Irish Times Article on Sophie Bryant, August, 2016
Shauna Gilligan on The Reading Life, includes a link to her Q and A session
Fallen Beauty by Erika Robuck - 2014 - A Novel
Earlier this month I read Sisters of Night and Fog by Erika Robuck. Set largely in Europe during World War Two, it centers on the resitance activities of young English woman in recruited into The Special Operations Executive to fight The Nazis in France and an American woman with a French husband who helps downed fliers escape. They both end up in Sisters of Night and Fog by Erika Robuck - 2022 - A WW Two Novel - 2022
Based upon the experiences of renowned WWII SOE agents Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert, Sisters of the Night and Fog is set mostly in London, France and Germany during World War Two. Virginia is an American, from Florida, who against her family’s wishes elects to stay in Nazi occupied France. Events draw her into the resistance, she helps downed fliers get out of France, at great risk to herself and her husband. She loses her comfortable life as rationing gets worse. The search for food becomes never ending.
Violette is a 19 year old English woman, a crack shot and desperate to fight the Nazis any way she can. She ends up being recruited into the Special Operations Executive and trained for clandestine attacks on the Germans in France. The training is very tough but Viollétte ends up being dropped by parachute into Occupied France.
The two women are both captured and sent to the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.
There are lots of minor characters ranging
from Nazis, downed Fliers, fellow resistance fighters and family members of the women. All are marvelously done. The descriptions of Europe are very well done.
I was very glad when i was able to acquire her novel Fallen Beauty on sale as a Kindle. Set in a small town in upstate New York, it centers on the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Edna Saint Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 Rockland Maine to
October 19, 1950 Austerlitz, NY. 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) and a woman who becomes her seamstress and close friend. The novel begins in 1928.
Laura Kelly is an unwed mother in a time and place where this is a terrible scandal. Millay, living on a nearby fabulous estate maintains a live of sensual and sexual indulgence, married to a completely devoted man, who seeks new partners to inspire
the passions she needs to write. She is on a constant emotional roller coaster. Laura runs a seamstress shop, mostly just barely getting by, taking care of her beloved daughter Gabriel. In the minds of those in her town, she is a “Fallen Beauty”.
Through an intricate series of happenstances Lilly is engaged to make the gowns Millay will wear on her nationwide tours. They become close in a strange way. Gabriel calls Millay “The Witch Lady”. There are dramatic connections of all sorts complicating relationships.
Millay is potrayed very much as a demanding diva, taking as her near divine right to be worshipped. I concede at times she seemed overwrought.
For Lilly I enjoyed and was emotionally gratified by her close of narrative life.
I enjoyed Fallen Beauties a lot. The Kindle edition contains a bibliography on Millay, a list of Robuck’s favorite of her poems and an interview.
Robuck has five other works of historical fiction. I hope to read them all.
Mel Ulm
A post in observation of Irish Short Story Month 2022
“Don’t Start Reading This Story” - A Short Story by Pat O’Connor - from his collection People in My Brain - 2019
During Irish Short Story Month in March 2021 I read a very entertaining Short Story by Pat O’Connor”Advise and Sandwiches” from his highly regarded debut collection People in My Brain.
“Metafiction is a form of fiction which emphasizes its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the audience to be aware they are reading or viewing a fictional work..” Wikipedia
“Din’t Start Reading this Story” announces it self as a work of metafiction in the in which the purported author speaks to the reader. He tells us that it is to late for you to stop reading. The survival of a character is at stake. If you stop Reading, they disappear. Here stated by our slighly bellicose narrator is creed of post modern literary theory
“Now get this. This story is specifically for you. Yeah, you. If a story is properly written, everyone gets a different meaning from it, and what you’re reading here cannot be understood in the same way by anyone else.”
In a way this is saying if a story can mean anything then it means nothing. The creed is either absurd or trivial.
The narrator then attacks The reader. This story would be a very good choice for an advanced Class. I greatly enjoyed it.
