the city-lit cafe

Reading the Olympic City: London - from the best books, blogs and literary places to visit to cafes, events and courses

 

 

 

From the best books and places to visit to cafés and events and courses, Malcolm Burgess helps you make the very most of the literary city.

Classic books on London: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, Charles Dickens Bleak House, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Norman Collins, London Belongs to Me, Colin McInnes, Absolute Beginners, Virginia Woolf, The London Scene, Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, John Evelyn, Diary, Samuel Pepys Diary

Recent recommended books: Monica Ali, Brick Lane, Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Sukdhev Sandu, Night Haunts, Gillian Tindall, The House by the Thames, Rachel Lichtenstein, On Brick Lane, David Szalay, London and the South-East, Clare Clark, The Great Stink, Will Self, The Book of Dave.

Favourite literary landmarks:

Keats House, Hampstead The beautiful Regency home where the Romantic poet lived and wrote from 1818 – 20. Now a thriving museum about Keats’ life and work with related exhibitions, events and walks, plus a delightful Keats-themed garden. www.keatshousecityoflondon.gov.uk 

Shakespeare’s Globe, Southwark Built close to the site of the original Thames-side Globe Theatre where many of Shakespeare’s most famous plays were first performed. Productions from Shakespeare and his contemporaries and modern playwrights from April to October with a year-round exhibition and tour. www.shakespearesglobe.com

Dr Johnson’s House, Fleet Street The wonderful Georgian home of Samuel Johnson from 1748-1759, where he compiled the first English Dictionary. Restored to its original design and full of writer memorabilia, with related literary and artistic exhibitions and events. www.drjohnsonshouse.org

Charles Dickens Museum, Holborn Dickens only surviving London home, where he lived from 1837 – 1839 holds the world’s most important collection of his rare editions, manuscripts, paintings and furniture. Special exhibitions throughout the year – 2012 is the 200^th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth.

www.dickensmuseum.com www.dickens2012.org

William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow Writer, designer, political campaigner and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris lived at the family home Water House from 1848 – 1856. Re-opening in July 2012 it contains an outstanding collection of textiles, wallpapers, ceramics, furniture, stained glass, books and fine arts. www.walthamforest.gov.uk/william-morris

The Sherlock Holmes Museum, Baker Street Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson lived at 221b Baker Street which is now a museum dedicated to the Victorian detectives. Includes a re-creation of the famous first floor study, life-size wax works and other visitor attractions.

www.sherlock-holmes.co.uk

Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey Nearly every famous writer in English Literature is either buried or commemorated in Westminster Abbey. Geoffrey Chaucer, John Dryden, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy are some of the writers buried here while memorials include those to Shakespeare, Emily Bronte, Henry James and John Betjeman.www.westminster-abbey.org

Carlyle’s House, Chelsea Thomas Carlyle was one of the nineteenth century’s best known historians and philosophers and lived with his wife Jane in this fine 1708 Queen Anne terraced house from 1834 – 1881 in an area rich with literary associations. Left very much as it was during Carlyle’s lifetime, it contains a wide range of books, pictures, furniture and personal possessions.

www.nationaltrust.org.uk/carlyleshouse

The British Library, St Pancras The national library of the UK has a collection of over 14 million books and moved into its impressive modern building in 1997. Fascinating themed exhibitions – currently on illustrated manuscripts – and displays. The Sir John Ritlbat Gallery has a permanent exhibition of books and manuscripts from Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales to the Magna Carta and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. www.bl.uk

The Freud Museum, Camden The London family home of Sigmund Freud and later his daughter Anna following their exile from Austria in 1938. Contains a brilliant collection of Freud memorabilia, antiquities and furniture, together with exhibitions, and includes Freud’s study and sofa, the scene of his most famous psycho-analytic investigations. www.freud.org.uk

Best bookshops:

London Review of Books Bookshop, 14 Bury Place, WC1A2JL www.lrbshop.co.uk

Foyles Bookshop, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, WC2H OEB, St Pancras International, Euston Road, N1C4QL, Festival Hall, South Bank SE1 8XX, Westfield White City, W12 7GE, Westfield Stratford City, E20 1EH www.foyles.co.uk

Waterstone’s Piccadilly, 203 – 206 Piccadilly, W1J9LE The largest bookshop in Europe!

