![[Image]](http://gorse.ie/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/image1-e1401696827400.jpg)
“London is the loneliest place I have known: this loneliness is the only holy thing in the city.”
The Green Fool, P. Kavanagh.
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It is Easter Sunday 2014 and the inscription 20 x C + M + B x 14 has been chalked onto most of the doors in the village of Pöcking, Bavaria.
In episode 1 of the gorse podcast, we talk to Irish short story writer and essayist Rob Doyle about his novel, Here Are the Young Men (Lilliput Press). Taking its name from a Joy Division track the novel is a visceral coming of age story depicting a darker side of Dublin. Talking to the Irish Times, Rob described his “strong urge to write about atrocity porn, if you want to call it that; growing up in a culture where you’re assaulted by images of violence.” It’s incendiary stuff, steeped in the literary nihilism of Bret Easton Ellis, JG Ballard, and, of course, Michel Houellebecq, subject of Rob’s essay for gorse no. 1.
![[Image: Matthew Thompson]](http://gorse.ie/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/image13-e1401126307158.jpg)
[Image: Matthew Thompson]
Rob Doyle is an Irish-born short story writer and essayist. His novel, Here Are the Young Men (Lilliput Press), is a visceral coming of age story depicting the darker side of Dublin. It is incendiary stuff, steeped in the literary nihilism of Bret Easton Ellis and Michel Houellebecq, the boredom of JG Ballard. Heads turned by images of violence on television news, and in computer games, Matthew, Rez, Kearney and Cocker set out to expose ‘our nation’s corrupted soul to the ravages of the moral plague that has assailed us, and to our collective horror and incomprehension in the face of it,’ by staging their ‘own 9-11.’ Susan Tomaselli met Rob Doyle in the bustling Library Bar. The conversation ran for one hour with the recorder on, then continued for a few hours more, ending in an exhibition of Wally Cassidy’s street photography in Temple Bar. [PDF]
Brian Dillon is an Irish-born writer, critic and curator. His first book In the Dark Room was a startlingly fastidious childhood memoir, viewed through the prism of familial illness and grief and poignant reflection.
In the last decade Benjamin Kunkel has written a couple dozen uncollected critical pieces, a novel, four short stories, a political-economic tract, and a play. The last two, Utopia Or Bust and Buzz respectively, appeared earlier this year. The shifting of formats feels less like restlessness or some obscure anti-professionalism and more like an author straining to articulate for (slightly) different audiences. Kunkel’s work has always been, with differing levels of explicitness, ‘Marxian’ (as he would put it), and the difficulty of Marxist art/entertainment in this late age of the Spectacle has been exhaustively discussed. Theatre, while more marginalised than other forms, is just as compromised. However, in its summoning of both high levels of existential/environmental dread and reflexive hilarity, Buzz proves the medium is perfect for Kunkel.