Memoirs of Hadrian,A historical novel by Marguerite Yourcenar, published in 1951 as Mémoires d’Hadrien. - translated by Grace Flick - 2005

Memoirs of Hadrian, A historical novel by Marguerite Yourcenar, published in 1951 as Mémoires d’Hadrien. - translated by Grace Flick - 2005

Marguerite Yourcenar 

Born: June 8, 1903, Brussels, Belgium

Died: December 17, 1987 (age 84 years), Northeast Harbor, Mount Desert, Maine, United States

In the long ago I visited Hadrian's Tomb.  I am glad now I have had the opportunity to read Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian.

The novel is written in the form of memoirs dictated by Hadrian, the Roman emperor, to his adopted grandson and successor, Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian reflects on his life, from his childhood in Spain to his reign as emperor. He discusses his military campaigns, his love affairs, his philosophy, and his legacy.

The novel is a meditation on power, love, and the meaning of life. It is also a portrait of a complex and fascinating man who ruled one of the greatest empires in history.

Hadrian reflects on his life, from his childhood in Spain to his rise to power as emperor. He discusses his military campaigns, his love affairs, his philosophy, and his legacy.

Hadrian had a number of love affairs in his life, both heterosexual and homosexual. The novel explores the different facets of love and its importance in human life.

Themes of the book

The burdens and responsibilities of power: Hadrian was one of the most powerful men in the world, but he also felt the weight of that power. He constantly struggled to balance the needs of the empire with his own personal desires.

The importance of love and friendship: Hadrian had many close relationships throughout his life, both with men and women. These relationships were a source of great joy and comfort to him.

The search for meaning in life: Hadrian was a thoughtful and introspective man who constantly questioned the meaning of life. He found solace in philosophy, art, and nature.

The legacy of the Roman Empire: Hadrian was a great admirer of Greek culture, and he saw himself as the defender and promoter of Roman civilization. He was determined to leave a lasting legacy behind him.

Stepchildren of the Shtetl : The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800–1939 by Natan M. Meir.- 2020

 

Stepchildren of the Shtetl : The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800–1939 by Natan M. Meir. - in The Stanford University Jewish Studies Series

"This outstanding book offers us a glimpse at the underbelly of a Jewish community rarely studied from this vantage point. Meir tackles an elusive topic with analytic skill, keen sensitivity, and clear, accessible prose."―Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

Winner of the 2021 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, sponsored by the American Library Association.

Finalist in the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards (History category), sponsored by the Jewish Book Council.

Honorable Mention in the 2021 DHA Outstanding Book Award, sponsored by the Disability History Association

Stepchildren of the Shtetl : The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800–1939 by Natan M. Meir. - in The Stanford University Jewish Studies Series- is very through study of a not much written about aspect of Eastern European Jewish, especially Jewish Russian history.

Meir details the numerous reasons an Eastern European Jew were to live in poverty.  If you were disabled or seriously mentally ill or cognitively challenged and had no family you had few options.  Public Begging or charity were your primary options,

Meir covers the operations of "poor houses" and the traditional obligations of Charity, the cholera weddings of the poor as well as the fears of many in Jewish society that the marginalised Jews played into the hands of Anti-Semitism.

"Memoirs of Jewish life in the east European shtetl often recall the hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. Stepchildren of the Shtetl tells the story of these marginalized figures from the dawn of modernity to the eve of the Holocaust.

Combining archival research with analysis of literary, cultural, and religious texts, Natan M. Meir recovers the lived experience of Jewish society's outcasts and reveals the central role that they came to play in the drama of modernization. Those on the margins were often made to bear the burden of the nation as a whole, whether as scapegoats in moments of crisis or as symbols of degeneration, ripe for transformation by reformers, philanthropists, and nationalists. Shining a light into the darkest corners of Jewish society in eastern Europe—from the often squalid poorhouse of the shtetl to the slums and insane asylums of Warsaw and Odessa, from the conscription of poor orphans during the reign of Nicholas I to the cholera wedding, a magical ritual in which an epidemic was halted by marrying outcasts to each other in the town cemetery—Stepchildren of the Shtetl reconsiders the place of the lowliest members of an already stigmatized minority." From Stanford University Press

About the author

Natan M. Meir is the Lorry I. Lokey Professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University.

