Award-winning Irish writer, Mark O’Connell recommends to pick up the following…
Mark O’Connell is an award-winning Irish writer. His first book, To Be A Machine, won the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. In 2019, he became the first ever non-fi ction writer to win the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His second book Notes From an Apocalypse, was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. He is a contributor to The New York Review Of Books, and his work has appeared in the New Yorker. A Thread of Violence, his book about murderer Malcolm Macarthur, was published by Granta earlier this year. He lives in Dublin with his family.
“I just finished reading film director Werner Herzog’s memoir, which is amazingly titled Every Man for Himself and God Against All. The man has had an extraordinary life, and made a lot of strange and powerful films, but what’s most interesting to me is his strange lack of self-reflection about it all. It’s told in a very straightforward style – just one insane, inspiring, terrifying, hilarious, profound thing after another – and he refuses to analyse himself. At times it’s frustrating, but mostly it’s inseparable from what makes his work so great. “If you harshly light every corner of a house,” as he puts it at one point, “the house will be uninhabitable.”
I’ve just started a book by Kerry Howley called Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, which is an essayistic exploration of the case of Reality Winner, the US military translator who was imprisoned in 2018 for leaking information about Russian election interference. It’s a really intriguing book – dark, surprisingly funny, and a bit formally shifty. It’s early days, but I’m very into it so far.
I’m also reading Go Ahead in the Rain, a book about the rap group A Tribe Called Quest by the American poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib. Abdurraqib is a gifted critic, and he writes with deep erudition and real style about Tribe’s music, and hip-hop culture as a whole. So far, it’s fascinating, fun, and endlessly informative.
I just got an advance proof of Colin Barrett’s debut novel, Wild Houses, which I’m very eager to get stuck into. Barrett is a lavishly talented writer, and I’ve always admired his stories for their surprising sentences, their unique voice, and their flinty, slanted humour. I’m excited to see what he does with his first novel.”
A Thread of Violence, by Marl O’Connell; www.dubraybooks.ie