For the next session of our Contemporary Irish Literature Book Club, we will read and discuss Claire Keegan’s new book Small Things Like These, via Zoom on Wednesday the 16th of February at 7pm.
If you would like to attend the book club, please sign up to on Eventbrite page here, and we’ll send you a link ahead of the session: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/contemporary-irish-literature-book-club-claire-keegan-tickets-254665891537
The book club is organised by Dearbhaile Houston, Liam Harrison and Orlaith Darling, the founding members of the Contemporary Irish Literature research network. While we all research Irish literature, we hope the book club can be a casual and informal environment to chat about recent books where all are welcome.
To give the discussion some structure, we’ve sketched out a number of possible talking points here:
- What form is Small Things Like These – novel, novella, long short story – and does it matter?
- Subject Matter:- how can novels capture cultural memories in distinctive ways, and fail to capture them in others?
- Reading Back: how can historical fiction act as a lens on the present?
Further reading (very optional!)
- Caelainn Hogan, Republic of Shame (Penguin, 2019)
- Derek Scally, ‘Ireland’s Break with its Catholic Past Incomplete, says Sally Rooney’, Irish Times 12th Sept. 2021. Available here.
- Alyson Staunton, ‘Why the State had such a big problem with unmarried mothers’, Irish Times 19th Jan. 2021. Available here.
- Jennifer O’Connell, ‘It was not just in Gilead that women were stripped of their names’, Irish Times 5th October, 2019. Available here.
- Claire Armistead, ‘I think something needs to be as long as it needs to be’ Interview with Claire Keegan, The Guardian 20th Oct. 2021. Available here.
- Terence Winch in Conversation with Claire Keegan, The Howard County Poetry and Literature Society, The Writing Life (2010). Available here.
- Emilie Pine, ‘Past Traumas: Representing Institutional Abuse’, in The Politics of Irish Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
If you have any questions, please email Dearbhaile, Liam and Orlaith at contemporaryirishlit@gmail.com
Contemporary Irish Literature 