Farewell to 2014
We asked contributors to gorse nos. 1 and 2 for their favourite reads of the year.
Die Wunderkammer, Or Notes from an Austrian Journal
By Darran Anderson.
[PDF]
The woods have been strangely silent since the temperature dropped. A week of electrical storms and sheer walls of rain advancing in from the sea [a note of recognition in rereading – Toni Kurz, die Mordwand, “Ich kann nicht mehr”] and then stillness, a curious unnatural stillness and the air a second from freezing before our eyes. A moth, made of dust and feathers, bounced around every angle in the room when I turned on the cabin light and scanned the rows of books for one to bring on the journey, besides a battered copy of Trakl that had accompanied me to the tropics. A black hardback with a funeral procession caught my eye. The Last Days of Mankind: Karl Kraus and His Vienna by Frank Field (1967). It looked so irredeemably grim I knew I would be compelled to take it, whether I wanted to or not.
News: March
1.1 Welcome to Colony, co-edited by Rob Doyle.
1.2 Rob has a short story, ‘On Nietzsche,’ in the current Dublin Review.
1.3 Rob has been interviewed by tn2 magazine.
1.4 Rob offers ‘bad writing’ advice to The Stinging Fly: “As an artist of any kind, all you really have are your obsessions, fascinations and perversions, and the way to artistic self-definition is to be trenchantly faithful to them. All the rest is dreary obligation: in other words, community service.”
2. S.J. Fowler’s Fjender project exhibits Morten Søndergaard’s Wordpharmacy (Broken Dimanche Press). More on the Fjender project here.
2.2 Steven comperes an evening of poetry from The Quietus and Blue Pavillion writers, 18 March 2014, 30 Broadway Market, London.
3.1 Darran Anderson’s chapbook, A Hubristic Flea has been published by Blue Pavillion press.
3.2 Darran was on the BBC NI’s Arts Show talking about poetry and the resurrection of The Honest Ulsterman.
3.3 Darran on the Gustave Doré exhibition, Master of Imagination, at the Musée D’Orsay.
4.1 Joanna Walsh has been interviewed by Restless Books.
4.2 ‘A kind of permission’, Joanna picks short story collections for the London Review Bookshop.
5. Hidden City, Karl Whitney’s book on Dublin, has its own page on Penguin, and uses a quote from gorse.
6. Desmond Hogan has an essay on Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis in the current issue of the London Library Magazine.
7. gorse interviewee Adam Thirlwell is in conversation with Stuart Hammond and Joe Dunthorne, as part of Visual Editions’ Literary Explosions, Ace Hotel Shoreditch, London, Wednesday 2nd April at 7.00pm.
8. David Winters reviews Lydia Davis’ The End of the Story in the Quarterly Conversation.