bahern7

                                         Freeland’s most famous city—Town Island City—with its skyscrapers and its yellow cabs; its teeming streets of harried pedestrians; its hotdog stands; its homeless war vets begging for change; the smell of burning flesh from those same meat stands; the stairways down to the subway on every street corner; the crush of commuters. Today, a cobalt blue sky burnishes over Town Island.   The magnificent views of that same sky if one looks up between the buildings; the world famous department store opened in 1902; the constant honking of car horns; the Indian shops; the Chinese shops; the hardy folk on the corner at Barge Street trying to entice passersby to buy counterfeit goods; the infinite number of restaurants from the most basic to haute cuisine; the ever present tourists from out of town and abroad; the constant photographing and filmi...

 

                                                 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09KH7T7T7

                                   Blake Crowe woke from a choppy night’s sleep of unquiet dreams mixed with frequent trips to the bathroom. It wasn’t a burgeoning prostate problem that had him peeing so much, rather, it was the unsettling contents of those same dreams. Every half hour or so, he had woken in fright and scurried to the loo just to calm himself down. The final vision, before the shrill 6a.m. alarm bell, was of a coffin lid closing—with a bleak and resounding thud—upon Blake’s entombed and terrified head. He had tried to scream but his soil-filled mouth rendered him mute, writhing helplessly in the desolate dreamscape. Hitting the floor and straightening up, part of him felt unable to face the day at all and he considered, for a moment, leaping back into his still warm bed. However, such a gambit wasn’t an option on this important morning, and besides, he’d recently read an articl...

  Mish, I’m throwing in the towel not with a sense of defeat but rather a sense of pastures new (sunny uplands even). We’ve reached nigh on fifty pages, and in print the lines look straight and true, as beautiful (almost) as the new steps fronting the Leavey Building (church end). It’s time to run the thing off and let it stand on its own fifty legs. Not as a work of art, granted, but certainly as testimony to the strength and power of the epistolary form. But whoa! I must rein in my logorrhoea lest I stray into the realm of melodrama. My final shot goeth like this: a cold coming I had of it this morning lugging my corpus to the desk. A local access road was closed  and I was forced to trudge through a barren field before I could rejoin civilisation and proceed to Dublin ’s heart. The field was rocky and frozen and populated by a large flock of Stymphalian birds who tracked my steps with dagger glares. At least I think they were Stymphalian birds though they may have been ...

 

  The four of them shared a house in one of the newer estates that had sprung up on the edge of the city during the boom. A three-bedroom semi with all mod cons, the online ad had said. Kate Berry and Tom Finn, a couple of two years standing, along with Ruby Mee and Breffni Ashton, singletons who—though not averse to one another’s charms—were content to keep things platonic. Simply put: the randomness of a lettings website was what brought these four together. On the surface at least the living arrangements were working reasonably well. Everybody got along okay even if the others found Breffni’s behaviour a tad odd. Notwithstanding this fact, the cooking, cleaning, shopping and watching of TV in the evening, all ran to a smooth order. However, the awkward matter remained: none of the other three knew the full extent of Breffni’s drug problem. Although he masked it superbly, he was a man in the throes of a chronic cocaine addiction. Colombian marching powder, Florida snow, pri...

The writer Grudgeville got most of his inspiration sitting on Dublin ’s Liffey boardwalk, pen and notebook in hand, observing the scene. Each morning, he would make the short journey from his apartment and position himself on the wooden bench that ran the length of the structure. Generally, he liked to sit by the O’Connell Bridge end of the action. All human life was there—teeming; from the high and noble to the low and base, and everyone else in between. At any given moment, Grudgeville could look around to see glamour models posing on fashion shoots, legal eagles scurrying to the courts, minor and major celebrities taking daily walks, mothers with prams, women with boyfriends, shop workers, office workers, business folk, and the ever present junkies—obsessing on their fix—and willing to do anything required to sate their need. Also gliding by with considerable frequency was a far more famous writer than Grudgeville: the renowned MacGnaw. MacGnaw—a firm believer in rotating the cr...