“see you are still here. But you don’t like this involved writing, do you? You prefer that domesticated stuff – which is exactly why I have taken this action. How the hell is a writer ever to get a real live story read when people lap-up that safe crap that lies face-down on the page? It doesn’t involve real characters, let alone the reader. I mean involve, not interest.”
As the story goes on the narrator picks up his attack on the reader to personal insults.
As a work of metafiction my Reading of the story is to see it as a reductio
ad absurdum of rhe notion literature that art has no intrinsic meanings
My further take is to see the narrator as representing resentful writers who feel readers are not willing to put in the effort their work requires.
There are 13 more stories in People in my Brain.
.
From The author’s website. - http://patoconnorwriter.com/
Pat O’Connor lives in Limerick in the southwest of Ireland. He was a joint winner of the 2009 Best Start Short Story Competition in Glimmertrain, and in 2010 he was shortlisted for the Sean O’Faolain International Short Story Prize. In 2011, he was shortlisted for the RTE Francis MacManus Award for radio stories, and won the Sean O’Faolain Prize. In 2012 he was shortlisted for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award and the Fish Short Story prize. In 2013 he was longlisted for Over the Edge New Writer of the Year.
His stories have been published in Southword, Revival, Crannóg, The Penny Dreadful, the Irish Independent, the Irish Times, anthologized by the Munster Literary Centre, and broadcast on RTE.
His radio play This Time it’s Different, was broadcast on 95fm as part of the Limerick City of Culture program in 2014.
In autumn 2014, he was one of eight International Writers in Residence in Tianjin, China.
His story Advice and Sandwiches was included in the Hennessy Anthology of New Irish Writing 2005-2015, published by New Island.
Mel Ulm
The Reading Life
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek - A
Novel by Kim Michele Richardson - 2019
Along with so many others I love this wonderful book.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A USA TODAY BESTSELLER
A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER
A PBS BOOK PICK
Set in the 1930s up to 1941 in the very impoverished Appalachian region of Kentucky, the novel follows Cussy Mary, a packhorse librarian bringing books, newspapers and magazines to the often struggling to feed their families people of Troublesome Creek. Through the WPA President Roosevelt the Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project brought books and employment to mostly women riding often long difficult routes, Cussy rides a mule you will grow to love. People were just so thrilled to see “The Book-woman” arrive. We learn a lot about the lives of those on her route. Some are kind and gentle, others cruel and dangerous.
Cussy has a genetic disease which gives her skin a blue tone.
Many in the very bigoted community reject her as either a witch or a “colored person”. Her father wants her married before he dies, he is a widower. She is 18. He bribes a man 30 years older than her who she hates to marry her by a dowry of ten acres. He dies raping her.
There is so much in this wonderful book, narrated by Cussy in the dialect of the time. We see how the greedy coal mine owners are destroying the land, enslaving the people in debts. Union organizers disappear. Cussy’s brave father tries to help the miners get more pay and safer conditions. He has the black lung disease.
Cussy loves her work. It is far more than just a $28.00 a month job. I found it fascinating to learn about the Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project. The minor characters are vividly realized.
The ending is very exciting
I give The Book Woman of Troublesome creek my very highest recommendation.
“The NEW YORK TIMES, LOS ANGELES TIMES and USA TODAY bestselling author, Kim Michele Richardson has written five works of historical fiction, and a bestselling memoir, The Unbreakable Child.
Her latest critically acclaimed novel, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek was recommended by Dolly Parton in People’s Magazine and has earned a 2020 PBS Readers Choice, 2019 LibraryReads Best Book, Indie Next, SIBA, Forbes Best Historical Novel, Book-A-Million Best Fiction, and is an Oprah's Buzziest Books pick and a Women’s National Book Association Great Group Reads selection. It was inspired by the real life, remarkable "blue people" of Kentucky, and the fierce, brave Packhorse Librarians who used the power of literacy to overcome bigotry and fear during the Great Depression. The novel is taught widely in high schools and college classrooms.
