the Dublin Review

In the winter issue of the Dublin Review, Stephen Phelan goes spelunking in the Basque Country with a scholar who has pioneered methods of determining how our palaeolithic ancestors made cave art – but who mostly resists speculating about what it all meant. For the rest of us, Phelan included, such speculation is difficult to resist, and in this dazzling essay he explores our long history of extrapolating from meagre evidence to confident narratives about the nature of early human life. Such narratives are almost always commentaries on the present and on our sense of the future, and the conclusion of Phelan’s essay is a brilliant variation on the form.

Also in the winter issue, Liz MacBride’s sparkling story ‘Universal Topics’ follows a young writer trying to make sense of a breakup, of the conflicting feedback she’s getting about her writing from teachers, editors, friends and lovers, and of the strange fact that ‘writing anything involves picking the juiciest meat from the bones and leaving the rest behind to rot’.

After the puzzling end of a long-term relationship, Piers Gelly started setting an alarm in the middle of the night so that he could record his dreams in something close to real time. Astonished by what was going on in his brain each night, he carried on with the practice despite suffering badly from sleep deprivation. ‘So this was the shape of my grief,’ he writes: ‘grey with exhaustion during the day, but alive with rich and strange images through the night.’ Gelly’s essay is a brilliant mediation on the stories we tell ourselves, both while awake and while we sleep.

The winter Dublin Review also includes Theo Macdonald’s ‘You Could Have Hair Like That’, a surprising and hilarious short story about a heartbroken and hungover young man trying to deal with a blocked drain, a stolen iPhone and an unexpected message from his ex; Cathy Sweeney’s story ‘The Guest’, a tour de force of unhinged narrative for the age of intergenerational cohabitation;  Aaron Gilbreath’s report on the life and opinions of Portland, Oregon’s shirtless bicyclist; and Elizabeth Brennan’s moving story ‘Daniel’, in which the narrator reflects on the unsolved – and unsolvable – mysteries of a youthful romance.