An essential guide to contemporary Irish letters.
A highly learned but lightly worn literary history of Northern Ireland that reaches beyond books into political and cultural turmoil.
Belfast bookseller Poots opens his brightly opinionated study with the titular Strangers’ House, a long-ago London hostel for foreign sailors. In a poem by Tom Paulin, an Ulster Unionist—a supporter of a Northern Ireland joined to the U.K.—ended up there with “the terrible suspicion that they are mired between Catholic Ireland and indifferent Britain, foreigners everywhere.” Stressing that the divisions in Northern Ireland center on “access to good land and decent employment, combined with competing ideas of what and where home is” more than on religion or ethnicity, Poots draws on literature, beginning in the early 20th century, to examine responses to such matters. It’s often forgotten, for instance, that C.S. Lewis, though a renowned Oxford don, was from Northern Ireland. Writing to an Irish friend in England, he lamented that as much as he loved his home, he despaired of “the invincible flippancy and dullness of the Anglo-Saxon race.” It took Ireland decades to admit that Oscar Wilde was one of its own, and Poots does admirable detective work. He recounts how the lawyer who brought about Wilde's downfall by exposing still-illegal homosexuality went on to found the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force but, on the Republic of Ireland’s achieving independence in 1920, “found that he had presided over the creation of a strange new country, a Protestant statelet that no one could have envisioned at the turn of the century.” Louis MacNeice, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and many other writers figure in the narrative before Poots arrives at the modern triumvirate of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon, who created a literature that, while Irish, was also universal and nonsectarian—and thankfully so, for, as Poots writes, “In the hundred years of Northern Ireland’s existence, there has not been a single poet or novelist of any worth who has succumbed to the cosy certainties of the tribe.”
An essential guide to contemporary Irish letters.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781538701577
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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