Malarky reviewed on irishCentral.com

Cahir O'Doherty of The Irish Voice and IrishCentral.com has just reviewed Anakana Schofield's Malarky, calling it "the most distinctive novel of its kind I've read in a decade."

IrishCentral.com is the largest Irish American media site. It was launched in March 2009 in New York. It has close to 1.1 million unique visitors a month, with 70,000 e-newsletter subscribers and has continued to grow with each passing month, easily surpassing all other Irish American websites.

The full review is available online.

The Q&Q reviews Malarky

In the just-release March issue of Quill & Quire, Emily M. Keeler offers a solid review of Anakana Schofield's Malarky.  Launching next month, we expect to get copies into our hands here at the Bibliomanse at some point next week.  Here's a bit of the review:

Irish-Canadian literary critic Anakana Schofield¹s first novel is a tumultuous ride. Malarky asks questions without providing answers, chronicling the emotional, mental, and occasionally menial anxieties of Our Woman as she struggles with her own agency and desire. Set in contemporary Ireland, the book overflows with subtle and sometimes subversive allusions to James Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d¹Urbervilles, site-specific contemporary Irish art, and Catholic history. Yet Schofield's strong prose style and inventive approach to structure will likely reward readers unfamiliar with these cultural references.


... 


Schofield¹s formal experimentation is in perfect tandem with her thematic content.  ... Our Woman oscillates between trying to please the men in her life ­-- her withdrawn husband, tellingly referred to as Himself, and her adoring gay son, Jimmy ­-- and trying to discern how to achieve her own empowered pleasure. She becomes obsessed with sex as a path to such empowerment, and takes a young lover after discovering her husband¹s infidelity and the bodily joy Jimmy finds with other young men.

For the rest of the review, please pick up a copy of the current Q&Q.  Or better yet: pick up a copy of  Malarky.  It'll be available everywhere very, very soon.

   

Discovering Anakana Schofield's Malarky

Though it will not yet be published for more than a month in Canada -- and nearly a month later in the U.S. -- we've had some great news in the past week about Anakana Schofield's first novel Malarky in the US, which we thought we would share with Thirsty readers.  The book has been picked as one of a handful of fiction and nonfiction selections for Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers Program for the summer of 2012.  Not only does this mean that it will receive great exposure through B&N stores and online, but it is also eligible for the $10,000 B&N Discover Great New Writers Award.

More details will follow as they become available.

If this is the first you've heard of Malarky, trust me when I say that it will not be the last.  It's a black and madly comic novel about a wife and mother come face-to-face with the mad agony of longing.  Set in rural Ireland, it spans the globe and grapples with the question (among many others: it continues to surprise me the range of subject this novel can contain without becoming overwhelmed by it): can we love something so much that we kill it?

It comes garlanded with some exceptional early praise.  My favourite may be this one, from Lynn Coady:

This is the story of Anakana Schofield's teapot-wielding 'Our Woman': fretful mother, disgruntled farmwife, and—surprisingly late in life—sexual outlaw/anthropologist. Everything about this primly raunchy, uproarious novel is unexpected—each draught poured from the teapot marks another moment of pure literary audacity.


Or how about this one, from Annabel Lyon:


Malarky spins and glitters like a coin flipped in the air—now searingly tragic, now blackly funny. The language is joyful and exuberant, the characters thoughtful and deeply felt. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.


For more information about Anakana Schofield and Malarky please check out the page on Biblioasis's website here.   You can also follow the link to Anakana's blog over on the author sidebar.  We'll be launching a Malarky website in the coming weeks as well.  Further details on launches and other promotion to follow.