KTH RDGWY

I know a boy with no head.

He has a body and he can walk and run and turn corners. He can jump and stretch and he can make people want him and he can make people hate him because he can make them want him, and he can do almost anything he puts his mind to (he has a mind). He has a laugh and he laughs, and he can smile at anything and he can keep up with anyone and he has all the world in the palm of his small hand. And he can swim and talk and tell jokes and make you suddenly brighten. And he can warm a room or a street or a bed simply by wishing it warmer. And he can dance and kiss and make love like he’s invented it, as if nothing else matters and no one is there. He can cook.

But he has no head.

And the chief drawbacks of this are that you can never quite tell what might be in it, or which way it’s facing. And he cannot wear a hat.

It hasn’t exactly been a secret (or if it has it’s been a very badly kept one) but the deal has now been done, the contracts have now been signed, and I’m very happy to be able to announce that I am now a Granta Books author.

The new book is called Hawthorn & Child and it will be published sometime next summer (2012). Those of you who have read Goo Book in the New Yorker or Rothko Eggs in Zoetrope earlier this year have already had something of a taster. It’s an episodic book of detachable fictions. It’s about London, and about policemen; and it’s also about wolves and pickpockets, racing drivers and criminals, ghosts and children, and it’s about the way we try to turn everything into a story – even when (maybe especially when) it can’t be done.

I’m quite proud of it. And it’s wonderful that my new publisher Philip Gywn Jones got it immediately, and that he is so enthusiastic about it. It’s very good indeed to have a publisher who believes in and is excited by what I’m doing.

I’ll keep you informed as the book goes through the various stages before publication proper, and I will be better, I promise, at updating this site more regularly, with bits of writing as well as news and general … things. And if Twitter is your thing, you’ll get more information (probably too much information) about what I’m up to from here.

K

This is a radio piece commissioned by the BBC in 2004 to mark the 100th Bloomsday. It was preformed (beautifully) by Sorcha Cusack, but I can’t find a recording anywhere and to be honest I had forgotten all about it until today, when general Bloomsday chatter on Twitter reminded me. If anyone out there happens to have a recording, do let me know. K

No I Said

I’m off for a walk. I’m out the door and down the drive. I’m out of the kitchen, into my coat, across the hall, shouting I’m off out for a while, I’ll be back in a while, and I’m out the door and I’m into the air, the noise, the world, and I’m not stopping I swear to God I’m never stopping, the way I feel – that’s the way I feel and I can’t disguise it. Why would I want to disguise it? But I do of course, I do disguise it, it’s like I have two different lives, and who’d want that, but that’s what I have. Two different bloody lives, and both of them stopped, halted, stalled, stuck in that house like secret children, like secret bewildered aunts, miserable hidden souls locked in an airless drum. One of them doesn’t mind, doesn’t mind at all – one of them is a good daughter, happy daughter, at ease with it all; the other one has all her fingernails hanging off from scratching the back of the door. I have to force myself, force myself, not to slam. Having to close the front door gently is like a little Calvary all of its own, another one, a tiny one yes, but one of a million other tiny ones, to go with the small ones, and the medium ones, and the big ones, and the massive ones, and the overall one – the overall, over-arching, complete and comprehensive sacrifice I have made of my life for the benefit of another. And where is the kingdom? Which way lies paradise, my peace everlasting, my eternal bliss? Don’t make me laugh. Don’t make me tell you.

Oh alright then. It’s my mother. My mother. She isn’t dead yet.

I stomp down the road looking like an eejit. It’s the middle of the day. There’s no one around now but men in vans out to fix things or deliver them, au-pairs with prams, au pairs with shopping bags, au pairs in the prime of other people’s lives. They all glance at me, stare at me, and I’m so sick of it all that I’m sure it shows. I’m sure they know. Look at you, they’re saying. Running away from your mother. At your age. Good God I could walk to the edge of the world, the mood I’m in, I could stamp my way to the edge of the earth, I’m so disgusted with the centre. But isn’t that the problem? Wherever you are, that’s where you are. You’re always at the centre, never out of the crosshairs, never away from the eye of the storm. We’re always the centre of attention in our rotten little lives. Aren’t we mother? Aren’t we?

