The Dublin Review is an excellently edited and curated quarterly of essays and original fiction that’s been edifying the city and beyond for over two decades now. It’s a quiet, intellectually hefty presence, that manages to be both high-minded and kind of scrappy, muscling into the company of grander literary magazines with its understated design and roll call of Irish literary heavyweights. In short, it’s a brand that already has a grip on me.
Its podcast iteration has been around since February 2020, as though to presciently establish itself just in time for a moment when podcasting collided with a pandemic and came out a winner. Since then it has settled into what appears to be largely a monthly format – give or take the occasional hiatus – with to date 22 episodes released, not including recordings of the annual live Conversations event the magazine also produces.
It’s a simple format: each episode centres on an essay or piece of fiction from a past edition of the magazine. The author is interviewed by writer Aingeala Flannery before being invited to read the work being discussed, after which Flannery often returns with some questions, and lo, some 50 minutes pass, the listener immersed in the suddenly generous subjects of night gyms or panic-inducing moths or internet addiction.
Flannery is a well-read, inviting interviewer, apt for this format: she knows how to ask the kind of exploring questions that expand our understanding of both the writing process and product. She is grounded and explicit – allowing the writers to take the offered rope and tie their own elegant and elaborate knots with it – without ever coming across as fawning.
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The context offered in the preamble to the readings proper is helpful, particularly if you’ve first encountered these works on the page: if you’re one of those virgin territory types (like me, alas) who prefers to dive into untouched waters, you might want to crack the print spines first. But what pleasure there is in hearing these authors read their own works, their voices finding the cadences they created and delivering them to each earbudded audience of one.
Kevin Barry talking about his 2012 essay on his concerns about digital connectivity 10 years after its original publication; Róisín Kiberd on the strange compulsions of night gym attendance; Mark O’Connell on fears of flying things; Niamh Campbell on the delights of the C-word: there are so many colourful gems here, making for a personal treasure of a story time with some of the greatest contemporary Irish minds.
If podcasts had spines, these episodes would line up nicely on your shelf and attest to your erudition. As a whole, the Dublin Review Podcast is the kind of stately audio offering that compels the listener to slow down; no having-the-chats-ness, no zingers, no staccato subject changes. Rather, this is a thoughtful offering, a pace changer packed with the kinds of musings that require of the writer and the listener time. Give it that, and you’ll be better for it.