I borrowed this book from The New York City Public library 

"Poaching" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - Included in the Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

 "Poaching" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - Included in the Collected Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004  - 4 pages

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.

Buriedinprint.com

"Poaching" is the 11th Short Story by Carol Shields I have so far read. 

"Poaching"  centers on a couple driving throughout England. We never learn much of their history.  They often pick up hitchhikers so they can learn their "story". The man calls this "Poaching".  

"I am partial, though, to the calm, to those who stand by the roadside with their luggage in the dust, too composed or dignified to trouble the air with their thumbs. There was the remarkable Venezuelan woman who rode with us from Cardiff to Conway and spoke only intermittently and in sentences that seemed wrapped in their own cool vapors. Yes, she adored to travel alone. She liked the song of her own thoughts. She was made fat by the sight of mountains. The Welsh sky was blue like a cushion. She was eager to embrace rides from strangers. She liked to open wide windows so she could commune with the wind. She was a doctor, a specialist in bones, but alas, alas, she was not in love with her profession. She was in love with the English language because every word could be picked up and spun like a coin on the table top. The shyest traveler can be kindled, Dobey maintains—often after just one or two strikes of the flint. That sullen Lancashire girl with the pink-striped hair and the colloid eyes—her dad was a coward, her mum shouted all the time, her boyfriend had broken her nose and got her pregnant. She was on her way, she told us, to a hostel in Bolton. Someone there would help her out. She had the address written on the inside of a cigarette packet. I looked aslant and could tell that Dobey wanted to offer her money, but part of our bargain was that we offer only rides".

I especially enjoy the literary references in her stories, today's story mentions the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the playwright Ben Jonson.

The Carol Shields Literary Trust Website has an excellent biography 

https://www.carol-shields.com/biography.html

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming – , 2019 - by David Wallace-Wells - 320 Pages - Nonfiction

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming – , 2019 - by David Wallace-Wells - 320 Pages - Nonfiction is an expansion of a 2017 article published New York Magazine - is a vivid account of the disastrous consequences if global warming is not mitigated soon.

Every day now on international news programs we see terrible storms that were once said to occur every 500 years, droughts causing potential mass starvation, insurance rates in hurricane prone areas in America becoming much higher with many companies withdrawing from the Florida market,  Forest fires grow more frequent in Canada and California.

Millions seek to migrate from areas hardest hit.

Wallace-Wells begins with an account of the comfortable myths well meaning people believe about climate warming.

"It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a reliable shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will inevitably engineer a way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true"

"It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation.

An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.

The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s.

Praise for The Uninhabitable Earth

“The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times

“Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist

“Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

“The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post

“The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books" from The Publisher- Penquin Randomhouse 

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.

"A Purple Dote" - A Short Story by Tadhg Coakley - - included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 - An Irish Short Story Month Work

 Irish Short Story Month XIII 

March and April - 2024

Today's Story, "A Pure Dote"' by Tadhg Coakley, a resident of Cork originally from Mallow,  is the second of the eighteen stories 

included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 - 

It is my intention to post upon each of the stories.

"A Purple Dote" focuses on what happens within a family when the forty year old father develops early dementia.  Coakley with depressing at times vermilitude details how it changed the marriage, how his children forced into being a parent to their father reacted.  The family had been financially secure before but now the wife must deal with government and medical authorities to survive.

 "‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?’ Try telling that to someone diagnosed with early onset dementia in the prime of his life, with a wife and three young kids and a mortgage. Try telling it to his wife and children, his friends and family. Then you’ll know what hurt is. Nuala knew what hurt was. Hurt was the love of your life turning into a helpless child, so that you have to look after him every day and sleep beside him every night and feed him and wash him..entitlement, every support, waiting on phone lines, standing in queues, filling out online forms, swallowing the shame of the hand-outs she never in her life expected that she would be forced to accept."

From website of Tadhg Coakley 

"I am the author of five books, Before He Kills Again (Mercier Press, 2023), The First Sunday in September (Mercier, 2018); Whatever It Takes (Mercier, 2020), the 2020 Cork One City, One Book choice; and the autobiography of Denis Coughlan, called Everything (Hero Books, 2020) which I co-wrote. My fourth book The Game: A Journey into the Heart of Sport (2023) was shortlisted as Sports Book of The Year. 