Daunt Books, 83 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, 158 – 164 Fulham Road, SW109PR, 112-114 Holland Park Avenue, W11 4VA, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, 193 Haverstock Hill, NW3 4QL, 61 Cheapside EC2U 6AX

Check these out for regular readings too.

Nicest literary cafes:

London Review of Books Bookshop Cafe, 14 Bury Place, WC1A2JL www.lrbshop.co.uk

Foyles Bookshop Ray’s Cafe, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, WC2H OEB, www.foyles.co.uk

The Poetry Café, 22 Betterton Street, Wc2H 9BX www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/cafe

Inspiring literary walks: www.walks.com Literary Bloomsbury and the Old Museum Quarter, Shakespeare’s and Dickens’s London

Useful apps: Get London Reading - wherever you are in London find out a book that’s set there - and Literary London. Both available on iTunes (Get London Reading is free)

Most interesting websites and blogs: www.londonfictions.com , www.fictionalcities.co.uk passionate enthusiasts on London writing. www.spreadtheword.org.uk for up-to-date London writing news and resources

 Live events and festivals:

• South Bank Centre, Riverside www.southbankcentre.co.uk includes the summer’s London Literature Festival
• The Poetry Café, 22 Betterton Street, WC2H 9BX. Regular poetry readings www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/cafe
• The Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, EC1R 3GA Focuses on translated writing www.freewordonline.com

 Many bookshops and libraries also hold events throughout the year. For the latest literary listings information  www.timeout.com/london (click books and poetry)

 Short writing courses and workshops:

• Faber Academy Writing Courses with visiting writer tutors www.faber.co.uk
• Urban Arvon summer three day course in association with Birkbeck College www.arvonfoundation.org
• Groucho Club, Soho week long summer workshop, plus other longer courses www.writingcourses.org.uk
• City Lit weekend creative writing courses www.citylit.ac.uk

 Also available in this series: Reading the City: Paris

Malcolm Burgess is the publisher of Oxygen Books’ city-lit London (£8.99, paperback) www.oxygenbooks.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Munday, the design genius behind Oxygen Books' city-pick series

Lewes-based designer and illustrator Michael Munday is the design genius behind our city-pick series covers.

Getting the right ‘look’ for a series is a tricky one but we think that Michael has got across the range and excitement of our books. We do hope you agree.

Michael has designed corporate identities for businesses, organisations, local authorities and arts projects; record sleeves and cd covers, logos, posters, and publicity for record companies and groups; graphics for websites; exhibition and display panels; reports, bookjackets, t-shirts...

He’s been commissioned by clients great and small: British Airways, Sainsbury's, Boots, Waitrose, Transport for London, Penguin Books, The Guardian, Sunday Telegraph.... He’s also illustrated hundreds of articles for the Radio Times, as well as for many other magazines, publishers, governments... and small organisations and individuals.

Do check out Michael's website and his fascinating travel blog based on his recent 'gap year' global travels.

www.michaelmunday.co.uk

http://michaelmunday.wordpress.com/about/

The ten best books set in Las Vegas says Guardian Travel. Agree?

Las Vegas's combination of neon glamour and seedy underbelly has attracted some of America's greatest writers, from Hunter S Thompson to James Ellroy, says Malcolm Burgess in Guardian Travel


• As featured in our Las Vegas city guide

•  
  • reddit this

• Malcolm Burgess
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 November 2011 16.12 GMT
• Article history

Ralph Steadman's illustration on a cover of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, 1972

An eccentric journalist and his lawyer travel to the Las Vegas of the psychedelic 60s in this legendary novel/memoir.

"Saturday midnight … Memories of this night are extremely hazy. All I have, for guide-pegs, is a pocketful of keno cards and cocktail napkins, all covered with scribbled notes. Here is one: 'Get the Ford man, demand a Bronco for race-observation purposes … photos? … Lacerda/call … why not a helicopter? … Get on the phone, lean on the fuckers … heaving yelling.'

