The short stories in Sarah Hall’s collection, Sudden Traveller (2019) at first seem vaguely disturbing. On closer examination, several of them turn out to be very disturbing indeed.| letter.talkaboutbooks.net
Last weekend, there should have been a newsletter post but I didn’t manage to write it because my attention was on other things. Having missed that post, I thought I’d just skip last week and send out the next post (probably about Sarah Hall’s short stories in Sudden Traveller) two weeks later, on 13 September. But I’ve changed my mind again. The main thing taking up my attention last week was the poetry of Andrew Marvell. I’ve been trying to turn my thesis into something publishabl...| Art Kavanagh
I’m feeling slightly guilty about having left you without a newsletter post at the weekend, so I thought maybe I should make up for it by suggesting some earlier posts in Talk about books that you might have missed first time or just might like to be reminded about. The following are some of my own favourites from the first year-and-a-half of the newsletter. See what you think. Reading Wuthering Heights with aphantasia When I first read Wuthering Heights I was in my 30s. More than 20 years ...| Art Kavanagh
Today’s newsletter post in Talk about books was meant to be about The Mill on the Floss, which I’ve just finished rereading but I didn’t manage to get the post written, for which I apologize.| letter.talkaboutbooks.net
Caoilinn Hughes’s two novels are quite different from each other and from her short stories. But both feature strained sibling and parental relations and show several different ways of dealing with the financial crash of 2008 and its devastating impact on Ireland.| letter.talkaboutbooks.net
Though Caoilinn Hughes’s short stories have won prizes, they have not been published in a collection. I list 8 stories that can be read online, and discuss 3 of them.| letter.talkaboutbooks.net
Caoilinn Hughes’s third novel is about four sisters who go to varying lengths to avoid each other’s solicitude, even when they might need it.| letter.talkaboutbooks.net
Art Kavanagh| letter.talkaboutbooks.net
Art Kavanagh| letter.talkaboutbooks.net
Each of Sally Rooney’s novels and several of her short stories feature a friendship or relationship across the class divide. One party is poor, the other well off. Her third novel is no different, except that there’s been a reversal of fortune.| letter.talkaboutbooks.net
Naoise Dolan’s first novel is among much else an exploration of language as both a medium of communication and a vast and complex human artefact. Her Substack reflects similar interests.| letter.talkaboutbooks.net
I had been vaguely aware of the name Mavis Gallant as a highly regarded writer of short stories but I hadn’t read any of her work until a little over a year ago, when I found a copy of her Overhead in a Balloon and Other Stories (Faber, 1989) on a seconhand books website. A few years earlier, I had thought that her stories were something I should look out for when Sinead Gleeson quoted a comment by Gallant from the preface to her Collected Stories (1950): Stories are not chapters of novels....| Art Kavanagh
The stories in Kate Atkinson’s 2002 collection, Not the End of the World, are linked or interconnected, but unusually closely.| letter.talkaboutbooks.net
Although Scott Turow’s novels have a number of common themes and tropes, each of them starts from a noticeably different place. The author goes to unusual lengths to avoid writing the same book twice.| letter.talkaboutbooks.net