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I have been struggling all day to decide how to describe Donal Ryan’s Strange Flowers and the best I can manage is ‘middle-of-the-road’ (which is a bit of a surprise for a previously long-listed Booker Prize author). The writing is good, the underlying plot reasonable enough – but I couldn’t…
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A poem. https://iangouge.substack.com/p/the-gate-is-locked-behind-me-now
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As an in-depth curation of a publisher’s interactions with one of his authors, Dear Mr. Beckett is something of a Curate’s Egg – but what makes it entirely fascinating is that the author concerned is none other than Samuel Beckett, and the publisher the visionary Barney Rosset (who also successfully…
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On Thursday 26th November I will be giving a ‘launch’ reading of my latest collection, ‘A Demand to be Heard’. This will be the inaugural offering of the new bi-monthly ‘Platform’ virtual reading event. Likely to be published around the 21st November, the book contains a series of ekphrastic poems…
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Alain Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth is, in many ways, more Kafka than Kafka. Most of the time you have no true idea of what’s going on – but that’s precisely the point. The structure isn’t linear, the tense flits between past and present, characters appear and disappear at will, and…