"Another says: 'Sign on Paradise Boulevard- "Stopless and Topless" … bush-league sex compared to LA; pasties here – total naked public humping in LA … Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbator/gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers … house-whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd."
• Paradise Boulevard

Tom Wolfe on Las Vegas, 1965, in Literary Las Vegas: The Best Writing About America's Most Fabulous City, edited Mike Tronnes

This eclectic compendium of writers on Las Vegas includes Tom Wolfe's famous essay from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, his first collected book of essays.

"He had been rolling up and down the incredible electric-sign gauntlet of Las Vegas' Strip, US Route 91, where the neon and the par lamps – bubbling, spiraling, rocketing, and exploding in sunbursts 10 stories high out in the middle of the desert – celebrate one-story casinos. He had been gambling and drinking and eating now and again at the buffet tables the casinos keep heaped with food day and night, but mostly hopping himself up with good old amphetamine, cooling himself down with meprobamate, then hooking down more alcohol, until now, after 60 hours, he was slipping into the symptoms of toxic schizophrenia."
• Las Vegas Strip

Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy, 1997

The Nevadan art historian and Vegas resident has written a fascinating memoir. Here an excerpt from his essay, A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz about the Liberace Museum.

"The balcony of my apartment faces west toward the mountains, overlooking the Las Vegas Strip; so, every evening when the sky is not overcast, a few minutes after the sun has gone down, the mountains turn black, the sky above them turns this radical plum/rouge, and the neon logos of The Desert Inn, The Stardust, Circus Circus, The Riviera, The Las Vegas Hilton, and Vegas World blaze forth against the black mountains – and every night I find myself struck by the fact that, while The Strip always glitters with a reckless and undeniable specificity against the darkness, the sunset, smoldering out above the mountains, every night and without exception, looks bogus as hell. It's spectacular, of course, and even, occasionally, sublime (if you like sublime), but to my eyes that sunset is always fake – as flat and gaudy as Barnett Newman and just as pretentious. Friends of mine who visit watch this light show with different eyes, they prefer the page of the landscape to the text of the neon. They seem to think it's more 'authentic'. I, on the other hand, suspect that 'authenticity' is altogether elsewhere – that they are responding to nature's ability to mimic the sincerity of a painting, that the question of the sunset and The Strip is more a matter of one's taste in duplicity. One either prefers the honest fakery of the neon or the fake honesty of the sunset – the undisguised artifice of culture or the cultural construction of 'authenticity' – the genuine rhinestone, finally, or the imitation pearl."
• Circus Circus, Circus Circus Drive

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, 1972

Now seen as a bible for postmodernist architecture, Venturi's seminal book saw the urban sprawl of Las Vegas as an architecture of communication over space, achieved through style and signs.

"The sign for the Motel Monticello, a silhouette of an enormous Chippendale highboy, is visible on the highway before the motel itself. This architecture of styles and signs is anti-spacial; it is the architecture of communication over space; communication dominates space as an element in the architecture in the landscape. But it is for a new scale of landscape."
• Monticello Drive

John O'Brien, Leaving Las Vegas, 1990

This searing novel of alcohol, obsession and suicide became an award-winning film starring Nicholas Cage.

"Casinos … know that chips are a wonderful, pretty tool, and possess none of the stigma of dollars. Dollars translate too easily into hours or houses or cars or sex or food or everything, and so losing a dollar is a much more tangible experience than parting with a chip, an object that looks more like a midway consolation token than a medium of exchange."
• Las Vegas Strip

Joe McGinniss Jr, The Delivery Man, 2008

An electric debut novel about Generation Y, set against the real lives and suburbs and gated communities of today's Las Vegas.

"Even though it's only May it feels like the end of July. (Minutes ago the temperature reading on the Sahara marquee read 96 degrees.) And it all lies before him: 21 stories below is the Garden of Earthly Delights dotted with clear blue rectangular pools and burgundy cabanas, and then it's the Strip and then the pink homes of Green Valley and the surrounding desert and the I-15 that leads to Los Angeles where Chase's father still lives."
• Green Valley, Paseo Verde Parkway

Larry McMurtry, The Desert Rose, 1983

From the Pulitzer-prize winning author comes the compelling story of Harmony, an ageing Las Vegas showgirl, in a novel that is both tough and tender.

