Colm McKenna

Jan 24, 2025 | irishtimes.com | Colm McKenna

My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionara Author: Andrée BlouinISBN-13: 978-1839768712Publisher: Verso Books Guideline Price: £18.99 Born in 1921 in Central African Republic, Andrée Blouin grew up convinced that her life was “punishment for being born of a white father and a black mother”. As a métisse (woman of mixed heritage), her existence was a sin, symbolising her French father’s weakness and her African mother’s licentiousness.

Jan 23, 2025 | clereviewofbooks.com | Colm McKenna

Despite his reputation as a raro and a varied oeuvre encompassing meta-fiction, short stories, detective novels, crosswords, comics and more, Mario Levrero may cut an oddly unified figure to his anglophone audience. His two novels translated into English, Empty Words (2019) and The Luminous Novel (2021), share common ground. In the former, a novelist begins a course of graphological self-therapy—handwriting exercises that he believes will also improve his general character.

Nov 20, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Pippa Goldschmidt |Keith Miller |Brian Ng |Colm McKenna

Letters exchanged between scientists have always been an essential tool in the communication of research, acting as short formal statements of recent results, as avowedly impartial in tone as long papers – this much is clear in the titles of academic journals such as Physical Review Letters. But the letters in this anthology are the flipside to those impersonal ones, tending towards the private, the informal and the emotional.

Nov 20, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Colm McKenna

Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.

Oct 25, 2024 | irishtimes.com | Colm McKenna

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality Author: William Egginton ISBN-13: 25978-1805337652 Publisher: Pushkin PressGuideline Price: £25William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels unveils a shared common ground to bind an unlikely trio, despite the centuries, continents and disciplines holding them apart: theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, philosopher Immanuel Kant and writer Jorge Luis Borges.