Her forthcoming fifth novel, The Book Woman’s Daughter is both a stand-alone and sequel to The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek and will be published May 3, 2022. Kim Michele lives with her family in Kentucky and is the founder of Shy Rabbit.” From https://www.kimmichelerichardson.com/
I look forward very much to reading The Book Woman’s Daughter
Mel Ulm
A post in observation of Irish Short Story Month - March 2022- The Visitor by Brian Kirk
An Interesting Q and A with Brian Kirk
The Very Well Done Information rich website of Brian Kirk
I first became acquainted with the work of Brian Kirk when I read his very well done short story, "The Shawl" in Long Story Short. Brian Kirk's story "The Shawl" represents to me one of the most basic reasons I have continued Irish Short Story Month for eight years and hope to continue it many more. It is a great feeling to me to read a story by a new to me writer who seems just at the start of his writing career and hope I will be able to watch her or him develop into a major writer. I have learned enough about the life and business world of Irish writers to know that it takes more than just talent. You have to find people willing to read your work and at some point pay you for it. This is far from easy, I know. (My post on "The Shawl" is here-it contains a link to the story.)
From my post of March 2013
I am very pleased to include a story by Brian Kirk in Irish Short Story Month VIII. (You can read the story at the link above, reading time is a very well spent ten minutes or so). “The Visitor” is the third story by Kirk upon which I have posted.
The story is set on Aran, an island of the coast from Galway. The narrator, a woman writer has come there to escape from the distractions of the city which blocked her writing, she feels. Aran is not named but she does, in a morning amble she thinks of Antoine Artaud, a French theater of cruelty writer, who in 1937 came to Aran to find peace, six weeks later, he was deported. I sense she tries to understand herself almost as a daughter of Artaud, trying to find a peace he never did.
The narrator came to Aran to be alone, but she finds this too painful. She has invited a formed college boyfriend to stay with her. He has brought with him thr city she longer to escape from but she is not yet ready to be alone. She cannot escape her involuntary memories, try as she might.
I find the prose of Kirk exquiste, he brings out hidden truthes
“I try to imagine living in the city again, dragging myself from fretful rooms to busy workplaces day in day out, suffering the passive cruelty of the commute and the ritual inanity of office talk. My heart sinks and my pulse races as I pause before the door and turn my face once more to the sky, feeling the early morning September sun—what little there is of it—wash over my face. I open the door at last to find him sleeping on the battered sofa in the open kitchen. For a moment I imagine he is dead, but his nasal breathing sets me straight. And then I see an opportunity. If I bludgeoned him with one of his dumbbells he might never wake at all. What would that mean for him? Would his senses have time to register the final shut down or would a sudden curtain fall on his flickering dreamscape, never to be raised.”
I can relate to a fear or hatred of the return to the city, I think many will.
She wants the man to leave but she fears being alone. She smells whiskey in his empty battle. Whiskey means something in west of Ireland it might not mean elsewhere. Maybe she wants the man with her as a kind of affirmation of her sexuality, her ability to hold a man, one who has had many women. But she hates her weakness and she knows she lacks the depth of self knowledge to rid herself of her dependency. She knows the man will leave her and is probably already unfaithful.
There is much more in “The Visitor”. It is a very Irish story but the characters are universal. I did feel I was back in west of Ireland.
I endorse this story to all lovers of Short Stories. I also urge the Reading of My Q and A with Brian for his insights into a very interesting set of topics. Be sure to visit his very well done webpage.
Brian Kirk is a poet, short story writer, playwright and novelist from Dublin, Ireland. His work has appeared in the Sunday Tribune, Crannog, The Stony Thursday Book, Revival, Boyne Berries, Wordlegs and various anthologies.