What day is it now? She has a thing about dates recently, as if waiting for one to come along unlike the others. It’s Wednesday, isn’t it? Wednesday? The middle of a scrappy June. The middle of a scrappy year.

I’m off into the park. Where else would I go? Out into the pale open spaces with me, with my muddy little feet clicking and clacking over the blankness, over the empty lawns, squelching and sucking at the black mud, dribbling through this tidied up, diminished world, just me, alone. Except for my mother at my back like an undone thing. I turned at the gate and looked back at the house. Just now, as I left it, in my froth. I do it every time. Every single solitary time. I cannot not do it. As if I have forgotten something and I turn back to remember it, but there’s nothing to remember, there’s just the house and its blank, bovine face. Can a house have a face, do you think? A bovine face? Is that possible? The door I haven’t slammed needs painting. As do the window frames. There are some roof slates dislodged. The whole thing looks listless, biding its time. It is in alliance with me, I know. Impatient and grumpy. Perhaps that’s why I look back. Because it calls out to me. Where are you off to? You come back now, do you hear me? Don’t leave me here with her. Don’t dare.

There’s been rain overnight. My shoes are turning dark. The radio is full of nonsense. She, my mother, has her ear glued to it since I arrived. I can get no sense out of her. She’s listening out for something. It may be another request. The last time she had that grotesque man on the mid-morning show play “Son Of A Preacher Man” for Frances – some apparently unspeakable private joke between them – and it was all she could talk about for days afterwards. About the phone call she made, and the girl who took the details, and the waiting, and the panic then, when he was reading out a request from someone called Frank, that the stupid girl had got it all wrong, but he played some opera for that, and the girl couldn’t have got it that wrong, could not surely have mistaken Dusty Springfield for some damn opera fatso, and the relief then, when the very next request was for Frances, from her, from my mother, and how he did it beautifully, got it perfectly right, and about how marvellous it all was, and how accessible the national airwaves are, to all of us, and what a wonderful resource really, one we should treasure. Today though, she seems less enthusiastic. She almost seems nervous. She’s quieter than usual. Oh don’t think she’s quiet, she’s not quiet, she hasn’t been quiet since the day I was born, I don’t mean she’s quiet, I mean she’s quieter than usual, which is still noisier than the rest of humanity gathered together, still nattering on about all sorts and nothing, about next door’s grandchildren and the cuteness of them, which she exclaims is to die for, but it’s just an expression, and the times the postman calls, never predictable, never the same, with his bundle of junk and brochures and the things she sends away for, she can never resist the licking of a stamp, and damn it now I’ve left without the letters she wants posting, and the parcel of God only knows what detritus for the earthquake victims. About whom she held forth for a good solemn fifteen minutes while I peeled the potatoes. Oh she loves a disaster. She loves catastrophe now. She wheels herself up close to the television and shakes her head at the wonderful misfortune of others, at the scale and the depth and the extent of the misery. Oh she moans, oh, who’d be a mother? Not me, mother. Not me. On the list today, the daily list, of things she needs me to retrieve – as well as a shoebox full of letters from the top of her wardrobe, as well as a dusty old novel from father’s bedroom bookcase – there was a photograph of us all taken, en famille as they say, in some kind of caravan, sometime far back in the last century, my father looking like he’s got the camera on a timer – will it or won’t it – my mother looking like he’s annoying her with his technical nonsense, me looking like I’ve had enough of it all already. I’m about three. What does she want that for? What made her remember it? Why was it hidden away behind a pile of crime novels on a top shelf in the spare room? But she doesn’t say. She has it on her lap. With the radio. She’s turning slow circles in the living room. Or was, the last I saw of her.