"When she turned off the pavement onto the bumpy dirt road Harmony looked back at the Strip, eight miles away. It looked so miniature, like a wonderful toy place, with all the lights still on … It was one of her favourite things, to turn onto her own road with the air smelling so good and be able to see the Strip, with the Trop up at one end and the Sahara at the other, and besides that have the sun coming up just as she got home. With sights like that to see every day, who could complain?"
• Las Vegas Strip

Charles Bock, Beautiful Children, 2008

A mesmerising novel that has been compared to Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, as it brings together the lives of those who live, love and work in a city, as corrupt as it is compelling.

"Waves of electricity, emanating from pop art facades, actually transforming the nature of the atmosphere, creating a mutation of night, a night that is not night – daytime at night," he writes.

"The 24-hour bacchanal. The party without limits. The crown jewel of a country that has institutionalized indulgence.

"… 105 outside for the 99th straight day. That dry desert heat, a wall that hit the moment you stepped outside, then pounded relentlessly. To get local fanboys away from their liquid crystal screens, out of their air-conditioned living rooms, and into their air-conditioned cars, management at Amazin' Stories had been importing the biggest names in the fantasy game."
• South Maryland Parkway

James Ellroy, The Cold Six Thousand, 2001

From Kennedy's assassination in Dallas to crime and punishment in Las Vegas, the epic and magisterial sequel to Ellroy's American Tabloid.

"Vegas sparkled – fuck death – should-haves meant shit. Nice breeze/nice sun/nice casinos. Pete crossed the Strip. Pete logged distractions: The Tropicana course. Cocktail carts abundant. Carhops on skates. Uplift abundant. Pete made two circuits. Shit popped out. Some nuns hit the Sands. They spot Frank Sinatra. They swoon and piss Frank off. They shuitz up his Sy Devore suit … Nice mountain. Neon signs. Jap-tourist shutterbugs."
• The Tropicana, Las Vegas Boulevard South

Various writers, Fade, Sag, Crumble, 2011

Las Vegas writers confront the decay, physical and spiritual, at the heart of today's city in a book specially published for this year's Vegas Valley Book Festival. Here we discover The Neon Museum in Danielle Kelly's essay Live Rust: Love, Mold, and Heavy Metal in the Neon Boneyard:

"The Neon Museum and Boneyard has spent 15 years preserving the neon vernacular of Las Vegas. The Museum collection holds more than 150 signs, but fewer than one tenth of those signs are restored. The rest sit unelectrified in the Neon Boneyard. The condition of some is impeccable, and a few are on the brink of collapse, but most exist somewhere in between. Each has a beautifully disproportionate combination of elegant tubing hugging exposed metal, with unevenly corroding paint and the occasional rusted corner. Some wear the scars of decades of labour and occasional abuse, are partially crushed or dismembered. A pathway has been plotted in and around the signs, which tend to veer, all angles and abstracts, into the path as they see fit. It's like a grand promenade through a rusty Roman ruin.

"Thousands flock every year to capture a snapshot of this fallen neon. They bear witness to the itchy peeling paint and the scratchy broken tubing. They take pictures of glass. The harsh desert sun refracting through an incandescent bulb casts an inverted shadow of thin circles … The Stardust is there, the Desert Inn and the Sahara, the Tropicana and the Aladdin. There are signs that only natives or long-timers might recognize: Society Cleaners, Steiner's Cleaners, Ugly Duckling Car Sales, and the Green Shack."
• The Neon Museum, 821 North Las Vegas Boulevard

• Malcolm Burgess is the publisher of Oxygen Books' city-pick series, featuring writing on cities including New York, Berlin, Paris, London, Venice, Amsterdam and Dublin

Reading the City: Paris - the best books and literary places to cafes, walks, events and courses

Classic books on Paris: Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast; Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past; Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro; Colette, Claudine in Paris; Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions; Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant; Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris.

Recent recommended books: Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon; Jeremy Mercer, Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs; T.E.Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank; Andrew Hussey, Paris: The Secret History; Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City; Richard Davenport-Hines, A Night at the Majestic.

