Dooneen
A wounded man writes from a cliff-cut room as Dublin’s housing uprising ends in massacre and contested record.
Notes on Books
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01
Essay
Explanation Under Pressure
An event occurs without becoming motive. Explanation is demanded, but the act remains without justification.
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02
Essay
Reading Queer Life
How queer life in literature is shaped by scrutiny, secrecy, attachment, violence and memory across the archive.
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03
Essay
Reading Masculinity
Fourteen novels under pressure. Masculinity tested through structure, control, and collapse.
The Disappearers
A rehearsal room in 1988 Kingston becomes the site of an attack whose aftermath spreads through aliases, testimony, revenge and return.
The Fall
A lawyer in an Amsterdam bar turns confession into control, using guilt to build a private court no listener can leave untouched.
At Night All Blood is Black
A failed mercy killing repeated on strangers as restitution, ending in an act the army's procedure cannot absorb.
Kingfisher
A debut novel follows a writer’s affair with an older woman, turning desire, illness and care into a question of who controls the record.
Arendal
One night failing to get home. Thirty years failing to get anywhere further.
Lázár
A Hungarian family learns to survive through concealment, then enters a century that turns concealment into policy.
Palimpsest
A memoir organises a life as social evidence, placing wit, rank and sexual candour under the pressure of what the argument cannot contain: the grief that outlasts every performance of detachment.
Hot Fruit
Orphanage origins, family objects, meals and fables shape lives built around beginnings that cannot be securely known.
She Who Remains
Measuring the cost of remaining alive when survival requires self-erasure.
Exhibition
A photographer watches her own images sell as a dead woman's self-portraits. The question is which of them made the work.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
A year of pharmaceutical sleep staged as transformation, ending in confirmation that conscious life happens to other people.