A fortnightly newsletter by Art Kavanagh about things I’ve read
These are the authors of the various works discussed in Talk about books since I started it in November 2020. In most cases, there’s just one post per author. (Clicking/tapping on the author’s name will open that post.) Authors whose books (poems, plays etc) have been the subject of more than one post have a little triangle beside their names. Clicking/tapping on the triangle will open a list of the posts which feature that author’s works.
A Dialogue between the Soul and Body;
Andrew Marvell’s objects
Down the country: Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart; and Belinda McKeon, Solace;
Incorrigibly plural: Lucy Caldwell, ed. Being Various
Gay best friends: Caroline O’Donoghue, The Rachel Incident, and Belinda McKeon, Tender
Wait Till I Tell You: Short stories;
Taking oneself seriously: The three novels of Candia McWilliam
Ephemeral woman in waterlogged landscape: Short stories by Caoilinn Hughes;
Cutting losses: Caoilinn Hughes’s novels
Caroline O’Donoghue, Scenes of a Graphic Nature;
Gay best friends: Caroline O’Donoghue, The Rachel Incident, and Belinda McKeon, Tender
Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now and other stories;
Death in Florence: du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel and Dibdin’s A Rich Full Death
Noblesse désoblige: Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat
Dervla McTiernan’s female characters;
“People I should trust”: Dervla McTiernan, The Good Turn
On “Dover Beach”: Ian McEwan’s Saturday
Sweet and Innocent: Spy stories by Ian McEwan;
“An exemplary case of unacknowledged self-persuasion”: Enduring Love;
Two short novels by Ian McEwan: Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach
Kate Atkinson, the Jackson Brodie series;
A fabulist’s adventure: Kate Atkinson, Transcription;
Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series revisited
Content warning: Sexual violence in Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn
Kazuo Ishiguro’s short stories: Nocturnes;
“Solemn oaths undone in cruel slaughter”: The Buried Giant;
Intelligent AF: Klara and the Sun
Fugitive women: Lisa Lutz, The Passenger, and Laura Lippman, Sunburn;
Becoming Amazons: Lisa Lutz, The Swallows
A wormhole to another place: Lucy Caldwell’s Multitudes;
Incorrigibly plural: Lucy Caldwell, ed. Being Various
After all, Zen was just a policeman: The moral trajectory of Dibdin’s Venetian detective;
An infant in its cradle: William Blake’s prophetic serial killers;
“This persistent universe game”: The conclusion of Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series;
Death in Florence: du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel and Dibdin’s A Rich Full Death
Peter Abrahams’s impaired heroes: Oblivion, Nerve Damage and Delusion;
Fit the crime: Prison and prisoners in the crime novels of Peter Abrahams
More about Browning’s music poetry: “Abt Vogler” and “With Charles Avison”;
Browning’s poetry about music: “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”;
“I choose Never to stoop”: Browning’s “My Last Duchess”
Morally neutral at best: Conversations with Friends;
Social distance: Beautiful World, Where Are You
Midnight’s Children: “A thousand and one dead ends”;
You’ve got a right to be angry: Salman Rushdie, Fury;
Shifting ground: The Ground beneath Her Feet;
“What, not one hit?” Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh;
Floating upwards from history: Salman Rushdie, Shame;
Two falls and a Submission: Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses;
Flight from paradise: Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown
Judicial misconduct: Turow’s judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers;
Anatomy of a series: Scott Turow’s Kindle County novels;
Impeaching his own witness: Pleading Guilty and The Laws of Our Fathers
The law of war: Scott Turow, Ordinary Heroes and Testimony
The last word or the first claim: Notes on some of Seamus Heaney’s poetry;
Nothing to be afraid of: Seamus Heaney on the last things of Yeats and Larkin
Stranger still: A Stranger with a Bag and other stories;
Paris in the springtime: Summer Will Show
Tana French, In the Woods;
Tana French, The Likeness;
Daughters and fathers: The Secret Place and The Trespasser;
Fractured spaces: Faithful Place and Broken Harbour
One of the lucky ones: Tana French, The Wych Elm
Middleton and Rowley, A Fair Quarrel;
Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling;
“A villain not to be forsworn”: The Revenger’s Tragedy;
“Fools will serve to father wise men’s children”: Women Beware Women;
The cruel comedy of Thomas Middleton: A Trick to Catch the Old One and other city comedies
Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale;
A double standard: Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady
Incontestable wills: Wilkie Collins, No Name
“Detective-fever”: Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
“To overreach the devil”: William Empson partly rewrites Marlowe’s Faustus;
An epical forged cheque: William Empson reads Ulysses;
William Empson and Andrew Marvell’s widow;
And not to yield: William Empson, “The Wife Is Praised”;
Poetic imagery: William Empson and the visual imagination in the criticism of poetry;
“Not human to feel safely placed”: Further reflections on the poetry of William Empson