Author Oisín Fagan's debut short story collection Hostages was published in 2016, followed by Nobber (2019), which was named one of the books of the year by The Guardian and Daily Mail. His acclaimed fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly, New Planet Cabaret and Young Irelanders.
His new novel, Eden’s Shore, is a bold and inventive work that explores greed, love and power in an imagined South America at the close of the 18th century.
Oisín will talk about Eden's Shore, at this year's Hinterland Festival of Literature & Arts in Kells, which runs from 26 - 28 June.
We asked Oisin for his choice cultural picks...
FILM
Better Man, the $110,000,000 Robbie Williams biopic. It’s full of Loachian kitchen-sink realism, Northen working-class families broken apart, dementia, abortion, but it’s about Robbie Williams and he’s a monkey. No one else is a monkey in the film. Never once do they explain why he’s a monkey. He never even acts like a monkey, except for once when he does cocaine. Then, for a few moments, he goes 'Ooh-ooh-ah-ah’ and runs around on four limbs. The end is him, still a monkey, singing My Way in a tuxedo with his father. It’s strangely moving.
MUSIC
Given the sun is out, I’ll be listening to Minnie Ripperton, Anita Baker, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, Chic and Diana Ross. As for local talent, Lord Ormond released a single called Saint Laurent a few days ago that has a real groove to it.
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BOOK
I’m enjoying very much Tim MacGabhann’s The Black Pool, an excoriating, lugubrious, peripatetic memoir about his alcohol and drug addiction. To lighten the mood, I’m also rereading Milton’s Paradise Lost, recounting the descent of man into sin and death upon that ground that was cursed for his sake. Adam says, ‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay / To mould me, did I sollicite thee / From darkness to promote me, or here place / In this delicious garden?’ That’s the good stuff, right there.
THEATRE
The last time I was just bowled over was when I read a short 1922 play by Eugene O’Neill called The Hairy Ape. It is about a proud, strong stoker who a rich woman in passing calls a ‘filthy beast’ causing him to suffer an immense breakdown of the masculine variety, in whose depths he wanders around New York’s labour unions looking for meaning and ends up challenging a gorilla in the zoo to a fight. It’s just completely brilliant.
Anyway, a lot of hurt apes in this interview.
TV
Jamie Goldrick of PushPull Media, who incidentally took the above photo of me, has produced a wonderful documentary called NORAID: Irish America and the IRA that will be broadcast on the 9th and 16th July at 9.35pm on RTÉ1.
GIG
I went to see William Basinski in April. I already knew he was great, but I didn’t know about the support act, Vanessa Bedoret. My God, she was incredible. The visuals, the performance, the grace, the soundscape. One of the best hours of live music I’ve ever seen in my life.
ART
There’s an Irish artist I love called Peter Burns. He paints these visceral, textured worlds. His genius is especially apparent on his larger canvases. Greatness is when you go big, but you do all the little, tiny stuff, too. He has it, no doubt. I could look at his paintings all day long.
PODCAST
I am two hours through a five-hour podcast on J.G Ballard’s Crash by a lad called Sean McTiernan. The podcast is called SFULTRA. I am shuddering with relief. He hasn’t said a single platitude yet. I’m a fan.
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TECH
The internet I loved circa 2011 is long gone and I’m still here scrolling. I must have scrolled past a trillion opinions by now. What a waste of life. I have downloaded various apps to minimise my screentime, all these complicated locks, but, in the end, they just add an extra minute or two to the process of a nice slack-jawed scroll. The smart money is on spending a few hours reformatting your internet experience to make it less annoying and of a higher quality, but I’m just too stupid to do that.
I think I’d like an app that at random points shouted, ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?’ That would be good for me.
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Eden's Shore is published by Hachette. The Hinterland Festival of Literature & Arts runs from 26th - 28th June in Co. Kells - find out more here.