Recent recommended translated books: Agnès Desarthe, Chez Moi; Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog; Faïza Guène, Just Like Tomorrow; Daniel Pennac, Monsieur Malaussene; Helen Constantine (translator), Paris Tales and Paris Metro Tales.

Favourite literary landmarks:

• Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore, Boulevard St Germain (where tout literary Paris from Hemingway to Sartre has drunk its café noir)
•  Shakespeare and Company Bookshop (where the Lost Generation found itself although moved to current location in 1951)
• Maison Victor Hugo, 6 Place des Vosges
• Maison de Balzac, 47 Rue Raynouard 
• Theatre de la Huchette, rue de la Huchette (Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna non-stop since 1957)
• Père Lachaise Cemetery (where Oscar Wilde, Colette, Marcel Proust and Jim Morrison are buried)
• Montparnasse Cemetery (where you’ll find Samuel Becket, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Serge Gainsbourg).

Best English language bookshops:

Village Voice, 6 rue Princesse www.villagevoicebookshop.com  

Galignani, 224 rue de Rivoli www.galignani.com  

The Red Wheelbarrow, 22 rue St Paul www.theredwheelbarrow.com  Shakespeare & Co, 37 rue Boucherie www.shakespeareandcompany.com 

W H Smith, 248 rue de Rivoli www.whsmith.fr

Check these out for regular readings too.

Nicest literary cafes:

Tea and Tattered Pages, 24 rue Mayet www.teaandtatteredpages.com

 Manga Café, 11 rue des Carmes www.mangacafe.fr

L’Autre Café, 62 rue Jean Pierre Thimbaud www.lautrecafe.com

Les Deux Magots, Place St-Germain-dès-Pres www.lesdeuxmagots.fr

Café de Flore, Boulevard St Germain www.cafedeflore.fr

 Inspiring literary walks: www.paris-walks.com Hemingway’s Paris and St-Germain-dès-Pres

 Useful apps: Literary Paris www.gpsmycity.com

Most interesting blogs: http://www.maitresse.typepad.com Essays and observations on books, culture and life in the city

www.laurelzuckerman.com Paris writing news

 Live events and festivals:

• Shakespeare and Company Bookshop, non-stop events and a book festival in June www.shakespeareandcompany.com
• the recently launched Paris Book Festival includes English-speaking writers  www.paris.fr/culture
• Culture Rapide, 103 rue Julien Lacroix has a fortnightly English-language poetry slam www.culturerapide.com
• La Maison de la Poesie, 157 rue St Martin includes international as well as French poets www.maisondelapoesiparis.com
• The Paris Anglophone Book Club discusses French books in English www.meetup.com/anglophonebookclub;

For the latest information  http://parisreadingsmonthlylisting.blogspot.com

 Writing courses and workshops:

• Faber Academy Writing Courses with visiting writer tutors (held at Shakespeare and Company which also runs other workshops ) www.faber.co.uk
• Paris Writing Workshop a month-long summer course, with masterclasses and workshops run by the Paris American Academy www.pariswritingworkshop.com  
• Paris Writers Workshop www.pariswritersworkshop.org

  

From city-pick New York ... to city-pick Manchester, Cambridge and Nottingham

Oxygen Books, publishers of the city-pick travel series, has been awarded an Arts Council Grant for the Arts to work with UK book festivals across 2012.

Oxygen’s titles on cities such as Berlin, Paris and New York feature some of the best writing about these cities. Using their experience in compiling their urban collections, the publisher’s will now be working with the Manchester, Cambridge Wordfest and Lowdham Literature Festivals to produce city-pick events around the writing from each of these cities.

‘We did a very successful pilot at the Humber Mouth Festival this year for city-pick Hull and were astounded at the wealth of writing, past, present and future that we found,’ says Oxygen publisher, Malcolm Burgess. ‘Now we’re very excited to be taking this idea to other major UK cities and working with their writers, libraries and festival organisers.’

The project involves putting a call-out for writing and creating a script which is then performed with an actor and podcasted, linking in with other festival and library local writing and reading projects and promotions.

www.oxygenbooks.co.uk

 For more information and pictures please contact malcolm.burgess3@btopenworld.com tel: 01277 263770

Are these the best books set in Dublin written by locals?

