Never Ask Me Why: Paul Auster, Novelist

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, September 5, 2009
WELL, MR AUSTER. Tell me all about yourself.” Quite a way to start a conversation. But then, if you’re Samuel Beckett, you can probably get away with any conversation-starter you like. And it goes without saying that you can lean across the table to pilfer a cigarette [...]

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From the Lake: Garrison Keillor

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, July 25, 2009
IN THE ELEVATOR, I’m sceptical. He can’t always talk in that voice, can he? At 11am, in the middle of a busy two-day trip to New York, at the end of another long season of the radio show which requires him to riff and revel and recite [...]

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An Irishman in America: Colm Tóibín

 
First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, April 25, 2009

IT’S SPRINGTIME in Brooklyn, in the old Italian neighbourhood of Cobble Hill. But suddenly it doesn’t feel like Brooklyn anymore; suddenly the air seems that of a small Irish town, of a small Irish sittingroom, where a small Irish boy sits at a card table with his [...]

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John Banville: The Art of Fiction, No. 200

 
 
My interview with John Banville, conducted on four occasions in Dublin between 2007 and 2008, has just been published in the Spring 2009 issue of The Paris Review. You can read an excerpt here.

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Lived-in Lots: Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts

 
First Published in the Irish Times, Saturday, April 11, 2009
THERE’S A HENRY JAMES story which set Leanne Shapton’s heart thumping even before she’d read it, and when you look at the title – The Romance of Certain Old Clothes – it’s not hard to see why. James’s earliest ghost story was published in 1868, and when Shapton [...]

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Unearthing Skeletons: Dirk Wittenborn

 
First Published in the Irish Times, Saturday, February 28, 2009
EVERY FAMILY HAS its secrets, says Dirk Wittenborn. Every family, he says, “has its bogeyman”. So, in a way, the Wittenborns of New Haven weren’t really that unusual. Not really. But even Wittenborn himself doesn’t look convinced by that idea. He may just have written a [...]

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Joan Didion

First Published: The Irish Times, September 13, 2008

The apartment is as you’d expect. Books are everywhere – on the tables, on the ottomans, on the shelves around the pale, high walls – and where there are no books there are photographs; silver-framed family snapshots, tinted now with an intense melancholy. That autumn afternoon by Bethesda [...]

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Yiyun Li, Novelist

First Published: The Irish Times, 9 August 2008
Yiyun Li is coming to Ireland, and not before time. It’s not as though the Beijing-born writer, who will read at the Kilkenny Arts Festival next weekend hasn’t had good reason to stop by this part of the world before now; in 2005, for her debut collection of [...]

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Joseph O’Neill, Novelist

First Published: The Irish Times Magazine, June 7, 2008

LOOK AT THIS,” says Joseph O’Neill, standing at a desk in the livingroom of his apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. He picks up a manuscript, a hefty volume, and we browse through the pages together. It’s all here. Crime. Punishment. Pride. Prejudice. War. Peace. And a Tyrannosaurus [...]

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Edmund White, Novelist and Essayist

First Published: The Irish Times, August 11, 2007
‘Oh dear,” says Edmund White, as we sit down over miniature china tea-cups and enormous pastel-coloured cupcakes in his Chelsea apartment on a blisteringly hot summer afternoon. “Oh god, let’s hope I’m not sued by Gore Vidal.”
We haven’t even started the interview, and already White has had his [...]

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