The October issue of the wonderful Short Review is now live. It includes reviews of The Stinging Fly press anthology Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails; Claire Keegan's Walk the Blue Fields and Vanessa Gebbie's Storm Warning. As always there are author interviews too including one (actually two interviews) with Vanessa here.
An interesting quote from Olivia Heal's review of Claire Keegan's book:
'There is surely something in the Irish voice that is different. The sense of belonging is coupled, perhaps naturally, with one of exile. So, I believe, is the voice. There is a language so deep and undisturbed, an oral tradition almost integral to the people, that it seems to gurgle from the throat much as it might from the land itself. And, there is something else, something that finds its most urgent expression in the writing of Beckett and Joyce, it is a difficulty in sitting comfortably in a language, a refusal of complacency. Perhaps it seems nostalgic to see it thus, but there is something in the attribution of this sensitivity to the fact that the predominant written and spoken language in contemporary Ireland is English, the language of the colonisers.'
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