“The Accidental Wife" is The Title Story in Orla McAlinden's award-winning debut 2016 Collection of set in Ireland short stories.
I first encountered the work of Orla McAlinden in September of 2018 when I read her novel The Flight of the Wren. Everyone who has read this book loved it, for sure I did. Here were my opening thoughts
"No other, of the numerous works of fiction and nonfiction I
have read on the Irish Famine Years (1845 to 1849) comes as close to capturing the lived experience of the Irish people than Orla McAliden’s darkly beautiful debut novel, The Flight of the Wren."
The Flight of the Wren is just an amazing book. It would make a great movie.
Of course I wanted to read more of McAlinden's work. I was happy to discover she previously published a collection of short stories. The stories in The Accidental Wife are set in Northern Ireland. They deal with seven decades in the McCann family.
"The Accidental Wife" in just a few pages covers twenty five years in the life of Marion, a widow, and her daughter Joan. She lives in a small house in a council estate, a development that replaced a slum. Marion now supports the family cleaning houses, doing laundry for the wealthy. Her daughter after school delivers the launder on her bicycle. Surprisingly for a charwoman, Marion also gives piano lessons. This is her way of keeping a sense of beauty and culture in her house. Her tone and manners are above her station. The other women in the neighborhood call her "Lady Muck". Joan stays in school much longer than the other girls in the area, who drop out to become maids or shop assistants.
About half way through the story we flash twenty-five ahead. Joan is now well married, with children and has "more than enough money". We learn about her marriage, her future in laws, wealthy landowners, who did not want a girl from the councils as a daughter in law. McAlinden does a marvelous job showing us how Joan became the accidental wife of Dominic over the opposition of both sides of parents.
I look forward to following the work of Orla McAlinden for many years.
I strongly endorse The Flight of the Wren
Kildare, Ireland
Award-winning Irish writer, inspired by Ireland's complex and difficult history.
The Flight of the Wren, Published 2018 winner of the CD Lewis award and the Greenbean Novel Fair.
The Accidental Wife, winner the Eludia Award, 2014.
Mel ulm
Sisters of Night and Fog by Erika Robuck - 2022 - A WW Two Novel - 2022
Based upon the experiences of renowned WWII SOE agents Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert, Sisters of the Night and Fog is set mostly in London, France and Germany during World War Two. Virginia is an American, from Florida, who against her family’s wishes elects to stay in Nazi occupied France. Events draw her into the resistance, she helps downed fliers get out of France, at great risk to herself and her husband. She loses her comfortable life as rationing gets worse. The search for food becomes never ending.
Violette is a 19 year old English woman, a crack shot and desperate to fight the Nazis any way she can. She ends up being recruited into the Special Operations Executive and trained for clandestine attacks on the Germans in France. The training is very tough but Viollétte ends up being dropped by parachute into Occupied France.
The two women are both captured and sent to the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.
There are lots of minor characters ranging
from Nazis, downed Fliers, fellow resistance fighters and family members of the women. All are marvelously done. The descriptions of Europe are very powerful.
I highly recommend Sisters of Night and Fog to all interested in novels set during World War Two. There is a return to Ravensbrück set in 1975 that adds depth to the story.
“Erika Robuck is the national bestselling author of The Invisible Woman, Hemingway’s Girl, Call Me Zelda, Fallen Beauty, The House of Hawthorne, and Receive Me Falling. She is also a contributor to the anthology Grand Central: Postwar Stories of Love and Reunion, and to the Writer’s Digest essay collection Author in Progress. Her forthcoming novel, Sisters of Night and Fog (March 2022), is about real-life superwomen of WWII, Virginia d'Albert-Lake and Violette Szabo. In 2014, Robuck was named Annapolis’ Author of the Year, and she resides there with her husband and three sons.”
I hope to read her novel Fallen Beauty, historical novel set in 1928 in a fictional town in Upstate New York near Steepletop, the home of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Mel Ulm