Books

Picador to publish Sinéad Gleeson’s debut essay collection

Anyone who has read her Granta essays, ‘Blue Hills and Chalk Bones’ and ‘Second Mother’, will be impatient to read more

Sinéad Gleeson presents ‘The Book Show’ on RTÉ Radio and reviews for ‘The Irish Times’

Martin Doyle's face
Martin Doyle
Sat Nov 11 2017 - 06:00

Picador is to publish Sinéad Gleeson's debut essay collection, provisionally titled Constellations, in spring 2019. Gleeson presents The Book Show on RTÉ Radio and reviews for The Irish Times – read her review of Han Kang's The White Book on page 32.

Constellations will reflect her passionate interests: "the body, feminism, nature, art, illness, landscape, film, ghosts, colour, motherhood, ways of seeing". Anyone who has read Sinéad's Granta essays, Blue Hills and Chalk Bones, and Second Mother, will be excited and impatient to read more.

It was also announced recently that The Long Gaze Back, An Anthology of Irish Women Writers edited by Gleeson, is to be the Dublin: One City One Book choice for 2018. Published by New Island, the anthology spans four centuries and features some of Ireland's most gifted writers.

In the last of this week's Gleeson news, Sinéad interviews Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and of Manhattan Beach on November 17th at 7.30pm in the DLR LexIcon Library, Dún Laoghaire.

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Declan Burke, crime fiction author and Irish Times reviewer, and Red Dirt author Elizabeth Reapy have been appointed as Dublin City Writers in Residence for the year to September 2018. Dublin City Libraries have also produced a new poster in association with Swan River Press, to celebrate the work of 12 Irish writers of fantasy: Charles Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Fitz-James O'Brien, Charlotte Riddell, Bram Stoker, Lafcadio Hearn, Lord Dunsany, James Stephens, Dorothy Macardle, CS Lewis, Elizabeth Bowen and Mervyn Wall. Ask in your local library branch for a free copy.

Making Millions by Dublin author Erika McGann 1s the 2018 Citywide Reading for Children choice. This exciting adventure story about the Bubble Street Gang, the second in the series, is suitable for boys and girls aged 7-9 years.

The Broken Spiral: Short Stories for Healing in aid of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre is launched on November 15th in the Irish Writers Centre by Colm O'Gorman, executive director of Amnesty Ireland. The anthology includes work by Pat McCabe, Louise O'Neill, Mia Gallagher, June Caldwell, Colin Barrett, Sinéad Gleeson, Roisín O'Donnell, Rosaleen McDonagh and Claire Hennessy.

UCC’s School of English reading series begins on November 14th, with three of Ireland’s leading female crime writers, Julie Parsons, Liz Nugent and Alex Barclay, at 7pm in West Wing 6. Admission is free. Other readers coming up include Jane Urquhart, Roddy Doyle, E M Reapy, Carlo Gebler, Susan Phipps and Joseph O’Neill.

Edgar Award winning Belfast crime writer Adrian McKinty, doubtless still on a high after his month in the sun as October’s Irish Times Book Club chosen author, had another reason to celebrate this week. “Wow! My wife Leah has won the $10,000 2017 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Young Lions. Now we know who the real writer in the family is.”

Leah Garrett's Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel sounds fascinating. Revisiting bestselling works ranging from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and uncovering unknown archival material, it shows how Jews, once stigmatised as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American.

Lady Beth by Caroline E Farrell has won the Carousel Novel Award 2017. Judge Louise Phillips called it "a thrilling journey into a dangerous world fuelled with tension and high stakes. It delivers exceptional characters and terrific prose within a page-turning unrelenting story that digs deep into the underbelly of our capital city."

The Accidental Pirate by Denise Deegan is one of seven finalists for Publishers Weekly's 2017 BookLife Prize.