My short stories, articles, and essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Winter Papers, The Irish Examiner, The Irish Times, The42.ie, Aethlon, The Holly Bough, The Honest Ulsterman, Quarryman, Silver Apples and elsewhere."

https://tadhgcoakley.ie/

Whether you are just getting started in Irish Short Stories or have been and avid reader for fifty years, Cook Stories, published by Doire Press, will delight you with 18 Stories.

The best way to purchase this marvelous collection  is via the Publisher Doire Press 

https://www.doirepress.com/

"God and Ants" - A Short Story by Steve Wade - a Irish Short Story Work

"God and Ants" - A Short Story by Steve Wade - a Irish Short Story Work 

Irish Short Story Month XIII 

March and April - 2024

I am very pleased to once again feature one of Steve Wade’s award-winning stories during Irish Short Story Month.

I have been following the work of Steve Wade since March of 2013.  Reading all his work for the last ten years is my sincerest demonstration of my high regard for his work

His debut collection can stand with the masters of the Irish Short Story.

  Gateway To Steve Wade on The Reading Life 

Website of Steve Wade 

A Wide Ranging Q and A Session With Steve Wade 

This is the ninth  short story by Steve Wade that has been featured on The Reading Life.  The fifth  from his debut collection.

As “Gods and Ants” opens Alfred working on a painting of a boatin the harbour.  As he paints people strolling about ask him why the painting shows a different number of windows

on the boat than they see. Of course like any artist he does not take kindly to this.  He begins to imagine art connoisseurs and visiting Parisians at “encountering the painting during Alfred P. Parkinson’s first major art exhibition, which would one day be staged in Sacre Coeur, would experience thescene’s essence. He saw them marvelling at the paradise island blue sky and the more sombre blue reflecting in thesea below into which the overwhelmed sun bled white-gold. On their tongues the coastal-air saltiness blends with the plaintive sound of the gulls screaming their interminable plea before the endless sea. And the boats – patient, rusting leviathans, whose white, multi-eyed cabins have witnessed countless fishing adventures far out in the cormorant-black sea, watched over by a yellow moon, hours before the dawn spills across the horizon.”

His vision of his future exhibit is interupted by people strolling by. Of course he is offended by their philistine  observations on his work.

“The few aimless evening strollers who had gathered tentatively around Alfred and his easel pulled in others. They swarmed about him like ants crawling over a fallen raptor, flightless, though not yet dead. Their presence and proximity interfered with his concentration. Time and discipline was his defence – Gods were not peeved by Ants”. 

Arnold begins to imagine his work is great art.  Then something happens.

“Gods and Ants” is as I expected it would be,a perceptive, interesting and fun to read story.

About the Author - Steve Wade’s award-winning short fiction has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies. His work has been broadcast on national and regional radio. He has had stories short-listed for the Francis McManus Short Story Competitionand for the Hennessy Award. His stories have appeared in over fifty print publications, including Crannog, New Fables, and Aesthetica Creative Works Annual. His unpublished novel, On Hikers’ Hill was awarded First Prize in the abook2read.com competition, with Sir Tim Rice as the top judge. He has won First Prize in the Delvin Garradrimna Short Story Competition on a number of occasions. Winner of the Short Story category in the Write by the Sea writing competition 2019. His

short stories have been nominated for the PEN/O’Henry Award, and for the Pushcart Prize.

From the Author’s  introduction 

“The stories in this collection first appeared in anthologies and periodicals. Some of them have won prizes or have been placed in writing competitions. Ostracised by betrayal, isolated through indifference, gutted with guilt, or suffering from loss, the characters in these twenty-two stories are fractured and broken, some irreparably. In their struggle for acceptance, and their desperate search for meaning, they deny the past”

A very worthy edition to the reading list of all lovers of the short story.

Mel Ulm

 

"The Cook and the Star" A Short Story by Anne O’Leary - included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 - An Irish Short Story Month Work

 

Irish Short Story Month- XIII- 2024

I have decided to extend Irish Short Month XIII for 2024 through at least April.

There are just too many great stories I want to feature to confine the event to one Month,

Whether you are just getting started in Irish Short Stories or have been and avid reader for fifty years, Cook Stories, published by Doire Press, will delight you with 18 Stories.

Today's Story, by Cork Native Anne O'Leary, "The Cook and the Star" is set in the vicinity of Cork and centers on a  woman temporarily working as a Cook for a Hollywood movie star there making a picture.

