End of an epic wait:A new novel by Dermot Healy doesn't come along that often, so news that one is imminent is doubly welcome.
His last one, Sudden Times(1999), is to be followed this October by Long Time, No See, published by Faber. Billed as an epic in miniature, peopled with a cast of innocents and broken misfits, its central character is a young lad, Mister Psyche, growing to maturity in an isolated corner of the Irish north-west and hanging out with men 40 years older than himself. For once, the term "long-awaited" is the apt and only way to describe a writer's return to the fiction fray.
The following month, November, sees another new Irish novel from Faber that will also be intriguing. Northerner Eoin McNamee is returning to the territory of his 2001 novel, The Blue Tango. Orchid Blueis set in 1961, when the body of murdered 19-year-old Pearl Gambol is discovered the day after a dance at Newry Orange Hall. A man is charged, but – and here's the surprise – presiding over the case is none other than Lord Justice Curran, whose own 19-year-old daughter, Patricia, was murdered nine years previously, his family's tale being told in Booker-longlisted The Blue Tango. Talk about returning to the scene of the crime.
Pen gets mightier
Ireland's association of writers, Irish Pen, has decided to weigh in to the discussion on the plight of the nation and has organised a debate, The Arts and the Economy, to take place in Dublin on April 15th. Among the panellists will be: cultural commentator and chair of Anglo-Irish literature and drama at UCD, Declan Kiberd; Aidan Burke of the Arts Council; Gerry Godley, spokesman for the National Campaign for the Arts (NCFA); and Claire Doody, of Cultural Odyssey, which was set up by Dermot Desmond after the Global Irish Economic Forum in Farmleigh last year.
Author and Irish Pen committee member Marita Conlon-McKenna said it was fitting, in the present climate, that Pen would offer a platform for engagement with ideas on how the arts could respond to our current economic ills.
The debate starts at 8pm on Thursday, April 15th, at the United Arts Club, 3 Upper Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin 2. To book, e-mail info@irishpen.com or telephone 087-9660770.
The short form in Cork
Appropriately, given that both are considered masters of the form, the short story will be central at the fourth annual Trevor/Bowen Summer School, which takes place from April 30th to May 2nd in Mitchelstown, Co Cork.
Lectures include Tom McAlindon on William Trevor; Eibhear Walshe on Elizabeth Bowen and Ireland in the 1950s; Bernard O'Donoghue on north Cork short story writers and poets; and a contribution by Heather Ingman, whose A History of the Irish Short Storywas published last year by Cambridge University Press. Writer Julian Gough, as well as reading his story, The Orphan and the Mob,which won the BBC National Short Story Award, will give a talk called Four Million Orphans: Irish Short Story Post-Catholicism. See mitchelstownliterarysummerschool.com for details.
Bookselling prized
Courageous, ethical, clever and an avid reader who consistently picks and sells good books, often from backlists and regardless of market trends – that’s how veteran publisher Michael O’Brien recently described John Cotter, presenting him with the O’Brien Press Bookseller of the Year Award 2010. Cotter, manager of the book department in the Book Centre, Waterford, and central buyer for Book Centre stores, has also worked in Hodges Figgis in Dublin and the Kinsale Bookshop.
