There’s an Oulipian game I like to play when reviewing the work of young female Irish writers: can I avoid any reference to Sally Rooney? To my mind, it’s reductive to…
book review
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Adrian Duncan’s new novel is his fourth book in four years (I’ll have whatever he’s having). His 2019 debut, Love Notes from a German Building Site, which won the inaugural John McGahern Book…
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The first short story Shirley Hazzard ever wrote was plucked from the slush pile of the New Yorker by William Maxwell, the magazine’s long-standing fiction editor. Maxwell, who would go on…
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Phil Klay’s first novel takes a line from Seamus Heaney’s ‘Kinship’ as an epigraph: “Report us fairly, how we slaughter / for the common good.” It’s a theme continued…
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The unnamed narrator of A Luminous Republic believes in bad omens. On arriving in a new city with his family for a civil service post…
Many of the stories in Emma Cline’s provocatively titled short-story collection feature older men whose stars are fading, numbing themselves from the world’s increasing indifference to their influence with booze, pills…