Leet's Be Alone Together

Let's Be Alone Together


Edited by Declan Meade


Stinging Fly Press €13, 207pps


STINGING FLY'S continuing commitment to the short story is just one indication of the form's growing popularity; the other is the number of cross-channel publishers willing to fork out on collections by new and well-known writers. This collection by various writers is characteristically mixed. Some stories here – and they're easily spotted – are written from personal experience, such as Tim Tierney's 'Looking For America'. Others are uniquely original, as in Helena Nolan's mournful and ambiguous 'A Hare's Nest' where a mother, who is recovering from the disappearance of her son, allows herself to be seduced by a total stranger. Then again, maybe she's in shock and, it is hinted, just hallucinating. Maybe she will never recover. In contrast to that, Mia Gallagher's playful 'Polyfilla' is set in south Dublin at a dinner party during which a myopic Lothario eyes up a woman. Cool glass in hand, hot desire in his pants, he moves in only to discover he has badly misjudged her age, and that her face needs a going-0over with 'polyfilla'. Stinging Fly is worthy of every support.


Forever Friends


By Kate McCabe


Poolbeg €18, 440pps


AFTER reading McCabe's latest door-stopper, readers will learn everything about the property market. Maddy works as an estate agent so we get the intricacies of joint purchases, auctions, percentages, bargaining. At one stage, Maddy declares "property is a rock-solid investment". Oh yeah? Maddy knows everything about the property market but, alas, nothing about men. You know from the minute she meets lover boy Greg – "broad-shouldered, blond, six-foot, drives a sports BMW, eats at places like the Chalet d'Or" – that he is a total shit who will bring her grief and nothing but. They meet when Greg shows an interest in a two-bed apartment in Sandymount for £85,000. So the setting is what, 1991? Whether or not they climb into the scratcher is left open, for McCabe is not one for such vulgarities. Anyway, they part and later he returns telling her he is selling the apartment. "Why are you selling?" she asks. "I'm getting married," he answers. Ah! Enter Conor: "I've wanted you for a long time," and her body melts. Women will love this stuff. Won't they?


True Tales of the Wild West


By Clive Sinclair


Picador stg£10 400pps


WE MUST ask ourselves here what would a man called Clive know about the Wild West. Clive? That said, every young lad once thought he knew everything about the Gun Fight at the OK Corral, the Deadwood stage coach, Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James. All of this has already been pored over before by those who separated fact from fiction, romance from reality. But Clive comes at it from an original angle by creating a new genre called 'Dodgy Realism', in which he invents two fictional characters, Peppercorn and Saltzman, who gallop off in all directions in search of the truth. Marvellous fun. At one point, Saltzman is attacked by a feminist. Is humiliated. Whereas Wyatt Earp would have put her across his knee. Then again, maybe he wouldn't. Dodgy Realism.


The Fighter: Essays


By Tim Parks


Vintage £10 278pps


PARKS advises, not uniquely, that we must question consensus. Here he looks at historical figures who went against the flow. Mussolini, a psychiatrist's dream, with his imbecilic fascist utopia; his indecisions would always be final. Sam Beckett is included. Centre stage, though, is DH Lawrence. Parks begins and ends with the conflicted novelist and his obsession with the class struggle – his mother was poor and ill-educated, not the schoolteacher he claimed she was, and suffered from the violence of her working-class husband.


From Anger to Apathy


The Story of Politics, Society and Popular Culture in Britain Since 1975


By Mark Garnett


Vintage £10 420pps


OUR starting point here is Harold Wilson's second term when Britain's morale had dipped to an all-time low: Westminster up to its oxters in scandal; serial killers on the streets. The bishop Llandaff was charged with gross indecency and forced to resign. A knife-wielding rapist was given a suspended sentence because the judge did not like sending a young man to prison. And then, to make things worse, a civil servant came up with the idea to 'Brighten Up Ulster' by sending Morecambe and Wise to Norn Oirlan'. The idea was dropped.