sadbh@irish-times.ie
It's rare to get such a clatter of thespians at a book launch as there was at the party to celebrate More Mischief in Dublin's Hughes & Hughes bookshop in the Stephen's Green Centre on Tuesday night. But then Kate Thompson, the author, is probably still best-known as the femme fatale of Glenroe, despite a writing career that took off in a big way with her last novel, It Means Mischief.
Old friend, actress Pauline McLynn was on hand to do the honours - "Ooo, now I can say I knew Kate when she was an actress," she grinned. Thompson, who has just signed a second two-book deal with Transworld as well as continuing with her Irish publishers, New Island Books, jokingly threatened to turn her attention to self-help manuals now that More Mischief is out of the way. Is The Glass Half Empty or Half Full? Who Cares, There's Another Bottle In The Fridge was a possible title being bandied around on the night.
The same night saw another book party, but surely one of the last of the summer. Young Lara Harte was in Waterstone's on Dublin's Dawson Street to read from her second novel, Losing It. Lara first shot to attention when she wrote her first book, First Time, between courses at UCD while still a teenager. Now at the ripe old age of 23, she has published her second with publishers Phoenix House of London.
Her editor, Christine Slenczka, made the trip over to introduce Lara's reading with grand praise for her "vivid language", while
Robert Caskie of Simpson Fox, Lara's London agents, also made the trip. Robert was able to combine the book party with meetings with Simpson Fox's other Irish clients - including Galway-based novelist Maggie Gibson. Simpson Fox also represents Neil Jordan who has recently commissioned playwright
Conor McPherson to write a screenplay for his new Dalkey-based production company, Company of Wolves.
The posthumous publication of a writer's work is always a contentious issue and a new work, Juneteenth by the late Ralph Ellison, looks to be no exception. Invisible Man, the author's first and only book, was published in 1957 and almost immediately became part of the canon. Although Ellison talked of a second work throughout his life, he had neither published nor shown his editor any drafts by the time of his death in 1994.
Juneteenth, then, is not a second novel but a selection of Ellison's papers and extracts from a proposed three-volume novel, which have been edited into novel form by John F. Callahan. Doubters are already gathering on the sidelines, including Prof Louis Menaud who wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "It seems unfair to Ellison to review a novel he did not write." If you want to decide for yourself, Juneteenth is published by Random House.
An interesting date for the diary this month is provided by Poetry Ireland and the Embassy of Israel who have invited the poet and translator Daniel Weissbort to read at the Winding Stair bookshop and cafe on Dublin's Ormond Quay on July 29th. Weissbort is the editor of the journal, Modern Poetry in Translation, and his trip to Ireland is to celebrate a recent issue of the journal which deals with modern Hebrew and Palestinian poetry. Kick-off for the reading is 8 p.m.
Gargoyle is the name of a hefty annual journal which has been going out from Washington DC and London since 1976 (with a small break in the early 1990s). On the contributors' list for this year's magazine which has just been published, a number of familiar names crop up. There is a poem called Beech- wood from playwright Dermot Bolger while London-based novelist and Dubliner Lana Citron publishes her poetry for the first time in the journal. Other Irish connections include a piece by photographer John Minihan about his work with Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs and Francis Bacon and a poem from Belfast-born Joe Cushnan whose contributor's note says rather endearingly "Career mainly in retailing".
Habitues of book launches tend to get rather familiar with the same old venues - bookshops, the National Museum, Newman House etc. However, the venue for the celebration of Moira Bowers's new book with Lilliput, Dublin City Parks & Gardens, was a new one on most of us. If you were in the vicinity of the North Circular Road on Wednesday, you probably saw several bookish gardeners wandering lonely as clouds, clutching a heavily annotated map of the area in search of The Sanctuary.
Even if you made it to the right building (Focus Housing) on the right street (Stanhope Green off Lower Grangegorman), there was still this set of instructions to be negotiated: "go through the reception foyer, through one set of double doors, turn to the right, go through another set of double doors, our door is second on the left." Still, such a hideaway seems a fitting launch venue for a book detailing the few urban spaces where you can still get away from it all.
Sadbh