My mother, I should explain to you, is in a wheelchair. And I say that in the same way that I might say that I am in a rage, or you are in love, or so-and-so is in a coma. It is a state of being. She’s only been in it for about a year, but she shows such a terrifying level of expertise you’d swear she’d been in it since birth. Do I mean expertise? I mean that corners mean nothing to her. That the wallpaper’s scraped and the skirting boards are blackened with rubber and splintered like kindling, and she couldn’t care less. I mean that tables and chairs are shown none of the respect my father had for them. She clatters her way around like he never existed. She’s put a crack in the central stained pane of the kitchen door. He had that specially made. I mean that steps hold no fear for her – she jumps them, I swear to God, like a side saddle skate boarder. She gets up a bit of speed and goes flying off into mid air as if the worst that could happen has already happened. She is morbidly optimistic. And she has more muscle in her arms than a weight lifter. She can wrestle the machine up steps if she feels she needs to. A remarkable procedure, which I once witnessed, appalled, from the living room window, as she came in from the garden with a bunch of sorry chrysanthemums. She looked like she might burst. I watched. The net curtains tickled my nose. She didn’t.

She has taken all the carpets up and put down linoleum. In every bloody room. From the front door to the attic. It used to be a house that was entirely carpeted, wall to wall, gable to gable, many colours, many patterns, many textures – all my father’s choosing and planning and execution, warm and rich and his. But once she was in the chair she found the carpets heavy going. Had them all ripped up and the linoleum put in. She could get up some speed then, which is what she’s always liked, she can gather some momentum – down the corridor to the kitchen, back up the hall to the front room, spinning that corner like a rally driver, back out to the foot of the stairs, a figure of eight, back to the living room, a ferocious pace, her big arms just a blur at her side, faster than any upright person can manage. Moving through the house with her is like walking with a hyperactive child. She’s all over the place, under your feet, charging towards you, charging away from you, heading straight for a hall table disaster with the two old vases my father bought in Venice perched on top terrified, the poor things, and avoiding it at the last second, oblivious to the chaos in her wake. It gives me heartburn just to look at her.

Everything was always quick with her. She drove the same way. She keeps the car you know – it’s out in the garage, starting to flake with rust at the bottoms of the doors. She gets me to go out and turn it over every now and then. Which involves sitting in it with the engine on for a few minutes, wondering whether she’s encouraging me to kill myself. I can’t drive. I’ve no interest. Walking is better. Slower. She won’t let me sell it. Sure why should she sell it? As soon as she’s out of the chair she’ll be driving again, it’s only a matter of time.

The park is deserted. It’s not as warm as it should be, for this time of year. It never is.

She’ll never be out of the chair. But she won’t be told. She thinks, my mother, that everything is temporary, except life. That one of these days she’ll stand on her own two feet and walk out to her car and speed off to find a man to relay the carpets. Which are rolled up in the spare room like the dead sea scrolls.

She’s benign, my mother, do you know what I mean? Benign like a tumour. She’s not killing me, but I want her removed. Is that terrible? Is it? Is that terrible of me? There she is in the house, my house, by rights my house really, and she’s persevering, clinging on grimly, no actually, not grimly, if she was grim then at least she might be of the same mind as me – waiting for some release – but she isn’t grim, she’s cheerful. Rolling around the linoleum, in my house, talking up her chances of a holiday with Frances and Maud, to the Algarve would you believe, the three of them, a holiday for the girls, can you imagine such a thing? Frances is practically blind, and showing early signs of Alzheimer’s, I’m sure of it. Maud is due her third hip replacement next month and spends most of her days, from what I can make out, chatting to teenage boys on the internet.

Every day I have to come over here. Every single bloody day. When I get to the door I turn and look back down the drive towards the gate, at the world. Every time. As if I’ve forgotten something. I don’t know what that’s about. And then in I go, to a maelstrom of words and news and gossip and ideas, and a list of things in inaccessible places, remembered things that suddenly seem important, I don’t know why, I never know why, and an unquenchable thirst for living, for being bloody well alive, on her steel wheels and her linoleum, like a woman stapled to life, affixed with spokes and levers, propelled by her own strength. Damn her.