"The first time she sees the Hollywood star, he is cautiously descending the staircase. He has not noticed her standing in the kitchen doorway and his large body is tilted sideways as if he is negotiating a steep hillside. He is snorting with the effort, fingers gripping the banister. Halfway down, he spots her. Immediately, his wheezing stills and his back straightens.  ‘You must be my saviour,’ he says. His famous, velvet voice is gentler than she expects."

As the story develops, the cook becomes important to the star, a man with drinking problems mourning the recent death of his son.  He loves a big Irish breakfast, who doesn't, and often needs a reason to get out of bed. Without him fully functional the movie won't get done. This will stop the counted for tourist activity,  There are heartbreaking revelations about the cook.

This is my first encounter with the work of Anne O'Leary but there will be more.

See Anne O’Leary website for additional information on her work 

https://anneolearyblog.wordpress.com/about/

Mel Ulm 

The Reading Life 

"Boundary" - A Short Story by Jhumpa Lahiri- from her collection Roman Stories - 2023

 "Boundary" - A Short Story by Jhumpa Lahiri- from her collection Roman Stories - 2023

At the same time I wonder what they know about the loneliness here. What do they know about the days, always the same, in our dilapidated cottage? The nights when the wind blows so hard the earth seems to shake, or when the sound of rain keeps me awake? The months we live alone among the hills, the horses, the insects, the birds that pass over the fields? Would they like the harsh quiet that reigns here all winter? “ from “The Boundary”

Jhumpa Lahiri is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest of contemporary authors.  So far I have read and posted upon these of her books:

Interpreter of Maladies 1999 A Collection of Short Stories, Pulitzer Prize Winner

The Name Sake 2003

Unaccustomed Earth 2008 A Collection of Short Stories 

The Lowland 2013

The Clothing of Books - a nonfiction work on book jackets 

Additionally I have read and posted on eight  of her short stories, mostly in The New Yorker besides those in her two collections.

Jhumpa Lahiri first wrote “The Boundary” in Italian, then translated it into English ( the link above includes a discussion of her involvement with Italian and her life in Rome).  There is no geographic setting given in the story so I decided it was set in the hills of Tuscany, or my version was.  The narrator is a late teenage girl.  She lives with her parents.  Her father is the caretaker at an estate.  Her mother takes care of a sick man.  The owner, a wealthy foreigner rarely visits.  (They live in a small house.: When he does he rides horses during the day and reads at night.  In the summer time, the main house is rented out.  The narrator takes care of getting the house ready and making sure the visitors have what they need.

The girl and her family are foreigners, just like the visitors.  We don’t learn where they are from but we do learn the narrator feels out of place in school as she “looks different”.  We learn something shocking and heartbreaking as the story closes. It made me rethink my experience of the story.

I was able to obtain this collection via a Florida library through the Libby Application 

The Favourite - A 2018 Film Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos- Starring Emma Stone, Olivia Coleman and Rachel Weisz

 The Favourite - A 2018 Film Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos- Starring Emma Stone, Olivia Coleman and Rachel Weisz

Available on Netflix

Having recently completed my third viewing of Poor Things I was delighted to find on Netflix another movie directed by  Yorgos Lanthimos starring Emma Stone, The Favourite.

The Favourite is set in early 18th century Great Britain. It follows the story of  Queen Anne's  frail health and her relationship with two  women: her close friend Lady Sarah, who governs the country in her stead, and Abigail, a new servant who  arrives at the court.

The set are marvelous, the male aristocrats are besieged fops, the Queen a bit mental, with some sex of various sorts happening.  We see the brutal way servants were treated and the sycophantic based government of 18th century England as depicted by Yorgos Lanthimos.

The Favourite received critical acclaim for its acting, screenplay, direction, and visual style. It won numerous awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actress for Olivia Colman, the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Colman, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for Colman.

"Fire Starter" - A Short Story by Alan McCormick - 2022 - An Irish Short Story Month XIII Work

Irish Short Story Month XIII 

"Fire Starter" is the first story by the highly awarded Wiclow resident Alan McCormick to be featured in The Reading Life.  Going forward I hope to delve deeply into his work.

"Fire Starter" is set in an asylum of some sort, the exact location and nature of it are a  bit cloked in shadows. Conventional religion is employed as part of the therapy"

"Theo thinks he’s Christ.  At my first attempt to eat breakfast in the retreat’s communal dining room, he’s shouting:

‘I can save some of you but I won’t be able to save all of you!’

