Winter 2011–12
Mad for the rain
A teenager and his mostly absent father compare notes on the past [short story]
The Hunters
A holiday friendship throws a couple off course [short story]
A disused restaurant in Co. Clare
The rise and fall of a great Tyrolean pizzeria – in the Burren [essay]
My animal passion
Laid off from his job, a man decides to sell his body [short story]
The act
A grim game of wits in a Tanzanian town [personal history]
A visit to the world of positive thinking [reportage]
9/11 and the seminar room
The attacks and the two Americas, then and now [essay]
‘He who is Gaelic will be Gaelic always’
Myles na gCopaleen and the Gaelo-fascists [essay]
Autumn 2011
Flann O’Brien at 100
Writers reflect on a genius unfulfilled
A young woman moves west, with two men on her mind [short story]
Points along the edge of a Kentish marsh
A walk around the mysterious Isle of Grain [essay]
Green tea
A family, bored and grieving, receives a visit from a peculiar couple [short story]
The parcel
Getting to know the couple upstairs [short story]
In the war
The death of a father [personal history]
Dark and true and tender
The pubs of Hull – all 254 of them [essay]
Summer 2011
Love in the workhouse [short story]
The Archbishop of Dublin and the legacy of clerical abuse [reportage]
Graduation
The son of a broken marriage prepares for conferrals [short story]
Big Cat
An old friend resurfaces [short story]
Mapping a little Gaelic kingdom
Cottages, bungalows and a half-built bridge in south Connemara [personal history]
The poet and the massacre in Ireland, from Spenser to Kinsella [essay]
The strange fate of a famous revolution [reportage]
Spring 2011
The fight over Ireland’s waste [reportage]
The beating
A mysterious summons from a brother across the ocean [short story]
The great sentimental complication
The author, heartsick, travels to Ethiopia [personal history]
With the IMF in the country, an occasional freelance journalist comes out of semi-retirement [personal history]
Manners
A solicitor, economizing, starts taking the bus to work [short story]
Disgust, lassitude, ennui
A diary for 2010 [diary]
Winter 2010–11
A matter of minutes
A woman, a man and a loaf of bread [short story]
Becoming a reader, and a writer [personal history]
The story of Linda Lambe
A troubled woman and her children [reportage]
The man from Mosul
An Iraqi bird of passage [memoir]
Birds
The old Jews of Tangier [travel]
Coming to terms with epilepsy [personal history]
Autumn 2010
Ten years, ten questions [our anniversary questionnaire]
On the writing of childbirth [essay]
Peter, Iris and the damage done [essay]
Deserts follow
In the ravaged forests of British Columbia [personal history]
Gravity
Love and deception in a grimy flat [short story]
After the concert
Is this the future of fiction? [short story]
Summer 2010
A new wilderness at the Maze
What happens when you knock down a prison built for paramilitaries? [reportage]
A visionary from Detroit, an artist from Kerry, and the mystique of the automobile [essay]
The unimpeachable Fr Pollen
When dad starts dressing up as a priest [short story]
Why the Irish health service doesn’t work
A tale of missed opportunities and deepening inequality [report]
A man’s game
A chance encounter in a hotel bar [short story]
Sweetheart, I’m telling you
Two nervous travellers on a train [short story]
Light ’em all up
The Apache video and the future of warfare [essay]
Every drop counts
Running out of water in Uganda [personal history]
The twilight of Irish Catholic New York
In Manhattan and the Bronx, the new Latino face of Catholic America [reportage]
Spring 2010
Future anterior
The time-travelling art of Gerard Byrne [review-essay]
A strong man in Vietnam [personal history]
Ireland’s looming water crisis
Why a modern, sparsely populated country with high rainfall struggles to supply drinking water [report]
Occasional McGahern
A master’s other voices [review-essay]
Diminishing returns
A diary for 2009 [diary]
Meeting Bruchmann
A couple in mourning, and a young man with a strange story [short story]
Winter 2009–10
Dogfish
‘”You need to get out of here.” That is what she had said to him …’ [short story]
Young, gay and in the closet … in San Francisco [personal history]
How McGahern did it
The twenty-three drafts of ‘Bank Holiday’ [essay]
Farm-work
A farming childhood, with ‘the instrumentality of the horse’ [memoir]
from ‘The Living Room’
A mother, a son, and the sea [fiction]
Redemption
A ghost in Beirut [personal history]
A mother recalls the unnecessary death of her son [personal history]
Autumn 2009
My life in Irish
‘… in the few words of my native tongue that are upon me …’ [short story]
A single beautiful poison pill
The first debate over Yeats’s most disturbing play [essay]
Sweet Gene
An addict and his prisons [short story]
Eduardo Rósza-Flores, Michael Dwyer and the mysterious killings in Bolivia [reportage]
These men, I think they are not bad men
Irish businessmen in Germany, in search of a deal [short story]
Chinese lessons
A mysterious tour of China in 1988 [memoir]
Ireland’s new blasphemy law – and its archaic constitution [essay]
No abiding city
Elizabeth Bowen at loose ends [essay]