I should get back. I’ll have to leave the shoes in the porch. I love her of course. I do love her. But what good is that? She loved my father. My father loved me. What of it?

When I get back she has stopped moving. I think for a moment that she’s finally had the good grace to leave us, but it’s not that. She’s sitting in the middle of the hall, and the radio is gone berserk, with a woman’s voice droning on and on and I can’t understand a word of it, and my mother is clutching that old novel, Ulysses it is, Joyce, that thing, and the photograph of the three of us in the caravan, and there’s a tear on her cheek but she’s smiling broadly. At me. Yes, says the woman on the radio, a few times, and my mother mouths it with her, like it’s a song, and then there’s a long silence, and the announcer comes on and says what it is we’ve just been listening to, and it’s the book in my mother’s lap, the same book, and she’s nodding, my mother is, and the announcer says the date, June 16^th, and my mother smiles at me, as if it’s significant, but frankly I’m not getting any of this, and then she asks me, my mother, she asks, with the photograph held up towards me like she’s meeting me at an airport or a train station, and she asks me, do you not know what today is darling? Her eyes sparkling so you’d swear she’s been drinking, or singing, or something good. Do you not know this date?

I was living at that time in a small town on the coast where it might be supposed that secrets are impossible. But the truth of course is that a rich depth of secrets is the only way such towns survive. Without secrets, everyday life would be impossible.

Writing, I spent my days alone, and my evenings in one of the town’s several pubs, and sometimes in one of the town’s two restaurants. Occasionally a friend would come to visit from Dublin. We would walk, sometimes swim, get drunk, talk. An old boyfriend visited from Paris once. The weather was bleak and the wind rushed through the streets with sea-spray and the scent of low-tide rock. I don’t think it rained, but it was always damp. He walked on the beach and was quiet, much quieter than he had been the last time I’d seen him. He worked in Paris for a chain store – something to do with shop layouts, design. He had been in France since leaving university in Dublin, working at various things, piecemeal, avoiding a career, writing some poetry. He’d published some poems in Dublin. We had been boyfriends briefly as teenagers – intense adolescents thinking everything was about our hearts when really it was about our bodies. But we liked each other. We shared a sense of humour. We read and exchanged novels we thought of as serious; we read each other’s poems; we dressed darkly and listened to each other’s advice about music. After school we drifted apart, but not very far, following different groups of friends, both ending up at UCD, both studying English, though from different angles, as if we’d disagreed. When we were in our early twenties we fell in love. I think we fell in love. He was less sure than I was. He didn’t rule it out, but he thought it was really friendship that was trying too hard. We would argue about whether we were in love or not. He once said, as if this was definitive – “you’ve never made me cry”. This was no good measure, I said. Though I knew that it was, and I knew that he was right. We both noticed that I could not say the same to him. But I cry far too easily.

We walked on the beach and he was quiet. I tried to tease out what was on his mind, but he just smiled sadly and insisted that nothing was wrong, that he was just tired, weary of his life a little, that he was happy to see me, to be with me, in this beautiful place. But the sand was the colour of UCD concrete and there was not much beauty, and the wind reddened our faces as if we were a little embarrassed.

We went for dinner on the first night, at the restaurant in the square where the seafood was good and he told me about his work, which seemed very boring, and I told him about my writing, which seemed even more boring, and we asked each other about men and discovered that we had reached a similar state of mind about relationships – feeling that we were better single, that we functioned better alone, and that sex was relatively easy and often delightful to find on a one-off or irregular basis with men who we treated as friends, or even not as friends but as physical comforts to us, and us to them, and that such a life was civilised and calm and why did everyone not live like us? The logic of this would have been to sleep with each other that night but we did not. He took the small second bedroom with its skylight and its view of nothing but a hill. I woke before he did and brought him coffee. He sat up in bed and I was moved by his skin. He was beautiful. He was different of course to the young man I had once thought I loved, but he was beautiful. It made me nervous.

