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?