‘That’s fine, Theo, do whatever you can,’ Simon the warden replies, pulling him away

Later, as I try to eat, I hear sobbing coming from the lounge.

Simon’s head appears around the doorway: ‘Theo has had an unfortunate accident, kids,’ he says, ‘and won’t be staying with us for a while.’

Simon’s wife, Ursula, wears tight purple leggings that smell of citrus and sandalwood. She looks young for fifty, and speaks as if she’s a WW2 German spy expertly repeating dated bookish English, a Teutonic phrase occasionally intervening between exacting vowels and corrective grammar. She is also a healer.

I lie on my bed, eyes closed, head propped on a mound of pillows as she kneels beside me, lightly stroking my left temple, my face turned into the soapy incense of her legs, soothing purples filling my eyelids.

‘Breathe in the calm beautiful energy of God’s nature. God loves you if you are good, and he loves you even more if you are bad. God loves you and so does everyone else.’

‘Even Theo?’

‘Especially, this Theo,’ she replies."

The narrator is a patient, inmate  at the asylum.  There is a very powerful description of a therapy session.

I do not want to spoil the plot for first time readers but I do wish to share a bit more the amazing prose of McCormick.

"Tall red spikes of light jag above a bush behind them, and Theo arrives on the lawn swinging a flaming stick above his head. He runs past Saskia who dances unsteadily around an upturned wheelchair. Sparks scatter, the crackling sound of scorched wood; the pungent smell of sulphur as he gets near to us. Ruth walks purposefully from the house to stand in his way, licks from the stick’s flame reflected in her eyes. She holds out her arms to welcome him. Theo stops and prods the stick toward her, flickers of fire falling to the ground and dying by her feet. She stays still, her arms held open, and smiles. Theo drops the stick and walks slowly into her embrace. She holds him, and then frees one arm to invite me in too."

You can read "Fire Starter" and other stories on author's website 

https://alanmccormickwriting.com/

Alan McCormick lives with his family in Wicklow. He’s a Trustee and former writer in residence for InterAct Stroke Support, a charity employing actors to read fiction and poetry to stroke patients.

His writing has won prizes and been widely performed and published, including recently in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Southword, Sonder and Exacting Clam magazines, and previously in Salt’s Best British Short Stories, A Wild and Precious Life – A Recovery Anthology, Modern Nature Anthology – Responses to Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, The Poetry Bus, The Bridport and Fish Prize Anthologies, Popshot, Litro and Confingo.

Work has appeared online at Epoque Press, Words for the Wild, 3:AM Magazine, Dead Drunk Dublin, Trasna, Mono, The Quietus, Fictive Dream, The Willesden Herald and Found Polaroids.

His story ‘Firestarter’ came second in the 2022 Francis MacManus RTE Short Story Competition and ‘Boys on Film’ came second in The 2023 Plaza Prizes Sudden Fiction competition. Stories in the past have won the Ruth Rendell InterAct Stroke Support Story Competition, The Liverpool International Short Story Competition and the Middlesex Literary Festival Story Prize.

DOGSBODIES and SCUMSTERS , his collection of short stories with flash shorts inspired by Jonny Voss’s pictures, was published by Roast Books and long-listed for the Edge Hill Prize.  

Alan and Jonny also collaborate on illustrated shorts known as Scumsters – see more at Deaddrunkdublin and Scumsters.blogspot  

"The Big River" - A Short Story by Desmond Hogan - 2017 - An Irish Short Story Month XIii Post

 Irish Short Story Month XI

Today's Story, "The Big River" is included in the most recent collection of short stories by Desmond Hogan, The History of Magpies.

Shauna Gilligan's Highly Illuminating Introduction to  Desmond Hogan

http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2012/06/desmond-hogan-irelands-most-famous.html

I have been reading Desmond Hogan for 12  years now.  I take his work very seriously.  I was first introduced to his work by Shauna Gilligan, PhD, author of Happiness Comes From Nowhere.  Through her kindness I met Hogan in May of 2003, at the office of Lilliput Press.  We spoke of two authors for whom we share great admiration, Nathaneal West and Zora Hurston, among other things.

