the Dublin Review

In the autumn issue of the Dublin Review, Rory Gleeson tells a story of literary failure: his own. After publishing a well-received first novel, he spent several years working on a second. But nobody liked the second novel. ‘In the Shit’ is his account of what happens to a person who has to write off years’ worth of creative effort – a rarely discussed occupational hazard for a novelist. It is also a brilliant demolition of the repackaging of failure as a necessary and even desirable stepping-stone on the way to success. Sometimes, Gleeson insists in this painfully honest and blackly comic essay, failure is just failure, and he doesn’t recommend it.

Also in the autumn issue, Molly McCloskey writes about two sojourns in Donegal: one in 1989, when she arrived in Ireland on what she thought was just a holiday, and one in 2011, when she was trying to decide whether to leave the country after twenty-two years. ‘A Land of Destiny’ is a witty, vivid travelogue and a brilliant exploration of the workings of memory and nostalgia, youth and middle age, addiction and sobriety, attachment and leavetaking.

Clare Fisher, a self-described ‘neurotic mastery seeker’, narrates the experience of trying to get pregnant, eventually succeeding, and navigating the psychological strangeness of early parenthood. She writes: ‘What will it let me do? and What does it want to do? are in constant, three-way conversation with What is it that I want to do?’

The autumn Dublin Review also includes ‘Waveforms’, a short story by Brian Dillon; Cal O’Reilly’s ‘Placeholder’, a precise, subtle and moving memoir of transition; Cora Enterline’s ‘Montsouris’, a searching account of revisiting Paris with an ex-boyfriend; and short stories by Matt Jones and Stephen Lynch.