What’s In a Name? Pen Names, Real Names, and What It All Means

I have always struggled with names. Not in the sense that I find them hard to remember, I think I’m pretty average when it comes to those embarrassing moments when you forget someone’s name but they remember yours. I mean more that I struggle with them more generally, what they are and what they mean. …

Killing the Monster or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Art

Art is scary. There is not doubt about it. It's a culture that is endlessly intimidating to an outsider, living in big old buildings under the beady eyes of people you feel instantly judged by. This is just how people feel, it's how I felt. But I don't anymore, or at least I don't as …

In Appreciation of Oscar Wilde

Today the 16th of October is Oscar Wilde's birthday. On this day 166 years ago Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland. A short 46 years later on the 30th November 1900 he would die in Paris having become one of the most popular and controversial writers in Europe. In the time …

‘Galápagos’ by Kurt Vonnegut

Galápagos like many of Vonnegut's novels manages both to be endlessly humourous and thoughtful at the same time. This novel was sent to me by a friend (a big fan of Vonnegut) and as soon as I started finally reading it, having been sitting by my bed for weeks, I was instantly reminded why Kurt …

‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’ by Reni Eddo-Lodge

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge is a book that could not have emerged at a more perfect time. It is not often non-fiction that isn't biography or somehow world war II manages to make its way to the front windows of bookshops but while Eddo-Lodge's book specifically …

‘The Green Fool’ by Patrick Kavanagh

Once again I return to Irish writing in the middle of the twentieth century with Patrick Kavanagh's first novel The Green Fool. Now it is no secret that I am a fan of Kavanagh's poetry but having read both of his novels I think it's safe to say I am now also a fan of …

‘Tarry Flynn’ by Patrick Kavanagh

Primarily I knew Patrick Kavanagh and I would guess to many other people as first and foremost a poet. I was already a fan of his wonderful poetic works which captures the heart of man caught between urban and rural, history and modernity in mid century Ireland. I had always been vaguely aware that he …

‘Crome Yellow’ by Aldous Huxley

It must be said that if you know Huxley it's probably for his groundbreaking dystopian novel Brave New World, well this is not that. Crome Yellow is Huxley's first novel and couldn't be more different to what many people might expect out of him, but that's not to say it's worse... just different. Crome Yellow …

‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker

            This is the latest installment in ‘being surprised that a book that everyone agrees is good, is good’. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a novel not unlike Frankenstein wherein the myth surrounding it and the dozens of adaptations of it tends to muddy the water as to what the work itself is. I’m sure the …