He stayed another four days.

There was in the town, in one of the pubs, a barman I liked. He was handsome, friendly, and I had spent evenings chatting with him about politics, books he was reading, other people. Sometimes I felt that he looked at me, or we looked at each other, in a way that suggested something. But I never knew what that something was. In a small town yearning is as easy and as dangerous as the sea. I took my old boyfriend to the bar and he and the barman chatted as well. They got on. We went back the next night, and we sat up at the counter with him at closing time and he had a drink with us and it was clearer now that the something was a interest, an erotic interest, an interest in erotic possibility, and when I asked him to come back to the house with us for a nightcap, the three of us paused and exchanged looks, slow silent looks, and all of us seemed to say yes.

But in the end, all we did was kiss. My former boyfriend kissed him first. And then I kissed him. And then my former boyfriend and I kissed. And then everything became something else and the barman soon left, and my old boyfriend and I talked for a long time, well into the day, and kissed, and we held each other’s arms and shoulders and we lay against each other and talked and kissed and in the end we both cried, probably from exhaustion, and we fell asleep together. We understood nothing while we talked and nothing while we cried. But while we kissed we seemed to know some bitter beautiful thing that we could not capture and we could not keep, because you cannot keep on kissing.

He went back to Paris. Last year he called me one night and we spoke about nothing, and he asked me about the town, and whether I would go back, and I said no, I didn’t think so, that the work I had done there had turned out badly. He thought that was funny. So did I. We laughed.

“Work is for cowards” he said.

I think perhaps I should at some future point write something about my depression. I don’t want to. There are few things more boring than reading or hearing about other people’s dreams or drug trips or depression. Having said that, depression has been the only real constant reliable presence – personality, character, leviathan – in my life since my early teens, and though it rises and falls, at times it dominates every aspect of everything I do and fail to do. Such as at the moment, and for the last several weeks. I write from inside it. And it is something that I am inside, in the sense of being in the hold of a ship – tied to a beam in the belly of an aircraft carrier, sick in the corner of a whale. I am not in the world at the moment. I am inside some dark horrible thing that is travelling through water.

I want to write about Bolaño. This is almost impossible. I want to set down the obvious but unstated facts about Bolaño’s “death”. And write about the extraordinary extended and invasive fiction which he has created – vast and intricate and viciously stabbed through the chest with sentiment and love. However I have not completed my reading, and I am depressed.

There is a banal and obvious truth about literature that bears continual repeating. It is practised in solitude and it is experienced and enjoyed in solitude. Much effort is expended in pretending that it is some sort of shared experience, that a community is created out of readers and writers. But it is not true. We write alone and read alone. And when we try to talk about it we are close to useless.

I want to write about Gombrowicz. That bastard. He is the only writer I know of who has come close to putting a stop to literature. Shutting it down. Completing it. His method is almost the opposite of Bolaño’s – constricted, intricately pressed into giddy claustrophobic space. He travels the world’s oceans in a glass egg. Gombrowicz tickles you to death. However I have not completed my reading and I am depressed.

There are so many terrible writers. So much shit is published by the zombies who publish shit. So many novels that are nothing, less than nothing, much worse than nothing. My own novels are nothing. My own writing is nothing but a knife at my back. It may be that six hundred years from now all people will read from the scraped up blood and tissue of these one hundred years will be Gombrowicz and Bolaño. Kafka, perhaps. That’s it. I’ve gone off Beckett. I need to write about that. But. I have not completed my reading and I am depressed.

He has a lot of books on his shelves and you like him because of it and you read the spines and you like the thrillers and the detective stories and you see the full set by a particular writer that you like, and he has arranged them in order so you like him more. Then you see when you turn around a much bigger book case full of DVDs and you like him less but scold yourself.

