‘Always, in my early working life in the hospitality industry, I would remain fixated on the threshold between staff and guests. On the one side, the guest side, the scenery was bright and inviting. On the other, it was clapped out, all its secrets blown open’
In the summer issue of the Dublin Review, Aileen Armstrong remembers a teenage job in a seaside hotel in a ‘stormy, eerie, maritime village [that] was for many people the most wonderful family holiday destination in the world’. She traces the agonies of ‘hovering abjectly’; the recognition that boys, her teenage ‘obsession’, were also (and would always be) the competition; the strange joy of ‘climbing out of windows and passing into north-western summer nights’; and, her daily consolation, the first season of Big Brother.
Also in the new Dublin Review: Dean Fee recalls the years when the video game World of Warcraft was the world he lived in; ‘Shoreline’, a short story by Chetna Maroo; Nathan O’Donnell spins an island fantasia encompassing Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, the Irish playwright Denis Johnston, the Second World War, and Hy Brasil (among other things); Michael Phoenix lights out from Haverfordwest; and short stories by Elaine Garvey, Ayşegül Savaş and Chloe Tomlinson.
From the Archive
The Dublin Review Podcast
The best Irish and International writers of fiction and non-fiction discuss and read from their work that has been published in The Dublin Review.