The ten best books on Dublin written by locals

Last updated: Nov 3rd, 2011 | By: Bart van Poll

0

Four Courts Dublin – Elward Photography

From Malcolm Burgess, publisher of Oxygen Books’ city-pick series, featuring some of the best writing on favourite cities, comes a new series for Spotted by Locals on the best city books written by local writers. This one is all about Dublin… 

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

Although he chose to leave Dublin for mainland Europe, James Joyce’s Ulysses focuses almost entirely on the city.

” He approached Larry O’Rourke’s. From the cellar grating floated up the flabby gush of porter. Through the open doorway the bar squirted out whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush. Good house, however: just the end of the city traffic. For instance, M ‘Auley’s down there: n.g. as position. Of course if they ran a tramline along the North Circular from the cattle market to the quays value would go up like a shot. “

William Trevor, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969)

In this wonderful novel, the incorrigible photographer, Mrs Eckdorf, launches herself upon Dublin for the first time and quickly begins to learn something about the city and its inhabitants.

“In Dublin the rain fell heavily that morning. Turf in public parks became soft underfoot and the unpainted wood of hoardings changed colour and soon could absorb no more … Statues glistened: washed of their summer dust, gesturing fingers seemed less jaded in their stance, eyes stared out with a liveliness. Rain ran on Robert Emmet and Henry Grattan, on Thomas Davis, on O’Connell with his guardian angels … it polished to a shine the copper-greens of a tribute to Yeats, Moore and Burke, Wolf Tone and Charles Stewart Parnell, Goldsmith and ghostly Provost Salmon: dead men of Ireland were that morning invigorated.” 

Elizabeth Bowen, The Shelbourne (1951)

Novelist Elizabeth Bowen wrote a celebration about Dublin’s most famous hotel, the Shelbourne.

“Around (the Shelbourne Hotel) everything else seems set back in time. The eighteenth-century spirit broods over this quarter – which still looks residential, though it no longer is. The lavishness of the trees in the Green itself creates, even in winter, an air of mystery. All round a graceful mellowness can be felt – in the brown-brick houses whose underlying tawniness glows at sunset, the classical doorways, the dark-watery polish of old glass. This Georgian part of Dublin is full of half-tones: sometimes by a trick of the shifting light, it looks strangely delicate, at once misty and clear-cut, all but transparent.”

Joseph O’Connor, The Secret World of the Irish Male (1994)

For novelist and journalist Joseph O’Connor, as for many, the ghost of James Joyce haunts the city …

“Freud said that the Irish were the only race who could not be psychoanalysed, because they were too much given to fantasy. And certainly, in Ireland, things which are not there are often more important than things which are. Joyce’s work reverberates with this knowledge. It is full of phantoms, apparitions, people who are not there any more. It is full of ghosts. Many of the most important characters in his work are dead. Parnell in The Portrait of the Artist, and Ivy Day In The Committee Room.’ Young Rudy Bloom and old Paddy Dignam in Ulysses. Poor Georgina Burns and Michael Fury in ‘The Dead.’”

Brendan Behan, Brendan Behan’s Island (1962)

Author Brendan Behan was one of Dublin’s most famous writers – and drinkers!

“Pubs are dull enough places at any time though not so dull in Ireland as they are in England. I suppose I know most of them in Dublin and I’d rather have them than the pubs in London. I remember being in the ‘Blue Lion’ in Parnell Street one day and the owner said to me: ‘You owe me ten shillings,’ he said ‘you broke a glass the last time you were here.’ ‘God bless us and save us,’ I said, ‘it must have been a very dear glass if it cost ten shillings. Tell us, was it a Waterford glass or something?’ I discovered in double-quick time that it wasn’t a glass that you’d drink out of he meant – it was a pane of glass and I’d stuck somebody’s head through it.” 

Roddy Doyle, The Deportees (2008)

Booker-Prize winning novelist Roddy Doyle’s The Deportees describes another side of the city: the new Dubliners who have fled their homelands for a better life.