His carpet is threadbare and everything is landlord standard issue and you are ambivalent about this but you wish his flat was a little nicer, or had more of a personality, was a touch cleaner, had a better sofa, but you are glad that you are in his place and not yours.

He talks about politics for a minute and you like him more but then he reveals a view about the prospects for the forthcoming election that does not quite chime with your own and you like him a little less. Even though you are unable to articulate the precision of your own view or why the difference is important and you do not even try.

His kitchen is a real mess and you are ambivalent about this but he digs around in the dirty dishes for a knife so that he can make himself a sandwich and you have declined the offer of a sandwich and you like him a little less because he is so hungry but he does not care that you see that he is simply hungry so you like him a little more.

He offers you cheap blended whisky and you see that he has a bottle of single malt on top of his cupboard, and after the first glass of the blend you nod at the single malt and he frowns, and he doesn’t like it but he pours two glasses of it anyway and you like him less for giving in to you.

You think that a man like this who saves the single malt for himself is going to have a stained toilet bowl. A filthy disgusting faecally cluttered toilet bowl. And you discover that in fact the bowl is pristine. Unblemished. White as a full sky. And you have your piss and go back to the living room and you like him better.

When you kiss he is good at it and you like him more. And you realise that he has at some point done something with mouthwash so that you do not have to taste his sandwich, and you like him more. When he takes off his shirt you get a whiff of strong deodorant and you like him less.

He has a painting on his wall that you are not sure if you like or not. The sex is fine, a roll of less and more and more or less but overall you both come out of it okay and you like him better than you did before.

He doesn’t want you to stay the night so you like him less, but then you realise that you don’t like people staying either and you want to go home anyway, so you like him more.

He is very non-committal about meeting up again so you like him less. But he does ask for your number and dials it there and then so that you have his, so you like him more. You wonder would you have left without asking for his and you know that you probably would.  Either you would have forgotten to ask or you would have thought about it and not asked because you would have wanted him to ask. You think about that in the street where there is just the quiet night and a short walk home and the streets are old and empty and you think about yourself, only about yourself, and all the things you have said and done this evening, and you like yourself more and you like yourself less and you like yourself less and you like yourself less and the window in your bedroom faces the constellation Draco which never sets.

Grass. Wall. There is some sky in the distance, and a cloud in the distance, and some hints of blasted houses and the remains of the town. Its ghost goes up and covers it. In the distance. There is the mud here, and the grass, and the grass is losing out, and the wall is crumbling but still a wall and the house it surrounds is partly collapsed and the roof still smoulders and the children sit out front on bits of furniture, sticks in the mud, huddled together with the last of the water and the taste of the beams, and the oldest boy whimpers quietly with his arm burned red and blistered and his sense of himself confused, so that he is mostly fear and failure, and he does not know what to do.

Arrayed as a front they watch the street for soldiers and pass amongst themselves the last of the water and the seeds. They’ve long since given up talking. Maybe thinking as well. And there is less heat now from the roof and the girl is shivering and she huddles with her brother on the sofa like they are listening to the radio and their mother they think is dead and their father is gone a long time, and they don’t speak of him though in each of their hearts he is always returning, coming down the road, coming up the street, his clothes muddy and maybe a bandage somewhere, but whole and healthy enough to lift them up and kiss their cheeks. He will lift them up and kiss their salty cheeks, and he will set them down by his legs.

Grass. Wall. Crackles at their dim backs. There is some sky in the distance.

Mud. Bricks. Snaps at his flayed back. There is some sky in the distance.

