the Dublin Review

The autumn issue of the Dublin Review – our 100^th – features a brilliant short story by Colm Tóibín, who has published fifteen pieces of fiction and non-fiction in the magazine over the past quarter century, dating back to his essay on the life and art of Francis Bacon in number 1. ‘A Sum of Money’ is the story of Dan, a boy from a poor farming family, who steals pocket money from the boys in his boarding-school dormitory. Over several months, Dan lives with the strange knowledge that he will probably be caught. Tóibín’s portrait of a twentieth-century Irish provincial boarding school – a place of minute calculations, subtle status markers and loaded silences – is masterful.

Also in the autumn issue, Molly McCloskey writes about going to the Arctic on a seaborne artists’ residency. She was puzzled that her fellow artists didn’t want to talk about the climate crisis, whose effects in the Arctic are especially visible and apocalyptic. But a few of them did want to talk to her about death, and the fear and denial of death – the subject of the writing project she was working on. ‘In the High Arctic’ is a brilliant meditation on mortality and on the ways in which we struggle to connect the dots between personal and planetary vulnerabilities.

Nathan O’Donnell moved from Ireland to Brighton believing that England – ‘progressive, tolerant, safe, free’ – was a place of great possibilities for a young, gay, literary-minded person like himself. ‘Visibility Low’ is O’Donnell’s rich, textured and often moving account of the experiences and disillusionments that followed, and of two key relationships: with the partner he met soon after arriving in Brighton, and with his father.

The autumn Dublin Review also features Conor Dawson’s account of a period in his life when he moved frequently between homes and jobs in Asia and eastern Europe while trying to help his brother make sense of his experiences with the French Foreign Legion in the Central African Republic; Tara McEvoy’s ‘At the Movies’, sparkling reflections on her experiences as a cinema usher; and Laura Morris’s funny and gripping story ‘Banging Out’, about a young newspaper proofreader trying to plot her ascent to greater things.