The Stinging Fly has been something of a revelation in Irish literature. Founded in Dublin in 1997 by Declan Meade and Aoife Kavanagh as a receptacle for “all this great writing floating around,” as Meade said, it earned government support and has reached its 25th year as a launching pad for some of the country’s most promising, and in time, some of its best known, poets and novelists. As such, it has also become prime poaching ground for editors in other countries hungry for Irish talent.
Since the very first days of computer science — a field known for its methodical approach to problem-solving — randomness has played an important role. The first program to run on the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer used randomness to simulate nuclear processes. Similar approaches have since been used in astrophysics, climate science and economics. In all these cases, plugging in random numbers at certain steps in the algorithm helps researchers account for uncertainty about the many ways that complex processes can play out.
But adding randomness into an algorithm can also help you calculate the correct answer to unambiguous true-or-false questions. “You just say ‘OK, let me give up, let me not try, let me just pick something at random,’” said Eric Blais, a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo. “For way too many problems, that ends up being a successful approach.”
This Bird Has Flown is a love story, a sweet and tender romance, but not just one between Jane and Tom — it's Hoffs' valentine to music. (It's no surprise that she titled the book after a song by her beloved Beatles.) "I'd never yearned for the spotlight, only the music, only to strive to give others what music has unwaveringly given to me," Jane thinks at one point. "An outpouring of love, of expression, of connection." That's just what this novel is, and it's an absolutely beautiful outpouring.
There is a word commonly used to describe books like this: gritty. Fair enough. “House of Cotton” is unafraid to peer at the unsavory minutiae of getting by. But for this novel, I’d add a few other labels too: magnetic, singular and completely unforgettable.
The title of this bracing memoir — I Can't Save You — by former ear, nose and throat surgeon Anthony Chin-Quee seems to suggests an inability or unwillingness to save lives.
But upon further reading, its seeming surrender actually affirms the Hippocratic Oath when you consider that Chin-Quee, a Black man who struggles with racial barriers throughout, can't save others without first saving himself — and that, as the tale tells, the author has to let go of his personal demons to prosper in his medical calling.
Jeannie Marshall’s compact and elegantly voiced book, “All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel,” is a confession about a former life which begins with a childhood that was squalid in both material and spiritual circumstances, and proceeds into a young adulthood that (mostly by implication) left her emotionally deprived but then got turned around by repeated exposure to the Sistine Chapel, where she found herself reborn into the love of art, the love of the past and, indeed, into love itself.
It is in the telling that the true magic of spoken word, and Bennett’s intricate exploration of its origin stories, comes alive. “Spoken Word” is an engaging meditation on the history of a literary and cultural movement that would take hold in the realms of music, theater, film, television and, of course, poetry.