Grim themes for grim times

Loose Leaves: Leafing through the book catalogues and trying to spot themes and trends for the literary year ahead is one of…

Loose Leaves: Leafing through the book catalogues and trying to spot themes and trends for the literary year ahead is one of the pleasures of summer.

Sadly, predictably - and appropriately - there is plenty of debate forthcoming on the grim state the world is in. With a new secretary-general to be appointed to the United Nations this autumn, the world's frustration that the UN isn't doing more to stem the tide of violent current events is up for scrutiny in a number of books.

Adam LeBor, central Europe correspondent of the London Times, will argue in Complicity With Evil: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide (Yale University Press, November) that the UN must return to its founding principle of protecting humanity and take a moral stand by setting the agenda of the Security Council, instead of merely following the lead of the major powers.

Also in November, in The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power (Bloomsbury), James Traub will look at how, after the invasion of Iraq, the focus was on whether the 60-year-old UN experiment of global policing had outlived its usefulness. "Do its failures arise from its own structure and culture, or from a clash with an American administration determined to go its own way in defiance of world opinion?" Traub asks.

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The US itself also continues to be under scrutiny. In Uncouth Nation, by Andrei S Markovits (Princeton University Press, February 2007), the subject is the breadth and depth of the anti-Americanism that has swept Europe in recent years. "Europeans are joining in an even louder chorus of disdain for America - for the first time anti-Americanism has become a European lingua franca." This quote gives a flavour of a book that promises to explain how Europe's aversion to the US has been catapulted into overdrive by George W Bush's policies.

Trying to track the runaway terror threat remains a consuming theme. Tackling it from a different angle, two American constitutional legal scholars Jules Lobel and David Cole will offer Less Safe, Less Free: Why We Are Losing the War on Terror. (The New Press, March 2007). Attacking the Bush administration's pre-emptive strategy on terror - including invading Iraq when it posed no imminent threat to the US and in defiance of the the wishes of most of the world - the authors argue that this strategy has, ironically, made the US more susceptible, not less, to future terrorist attacks. Lobel and Cole suggest an alternative strategy in which the rule of law is seen as an asset, not an obstacle, as the US faces up to new threats.

The Iraq books continue to come too, from Nobody Told Us We Were Defeated: Stories from the New Iraq, by Rory McCarthy, just out from Chatto, to Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Allen Lane, September), in which Thomas

E Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent with the Washington Post, aims to give "a chilling picture of the deceit , stupidity, wishful thinking, lack of forward planning and total intellectual failure of those behind the invasion".

And as the grim global tableau darkens further, courtesy of events in Lebanon, no doubt the Middle East, never off the publishers' lists, will be the subject of more studies, analysing what is happening and how it can be stopped.

At home with our poets

Poets reading especially for readers and listeners in their own homes - or wherever you like, for that matter? It's a reality now in the case of poets in the Dedalus Press stable, as their publishing house puts its archive online via a new audio room on its website

Fergus Allen, Pat Boran, Pádraig J Daly, Thomas Kinsella, James J McAuley, Iggy McGovern, Gerry Murphy, John O'Donnell, Gerard Smyth, Mutsuo Takahashi, Macdara Woods and Enda Wyley can all be listened to now, or downloaded for later.

The Dedalus innovation will also provide an invaluable new dimension on the Irish Studies front, particularly for fans and scholars in far-flung parts who aren't able to hear public poetry readings by the standing army of poets on their native soil. www.dedaluspress.com. Details from editor@dedaluspress.com

Story time

RTÉ Radio 1 is calling for original short stories for the 2006 RTÉ Radio 1 Francis MacManus Short Story Competition. On offer are prizes of €3,000 for the overall winner, with €2,000 and €1,000 for the second and third prize-winning entries. The work of the three prizewinners, plus a selection of the shortlisted stories, will be broadcast in 2007.

The closing date for entries is October 30th. A copy of the competition's rules and regulations and an entry form can be obtained by sending a stamped addressed envelope to RTÉ Radio 1 Short Story Competition, RTÉ Radio Centre, Dublin 4 or by going to www.rte.ie/radio1/francismacmanus