"We were here when the Christians first came to Ireland and we will be here when they leave" - A proverb of Irish Travellers 

A considerable portion of the work of Desmond Hogan focuses on Irish Travellers.  Irish travellers have an ancient history.   They Are  acknowledged as an ethnic group.

Travellers play an important part in "The Big River", numerous suicides mostly by hanging are alluded to in the story,

"‘Shannon Crotty was my cousin. He hung himself. His wife Ethlinn Flavin from Knocknaheeny in Cork hung herself before him. Her brother Besty hung himself in between them. A lot of Travellers are hanging themselves now. One man because he had cancer. A girl because she was pregnant and did not want her father to know it."

(Amusingly in the Comedy TV series Derry Girls Travellers are depicted as dangerous and terrifying.)

Hogan makes extensive use of colour and references to historical-cultural entities in "The Big River" which I find fascinating:

"In their trailer the newly weds had a picture of two elephants kissing, horns wrapped around one another’s trunks: a photograph of Santa Claus presenting a cup for hurling to Shannon as a child, in a black bow tie; the dead Hunger Striker Martin Hurson with miner’s locks, white shirt, white tie, smile reserved for weddings; a statue of Saint Patrick with ashen hair and peach lips; a parrot with flaked red head; a pair of beige polka-dot wellingtons; a donkey and four Edwardian children, boy in young Edward VIII cap, clinging to a little girl’s waist on top of the donkey"

I hope to post on other stories by Desmond Hogan during ISSM XIII.

Mel Ulm

Poor Things - A 2023 Film Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos - Starring Emma Stone (winner 2024 Academy Award for Best Actress), William Defoe and Mark Ruffalo

 Poor Things - A 2023 Film Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos - Starring Emma Stone (winner 2024 Academy Award for Best Actress), William Defoe and Mark Ruffalo

Academy Award 2024 - Best Actress in Leading Role

Academy Award 2024 - Best Production Design

Academy Award 2024 - Best Costume Design 

Academy Award 2024 - Best Makeup and Hair Styling 

I totally love Poor Things. It is incredibly beautiful with a  masterful use of colour. Emna Stone is truly magical as Bella Baxter. Poor Things is Hilarious, Magical, Sensuous, Sexuality Enthalling  and Scary,  Cinema as High Art. 

The story follows Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman in Victorian London who is brought back to life via brain transplant by an eccentric scientist, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Dafoe). She is eager to learn about the world and soon finds herself on an adventure with a roguish lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo). 

The movie has settings in London, looking very Gothic Horror Movies style in Black and White, in Paris, Lisbon,  Alexandria and abroad a ship. I especially liked how Bella became an avid reader of philosophy mixed in with some furious jumping.

With a bit of tounge in cheek Poor Thing is kind of a menage of Frankenstein, My Fair Lady, A Beautiful Mind and Debbie Does Dallas.  

Bella Baxter, not unlike the Buddha, leaves her safe environment to discover the real world. Poor Things, as in Don Quixote, depicts an innocent in a corrupt world. Going back to the start of Western Literature, Bella would have enjoyed furious jumping with Gilgamesh, probably exhausting him, and cruising with Odysseus.

Mel Ulm

"Fictive Dreams" - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - August 2017. Iish Short Story Month XIII

Irish Short Story Month - XIII

I first observed Irish Short Story  in March 2011.  Irish Literature and history is an important aspect of The Reading Life.

I first encountered the work of Brian Kirk in March 2013, during ISSM III.  One of the reasons I have continued on with ISSM for eleven years is to provide me with the motivation to keep reading writers as supremely talented and perceptive as Brian  Kirk, watching them develop, expand and keep up the grand tradition of the Irish Short Story.  I posted on two short stories by Brian Kirk in 2013 and with the post you are now reading have posted on two of his short stories in 2018. 

 We also did a very wide ranging Q and A session in 2013.  (There are now four links to stories by Kirk in posts on his work on my blog, all of which I strongly recommend to lovers of the form.)  

"Fictive Dreams" can be read at

 

www.briankirkwriter.com

"Fictive Dreams", told in the first person, relays the late teenage years of an aspiring young poet.  He is from a large family with numerous siblings, none at all a bit orienteering toward literary or intellectual pursuits. He lives a brief train ride from Dublin, the Emerald City of young Irish poets.  After high-school as his parents cannot afford college, he gets a job working on a farm.  

