 15 years to be published again, this time by the Stinging Fly magazine. The Stinging Fly Press, the book-publishing arm of the magazine, went into print for the first time in 2005 and has been notable for its story collections, including Kevin Barry’s debut, There Are Little Kingdoms.
If Costello is to win the Guardian award in November, she will have to hold off strong competition, including Chad Harbach’s baseball novel The Art of Fielding and US army veteran Kevin Powers’s Iraq novel The Yellow Birds. There are six works of fiction on the longlist, four of nonfiction and a poetry collection, Sarah Jackson’s Pelt, which was the nomination of the Guardian’s readers.
Meanwhile, the Stinging Fly magazine's summer 2013 edition will be its first all-translation issue, produced with the help of a literary translation agency, Parkbench Publishing Services. Editor Declan Meade is therefore asking translators to submit proposals for foreign-language work they would like to translate for inclusion. Ideas should reach the magazine by the end of September; for details, see stingingfly.org/about-us/submission-guidelines.
Last of the summer festivals
The Mountains to Sea literary festival in Dún Laoghaire ends tomorrow, but there are still events worth catching if you can, some of them free. In the Poetry Now strand, readers over the weekend include Louis de Paor, Mark Doty, Thomas Lynch, Paula Meehan and Macdara Woods, while at the Pavilion Theatre tomorrow afternoon's tribute to the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, the 2011 Nobel laureate, will include a panel discussion, a film and readings of Tranströmer's work by such luminaries as Seamus Heaney and Tess Gallagher. See mountainstosea.ie.
Elsewhere, next weekend will see a series of free workshops at the second Pen Fest, Carlow County Library's literary festival for aspiring writers. Executive librarian John Shortall promises "an array of literary talent whose sole focus will be on guiding emerging writers towards future success . . . Book a place now though, as all workshops will have limited capacity." Several forms will be covered, including poetry (with Iggy McGovern), screenwriting (Ferdia Mac Anna), writing for children (Herbie Brennan), and fiction (Liam Flood). See carlowlibraries.ie/penfest.html.
The final Ulytweet
Thanks again to all who took the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho at his word and tried to compress Joyce’s Ulysses into a tweet-length 140 characters, which is all Coelho believes that the novel’s content amounts to. The difficulty of the task has led to some slightly mangled language in a few of the contributions, but, happily, the final effort received was the clearest. So the last word goes to Alan Sheehy- Skeffington for this: “Stately plump person annoys aloof intellectual, sad adulterated Jew roams Dublin, they meet, carouse, discourse and part, Molly dreams, Yes.”
