Claire Hennessy's Blog, page 4
March 21, 2019
Books ‘n’ pieces
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Claire Hennessy (@chennessybooks) on Mar 17, 2019 at 3:08am PDT
YA reviewed in The Irish Times : new books from Orlagh Collins, Nina de Pass, Samira Ahmed, Laura Bates, Sara Barnard & the Proud anthology (ed. Juno Dawson). Also contributed to this piece on the best books by women of the 21st century.And more lady-fiction, this time for HeadStuff.What I’ve been reading: including but not limited to The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso, Nine Inches by Tom Perrotta, Vagina: A Re-education by Lynn Enright & Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton.
March 4, 2019
Books ‘n’ pieces (what I’ve been up to)
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Claire Hennessy (@chennessybooks) on Feb 12, 2019 at 6:51am PST
Popped into Trinity for an editing workshop as part of LitSoc’s Litfest week. (Arrive for the workshop, stay for the chats about fanfiction and the cups of tea…)
YA fiction reviewed for February in the Irish Times includes novels by Gita Trelease (magic during pre-revolutionary France!), Alyssa Sheinmel (a gorgeous psychological thriller), Angie Thomas (her impressive follow-up to THUG, Sharon Dogar (Mary Shelley!) & Kiersten White (a new Buffy-verse series begins!).
Banshee is open for submissions until the end of March! Also gets a mention in this British Vogue article about current Irish women’s writing.
March & April creative writing courses at the Big Smoke Writing Factory are open for booking now.
I visited Galway to read at their monthly Over The Edge reading series & it was delightful. Great writing-community vibe but also a nice balance of featured readers & open-mic slots. And excellent chats after, the sort that leave you feeling ‘like a real writer!’ for at least 24 hours.
View this post on Instagram
Prep for reading this evening! #overtheedge #galway
A post shared by Claire Hennessy (@chennessybooks) on Feb 28, 2019 at 8:43am PST
January 20, 2019
Bookish Thoughts: January
Welcome to the monthly-round-up, where I yap about books I’ve read recently and what the shiny bits were, whether they came out years ago or last week.
From the archives:
Sarah Manguso (have I mentioned I love her in the last five minutes?) and her book The Guardians is wondrous.
This month’s shiny new reads:
YA fiction reviewed this month in the Irish Times includes novels by Chelsea Pitcher, Karen M McManus, David Owen, Lisa Williamson & Natasha Ngan.Ella Risbridger’s Midnight Chicken is mostly still too complicated for me recipe-wise but I’m trying.
To watch out for:
[image error]
[image error]
Sophie Kinsella’s I Owe You One is that delicious combination of rom-com and sharp-commentary-on-business that one would expect – another gorgeous read.
December 31, 2018
Bookish Thoughts: December
Welcome to the monthly-round-up, where I yap about books I’ve read recently and what the shiny bits were, whether they came out years ago or last week.
From the archives:
A.S. King’s Still Life With Tornado is a YA book of wonder.
This month’s shiny new reads:
YA fiction this month in the Irish Times is a round-up of the best of 2018.
Early Work by Andrew Martin (debut American author, not the British mystery dude) is a wry look at young-writers-trying-to-be-writerly, among other things. Hugely enjoyable.
Jessica Vallance’s Trust Her is a thriller that offers two messed-up antiheroines for the price of one – a delicious read.
Ruth Ware’s The Death of Mrs Westaway is an old-school-style mystery set in a Big House and featuring family secrets of various kinds.
My Meg Wolitzer crushing continues and I finally read The Female Persuasion, which is a neat little look at what it means to try to be a feminist in your life and in your career. Adored it.
The latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid title, The Meltdown, continues its sharp observations about what it means to be a kid. Greg also offers up some excellent suggestions about how humans should hibernate all winter. Book 13 and still going strong…
I reviewed the latest Jodi Picoult novel, A Spark of Light , for HeadStuff.
To watch out for:
Sinead Gleeson’s Constellations. A stunning, smart, empathetic collection of personal essays offering insight into illness, the body, grief, identity and so much more. Publishing April 2019 and already on several ‘to watch out for’ lists.
Claire Allan’s second psychological thriller (following a successful career writing women’s fiction), Apple of my Eye, is out in January and is deliciously gripping.
Out in February: Alex Michaelides’s The Silent Patient, a thriller about a painter who allegedly stabbed her husband to death and the psychotherapist determined to make her speak.
