Sunday, 12 March 2017

Rise Like A Phoenix From The Ashes

For any of you who missed it (which I suspect is quite a lot), here's the tiny piece in The Phoenix which The Sunday Independent got all hot and bothered about, and which cost me my book reviewing gig of 18 years standing there. What a paranoid organisation.


THE PHOENIX FEBRUARY 10, 2017

IRISH TIMES literary correspondent
Eileen Battersby would not have been
displeased at her newspaper’s review last
autumn of her first novel, Teethmarks
on My Tongue, penned by Katherine
A Powers – “remarkably accomplished
work … excellence … dark wit” and so
on. She will also be pleased the Sunday
Independent has chosen, so far, not to
publish a review commissioned over three
months ago.
The review by Desmond Traynor, an
occasional reviewer at the Sindo, is less
complimentary than Powers’s critique and
describes the heroine, Helen’s chronicle
as “self-involved and repetitious to the
point that it resembles listening to someone
running off at the mouth with a bad case
of logorrhea”. There are other, more
withering comments in Traynor’s review
but mercifully the Sindo has failed to
publish it.
Sindo literary editor Madeleine Keane
declined to comment when Goldhawk
innocently inquired why the review had
not yet been published. But it seems editor
Cormac Bourke decided not to. There
was a time when the Sindo would jump
at the chance to dish it to those IT snobs.
Is Bourke’s reticence part of the Sindo’s
new and less provocative approach to rival
media?




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