“I walk. Through Temple Bar. Along the river, past tourists and heroin addicts, strangely sitting together. Past the Halfpenny Bridge and O’Connell Bridge. Past the Custom House and the statues of the starving Irish people. I walk to the Point Depot. Across the bridge – the rain has stopped, the clouds are low – I walk past the toll booths, to Sandymount. No cars slow down, no car door slams behind me. I am alone.

I walk on the wet sand. I see men in the distance, digging holes in the sand. They dig for worms, I think. They look as if they stand on the sea. It is very beautiful here. The ocean, the low mountains, the wind.”

Flann OBrien, The Dalkey Archive (1964)

In Flann O’Brien’s hilarious novel, Mick has an engaging and surprising encounter in the very centre of Dublin.

“First he made his way to St Stephen’s Green and sought a seat there – easy enough so early in the morning. The Green is a railed-in square pleasure ground near the city centre, an extravagance of flower beds and fountains … Coming in through the green towards the hospital, Mick’s eye penetrated the tracery of shrubs and iron railings. Yes, (James) Joyce was standing there, and Mick paused to appraise him soberly … He was neat in person, clean, and had a walking stick. A dandy? No. The carriage of his head in the fuss of the traffic and passing people gave notice that his eyesight was uncertain. If a stranger were to try to classify Joyce socially, he would probably put him down as a scholarly type – a mathematician perhaps, or a tired senior civil servant, certainly not a writer, still less a great writer.”

Sean O’Casey, Pictures in the Hallway (1942)

In his novel-style autobiography the writer known as a playwright recreates the night when Charles Stewart Parnell, the champion of Irish Home Rule, died.

“Parnell! What had this man done that all the people were so upset about him, one way or another? The mention of his name always gave rise to a boo or a cheer. The Roman Catholics who wouldn’t let a word be said against him a while ago, now wouldn’t pick out words villainous enough to describe him; while the Protestants who were always ashamed of him, now found grace and dignity in the man the Roman Catholics had put beyond the pale … Well, they could all breathe in peace now that he was dead. His Ma said his Da often said the first chance the priests ever got, they’d down Parnell. And there he was now, dead among the dead men.”

Anne Enright, The Brat, The Portable Virgin (1991)

The Booker-Prize winner’s short story collection contains many evocations of the city in all its moods.

“Clare’s father makes his way from the Customs House to O’Beirne’s on the Quays, crosses the Liffey by means of a  bridge, so sited as to add to the distance between the two buildings a length of nearly three hundred yards.

‘If I could swim now, I’d be right.’ He is a man much given to speaking aloud when company is absent, and to silence when the nicer of social obligations might urge him into speech. These contributions he does make are as counterpoint to the sounds of liquid consumption only, the sweetest of which is the sound of a pint drawing creamily at the bar, a music only those born with the gift, or those who can spend a minimum of three thousand hours acquiring the gift, can hear.”

 Eavan Boland, Object Lessons (1995)

Poet Patrick Kavanagh is one of Ireland’s greatest writers, here remembered by fellow poet Eavan Boland. Today you can sit beside him in sculpted but life-like form on a bench overlooking the canal mentioned.

“Gradually the city was catching my attention. Not far from my flat was the canal. At night the water glittered under street-lamps, the grass of the towpath took on a livid colour and the wooden bulk of the locks turned into hunches of shadow.

Patrick Kavanagh had come here in the mid-fifties. He had sat by the water within sight of the bridge and traffic. There was nothing particularly beautiful about the spot he had chosen. It was a noisy inch of city, shadowed by poplars and intruded on by a passerby. He had been a sick man then, disillusioned and estranged. And with his foot on that inch, he had written a visionary sonnet. I never passed the canal at that point without thinking of it. O commemorate me where there is water. “

Excerpts from all the books featured here are available in Oxygen Books’ city-pick Dublin (£8.99). Other titles in the series include New York, Berlin, Paris, London, Venice and Amsterdam.
www.oxygenbooks.co.uk

http://www.spottedbylocals.com/dublin/the-ten-best-books-on-dublin-written-by-locals/

city-pick New York: 'prismatic, engrossing ... atmospheric' Financial Times Paperback of the Week