Fiction

Fiction

Don Quixote is the best book out there on political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the tragedy and the comedy of the Mexican political system than Hamlet, Macbeth and Don Quixote. They're much better than any column of political analysis.

Subcomandante Marcos

The "War to End All Wars," like all the wars that have followed it, discarded human lives on all sides. Here, a German prisoner helps British wounded make their way to a dressing station. Image: Imperial War Museum
Wednesday, 07 November 2018 13:37

The Discarded Soldier

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Jenny Farrell introduces a little-known short story by Liam O'Flaherty 11 November 2018 marks the centenary of the ending of World War I. During that bloody slaughter, the propagandists described it as the “war to end all wars”. One hundred years and as many wars on the militarists in the…
Remembrance Day WW1
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José Saramago: visions of a better world
Saturday, 29 September 2018 17:54

José Saramago: visions of a better world

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Jenny Farrell pays tribute to the communist writer José Saramago, whose vision of another, possible world is still relevant today. Twenty years ago, on 8 October 1998, the communist writer José de Sousa Saramago was the first Portuguese author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.  The first fifty years of…
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Cré na Cille: a comedy and a bald statement of unacceptable class rule
K2_PUBLISHED_ON Monday, 03 September 2018 22:31

Cré na Cille: a comedy and a bald statement of unacceptable class rule

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Eoin Ó Murchú reviews Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille, translated from the Irish as The Dirty Dust by Alan Titley, Yale University Press 2015 Cré na Cille is regarded as the greatest modern prose work written in the Irish language. Its depiction of the reality and context of peasant life is…
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Ulysses Flann O'Brien James Connolly
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: a literary exposure of The Great Money Trick of capitalism
K2_PUBLISHED_ON Friday, 03 August 2018 15:39

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: a literary exposure of The Great Money Trick of capitalism

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Jenny Farrell discusses one of the great working class novels in English literature, a literary exposure of the 'Great Money Trick' - the exploitation inherent in capitalism. Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is the first important working-class novel in English literature. It was written between 1906 and 1910 and…
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Robert Tressell social realism the great money trick
Emily Bronte
K2_PUBLISHED_ON Friday, 22 June 2018 22:52

Emily Brontë, Heathcliff and imagining a classless society

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Jenny Farrell discusses ‘Wuthering Heights’, and its subtle, skilful imagining of a more humane, classless society, where unequal gender difference is replaced by an equality of personhood. 30 July 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth. Her novel “Wuthering Heights” (1847) is an amazing, creative challenge to the…
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Wuthering Heights
'The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter': Dashiell Hammett vs. Joe McCarthy
Wednesday, 28 February 2018 11:57

'The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter': Dashiell Hammett vs. Joe McCarthy

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Phil Brett tells the story of when Dashiell Hammett faced Senator Joseph McCarthy.                               Sixty five years ago, on March 26th 1953, Dashiell Hammett, the famous novelist who was responsible for popularising the hard-boiled private eye novel,…
Maltese Falcom Humphrey Bogart Lauren Bacall IWW Trump
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This harp shall never be silent: Tomás Mac Síomóin at 80
Tuesday, 13 February 2018 20:07

This harp shall never be silent: Tomás Mac Síomóin at 80

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Jenny Farrell marks Tomás Mac Síomóin's birthday on 19 February with an essay on this subversive, internationalist writer, who translated the Communist Manifesto into Irish, satirises  contemporary neoliberal Ireland in poetry and prose, and is ignored and unofficially censored by the Irish literary-political establishment. One of the tragedies that befell Ireland…
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The Profit Motive
Tuesday, 30 January 2018 11:16

The Profit Motive

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The Profit Motive - Part One by Owain Holland I speak to you from a secret Government facility named 'Arthur's Grave' on Lundy Island. My name is Doctor Cynthia Doyle. The Government rounded us up. All the healthy, uninfected medical professionals they had left, and sent us here. I'm the…
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