December 23, 2018
Best books of 2018 (YA edition)
December 20, 2018
Best books of 2018 (backlist edition)
(selected from the books that I read, but didn’t necessarily come out, this year, including some rereads)
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
December 17, 2018
Best books of 2018 (‘grown-up’ edition)
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
December 14, 2018
Some stuff what I wrote in 2018
Writers & their day jobs
‘Literature is a safe place to learn about the darker aspects of life’
Face The Truth | Selective Storytelling In Bohemian Rhapsody
The Irish Campus Novels To Read After Normal People
Literature Essay | There Was No YA When I Was Growing Up
Behind The Form Rejection
Keep The Faith: Creativity Books For When You’re In A Slump
Essay in the Bold Girls reading guide
Ultimate Teen Angst Drama Dawson’s Creek Turns 20
November 29, 2018
Bookish Thoughts: November
Welcome to the monthly-round-up, where I yap about books I’ve read recently and what the shiny bits were, whether they came out years ago or last week.
From the archives:
Continuing with my Cheryl Strayed love, I read Wild, which I had previously written off as one of those super-privileged hippie-dippie books in which a young woman ‘finds herself’ while backpacking. I didn’t love this as much as the advice columns, but it’s certainly a lot grittier than I was expecting.
Some rereads of note: Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters; Marian Keyes’s The Brightest Star In The Sky; Stephen King’s Misery.
This month’s shiny new reads:
YA fiction reviewed this month in the Irish Times : The Light Between Worlds by Laura Weymouth; The Mirror Visitor: A Winter’s Promise by Christelle Debois (trans. Hildegarde Serle); The Boneless Mercies by April Genevieve Tucholke; Broken Things by Lauren Oliver.
I love Sandra Gulland’s Josephine B trilogy, so was very excited to see her return to the 18th century with The Game Of Hope, a YA novel about Josephine’s daughter Hortense (Napoleon’s stepdaughter). 1799, boarding school, fortune telling. Be still my heart.
To watch out for:
I’ve just started Sinead Gleeson’s thoughtful essay collection Constellations, which is out next spring.
November 8, 2018
Recent things! In which I have a love of glam rock and YA, and no one is surprised.
Not intentionally, but I’ve written about music biopics (both fictional and fictionalised) and nostalgia more than once lately: it was the 20th anniversary of Velvet Goldmine, which was one of the movies I was obsessed with as a teenager (because glam rock! And naked Ewan McGregor!). It features heavily in a YA novel I wrote at the time, Good Girls Don’t (2004; ebook edition 2016), and even though I’ve rewatched it many a time over the years (it also has Christian Bale before he went all weird and super-muscley!), revisiting it for this anniversary piece was the first time I’d watched since Mr Bowie left us (feelings!).
Anyway, I thought, well, that’s it, that’s all my music knowledge used up…
Then I went to see Bohemian Rhapsody. And I had to write about it.
The piece I’ve linked to there is about the movie, and the band, but it’s also about being a teenager and having an obsession, and about how we shape stories to try to make some sense out of life and death. (It is unapologetically sentimental, also.) I didn’t know I had quite so much to say about this, but I’m glad I wrote it, and very glad that the lads at HeadStuff published it.
(And if you haven’t watched Live Aid, particularly the UK side of things, go for it.)
On to books! I’ve a longstanding love of the campus novel, and with so much buzz around Sally Rooney’s second novel, which is set mainly at Trinity, it seemed like the time (okay, fine, any excuse!) to pull together a few recommendations for other Irish campus novels. Our tradition (insofar as we have one, and it’s still a bit shaky, really) is a bit different to the Anglo-American tradition (in part because our oldest university is in the city centre and not in a bubble of its own), but no bad thing.
And I also talked to a few writers about their ‘day jobs’, which is a subject I’m more than a little fascinated by. What struck me when putting this together was how many writers were so eager to discuss this stuff – to acknowledge that they had day jobs, that it was hard, that there’s a weird attitude both in and out of literary circles about ‘needing’ one (or even ‘wanting’ one for the stability), etc.
Finally, a while back I was asked to give a HeadStuff Lecture, which are these nifty ten-minute talks people give about stuff they know about (informative but not academic) and after dithering a great deal I came to the shocking conclusion that I needed to talk about YA fiction (I know – sometimes I am not the sharpest crayon). There’s a thing people say sometimes on panels which is ‘there was no YA when I was growing up!‘ and – although we can argue about categorisation in bookshops and libraries, and access to things, and public perception versus librarians and experts – they are either wrong or else have very good anti-ageing cream.
I think my favourite bit of this piece is my claim that the Irish invented YA fiction, which is both nonsense but also actually a little bit true.