He has a mentor, a middle-aged aged gay man who sees himself riding to success as a literary agent on the young man's already one highly regarded poem.  

I do not want to divulge much of the intriguing plot.  I will share the opening of the story in order to convey a sense of the elegance of the work.

"There were times when I wished I was an only child. Sometimes I thought that if my parents were to die suddenly, in a freak accident or by some mysterious but swift illness, I would not grieve too sorely for them. I loved them both, of course, but at the same time I yearned for the certain changes, the endless possibilities, their deaths would surely bring.

I come from a big family, but worse, I am the youngest, the baby, the runt of the litter. I can never decide which of these pithy descriptions I like least. In the first case, even now as a young man, I am immediately infantilized, and in the second derided as being physically weak – which I must admit I am relative to many of my peers.

Even before my English teacher, Mr. McIntosh, singled me out for praise, I sensed I was different. My mother had always doted on me, her youngest, and gave me to think I was special, in a way that was always unspecified. But, at the same time, I was equally alive to my limitations, acutely aware of the possibility that I might be just another nobody. For this reason I sought to create the special person that I felt must surely live within me by altering my external appearance, and in so doing I became strange in the eyes of my family, my friends, my peers and the whole town.

The town was part of the problem. It encompasses the geographical site of the houses, shops and streets that make it up, but it also includes the surrounding town lands, the houses and farms, and more particularly all of the people who reside therein. It’s not that I disliked the town, but I savoured each moment I spent away from it. When I finished school I began to make regular trips to Dublin on the train and I relished those journeys."

His website has a detailed biography and links to this and other of his stories

http://briankirkwriter.com

I hope to follow the work of Brian Kirk for many years.

Mel Ulm

The Reading Life

"Words" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - Included in The Collected Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

 This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.

Buriedinprint.com

"Words", four pages, is the tenth story by Carol Shields I have so far read,

"Words" is a fascinating story about global warming seen through a marriage that originated in a conference, spanning ten years.  They met as delegates to a global conference.

"WHEN THE WORLD FIRST STARTED HEATING UP, an international conference was held in Rome to discuss ways of dealing with the situation. Ian’s small northern country—small in terms of population, that is, not in size—sent him to the meetings as a junior observer, and it was there he met Isobel, who was representing her country as full-fledged delegate....They played truant, missing half the study sessions, the two of them lingering instead over tall, cool drinks in the café they found...The second International Conference was held ten years later. The situation had become grave. One could use the word crisis and not be embarrassed. Ian—by then married to Isobel, who was at home with the children—attended every session, and he listened attentively to the position papers of various physicists, engineers, geographers and linguists from all parts of the world. It was a solemn but distinguished assembly; many eminent men and women took their places at the lectern, including the spidery old Scottish demographer who years earlier had made the first correlation between substrata temperatures and highly verbalized societies. In every case, these speakers presented their concerns with admirable brevity, each word weighted and frugally chosen, and not one of them exceeded the two-minute time limitation. For by now no one really doubted that it was the extravagance and proliferation of language that had caused the temperature of the earth’s crust to rise, and in places—California, Japan, London—to crack open"

The story forces through the theories advanced to ponder or look for a meaningful conclusion as the climate crisis becomes worse every month..

The Carol Shields Literary Trust Website has an excellent biography 

https://www.carol-shields.com/biography.html

 

The Zone of Interest - Directed by Jonathan Glazer - Starring Christian Friedel as Rudolf Höss -'Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss - 2024 Academy Award Winner for Best International Picture and Best Sound Design

 

The Zone of Interest - Directed by Jonathan Glazer - Starring Christian Friedel as Rudolf Höss -'Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss - 2024 Academy Award Winner for Best International Picture and Best Sound Design 

One Hour 46 Minutes 

Available for Purchase on YouTube and Amazon Prime 

Among the numerous print reviews of The Zone of Interest I found that of the Los Angeles Times particularly perceptive.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023-12-14/the-zone-of-interest-review-jonathan-glazer-drama-auschwitz-holocaust-wwii

The film focuses on the Hosses as they strive to build a dream life for their family in a house in zone of interest next to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp.  A wall separates their property from the camp.They have five children. Hoss is a dedicated father, reading stories to his children.

