Norman Jeffares
From the Tiger’s Thicket
The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2004–5
By David Marcus (ed)
Faber & Faber 336pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
Do the sophisticated children of this age know the exciting anticipation of approaching a lucky dip? A lucky dip is what the very title of this collection of stories suggests, for it proclaims itself the Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories. Best and new? New, certainly. Best – a very good chance of this, since the lucky dip’s contents have been ordered by David Marcus, no new hand at editing anthologies, himself a novelist of distinction whose best, Land Not Theirs (1986), resonates in the mind.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.