He sits in the mud and wants to sleep but he cannot sleep because of the noise and the smell and because of his leg and he sits in the mud by the river and they call him the Pig. The river is wide and it is full of oil and bodies. At his back the snapping shots. He laughs a little he thinks. Why is he sitting and not lying down? He looks at his leg. It is altered from the high thigh, where there is a puff of foamy blood and he can see the mud where his knee should be and his foot still seems attached by a loop of skin or some other local matter, but he cannot be sure if it is just the blood and that is all, that is all, he is bleeding to death and that is all. He looks at the river and that is all. He wonders why no one shoots him again or comes for his kit and his clothes. They call him the Pig because he snorts when he laughs. And he has clung to the name and laughed at it snorting, and he has kept it out of his letters so that he can tell them when he sees them, that he has been the higgledy pig, like the story he made up for them, that they asked for every night, that’s what they’d called him, the pig, the higgeldy pig, because of the snort when he laughed, and because he laughed so much. And why did you laugh so much Daddy, why? Because I was thinking of the time I’d be telling you that they called me the Pig, and I was thinking how you would take it, and thinking how funny you’d find it, and I was thinking of you, and that was my life, and I am thinking of you now.

And he sits in the mud and wants for nothing.

The children all died too, by starvation and the cold, one way or the other.
And this happened many times in that year, this year, who knows.

When we were kids in Texas we used to swim every morning in a river near the house we painted red. One day we saw what we thought was a dead child but it was half a dead pig wrapped in magazine centrefolds caught up in the reeds and stinking blue. When our father died my brother cried and I didn’t. We moved to Europe with our mother and lived without money for two years in a top floor apartment where we felt too hot or too cold and always hungry. My mother wrote but no one cared. She worked some days. She hung a picture of our father on the wet wall. We huddled scared and learned the language and we listened to the dying Algerian woman who lived below us, and her living sons rattled the doors. My brother was raped twice in the stairwell, once by cops. I carried a knife and spent a year with my head caved in. Our mother died of course. My brother went to New York and I didn’t. I came here with a girl I knew and her daughter and we have not moved since. Not a muscle.

My brother is an indie music star, half famous now, and we have not talked in many years and in interviews he says he was an only child and he tells the story of the dead pig but not the story of the Parisian stairwell. I understand this. I love my brother. And I will kill you if you hurt him. I will kill you if you hurt him. I will kill anyone.

Matin Provost’s film Où Va La Nuit , based on my novel The Long Falling , opens in cinemas in France and Belgium on May 4th. It features Yolande Moreau in the lead role. Here’s a trailer.

OÙ VA LA NUIT : BANDE-ANNONCE de Martin Provost… by baryla

More details here.

This week’s issue of The New Yorker has a new story of mine called Goo Book . The issue is dated April 11th but it’s out now (April 4th). Apologies to those of you who were expecting it last week (or the week before), but world events intervened and The New Yorker was understandably pressed for space.

There is also a brief Q&A on The New Yorker website about the story which you can read here .

The current issue of Zoetrope All-Story also has a new story called Rothko Eggs . The version printed in the magazine has some errors that crept in during a copy edit. There isn’t a huge number of them, but they do affect the flow of the story, and one on the last page alters the ending. So Zoetrope have put the correct version of the story up on their website, and you can read it here . Ideally, go and buy the magazine – there are some great photographs in there by Mark Romanek; there’s a David Means story; there’s other fiction by Johanna Suskind and Frances de Pontes Peebles; there’s an old Raymond Carver – then print off my story from the website and stick it in there using glue, Sellotape or spit.

I wrote a review of Kevin Barry’s début novel City of Bohane for the Irish Times, and that came out on Saturday. You can read it here .

Finally, I’ll be in Dublin next weekend for the Franco Irish Literary Festival , which takes place at Dublin Castle. This is the second time I’ve attended this festival – it’s a great opportunity to meet and hear writers from France and Ireland (and elsewhere). I’m doing a Café Littéraire on Friday 8th at 6pm with Philippe Forest and Julia Franck; and a Literary Brunch at 11am on Sunday 10th with Claude Arnaud, Eric Fottorino, Virginie Linhart and Micheál Ó Conghaile. All events take place in the Coach House in Dublin Castle, and are free and open to all. Come and say hello.