When the mother of Mrs Hoss visits she tells her daughter she has done very well. They have a beautiful garden, the household staff are a mixture of prisoners and Poles.  Hoss seems to be a Nazi for career purposes more than ideology,

We never see directly the horrors of Auschwitz but there are sounds of gun shots and screams.  The smoke from the ovens is always visible and the ashes of the murdered get into everything.  

. The Zone of Interest premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival on 19 May 2023 to acclaim, winning both the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI Prize, and was named one of the top-five international films of 2023 by the National Board of Review. It won three BAFTAs (including Film not in the English Language), two Academy Awards (Best International Feature and Best Sound), and three Golden Globe Awards.

In his acceptance speech at the Oscars the director Jonathan Glazer he hoped the film would make people think about the walls the set up to allow us to ignore  the Middle East War.

The Zone of Interest is High Art.  Along with Schindler's List and The Pianist it is essential viewing 

"Pardon" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - Included in The Collected Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.

Buriedinprint.com

"Pardon", a brief three page work, is quite a deviation from the previous eight stories by Carol Shields I have previously read.  The characters are not heavily involved with creating or reading literature.  

The story opens in a small town card shop.  A woman has offended her father-in-law and wants to buy an apology card.

"ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON MILLY STOPPED at Ernie’s Cards ’n’ Things to buy a mea culpa card for her father-in-law, whom she had apparently insulted. “Sorry,” Ernie’s wife said in her testy way. “We’re all out.” Milly found this hard to believe. The card rack was full. You could buy a happiness-in-your-new-home card or a mind-your-own-beeswax card, even a spectacular three-dollar pop-up card announcing to the world that you were feeling underappreciated. Surely there was such a thing as an I’m-sorry card. “You can believe what you want,” Ernie’s wife said. “But we’re sold right out. At the start of the week I had at least a dozen sorry cards in stock. We had a real nice selection"

The story goes into why the store  sold out of apology cards.

"Pardon" has more of a comic tone than the prior stories.

The Carol Shields Literary Trust Website has an excellent biography 

https://www.carol-shields.com/biography.html

 

The Pianist is a 2002 biographical Holocaust war drama film produced and directed by Roman Polanski, with a script by Ronald Harwood, and starring Adrien Brody

 

Available on YouTube 

The Pianist is a 2002 biographical Holocaust war drama film produced and directed by Roman Polanski, with a script by Ronald Harwood, and starring Adrien Brody

The Pianist is  based on the autobiography of the same name by Władysław Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish pianist who survived the Holocaust in Warsaw.  (2002) is a historical war drama film directed by Roman Polanski and based on the autobiography of the same name by Władysław Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish pianist who survived the Holocaust in Warsaw. 

The film stars Adrien Brody as Szpilman, and follows his life from the start of the German invasion of Poland in 1939 through his experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto and as a fugitive hiding in the ruins of the city.

The Pianist was critically acclaimed, winning the Palme d'Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and three Academy Awards, including Best Director for Polanski, Best Adapted Screenplay for Ronald Harwood, and Best Actor for Brody. It is considered one of the greatest films ever made about the Holocaust.

I found The Pianist to be of great emotional power, exposing both the depths of evil and goodness.

Fitting Behaviour" - A Short Story by Carol Shields- included in The Collected Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.


http://www.buriedinprint.com/




“Her stories have given me happiness, not just pleasure. They delight me at first by the clear and simple elegance with which they’re made. Then there’s something so bountiful and surprising about them, like the beautiful broken light of a prism.” —Alice Munro


The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection,it is my hope to read and post on them all in 2024.

"Fitting Behaviour" is the 8th story by Carol Shields I have had the exquisite pleasure of reading.

The central character in "Fitting Behaviour" is a Canadian author of several novels.  His wife of 35 years is dying a lingering death.  He has had a romantic encounter with his editor.  They have two adult daughters.  

I will just quote a bit.

"SOME OF MEERSHANK’S WITTIEST WRITING was done during his wife’s final illness. “Mortality,” he whispered each morning to give himself comfort, “puts acid in the wine.” Other times he said, as he peered into the bathroom mirror, “Mortality puts strychnine in the candy floss. It puts bite in the byte.” Then he groaned aloud—but only once—and got straight back to work. His novel of this period, Malaprop in Disneyfield, was said to have been cranked out of the word processor between invalid trays and bedpans."

The Carol Shields Literary Trust Website has an excellent biography 

https://www.carol-shields.com/biography.html