The Anti Room

Earlier in the week I was dragging a heavy shopping trolley in one arm with a stuffed sack over the other shoulder out of Superquinn, as I do at least twice a week.  The trolley bulged to the degree that I was unable to close the flap with the paper towels poking from the top.  [...]

Read Full Post »

London, summer 1993. Patting my pocket to check I hadn’t forgotten the money, I passed the bathroom mirror without a glance. My face was clean but my hair was probably a mess as the closest I came to caring about appearance was to occasionally use a nailbrush when my hands got really manky. I knew [...]

Read Full Post »

  I’m outta here! Women fed up with lads’ mags and sexist language undermining our struggle to be taken seriously and treated equally could follow the example of Guardian columnist Wendy Roby who encouraged her readers to engage in random acts of feminism. Roby argues very persuasively that “signs of female solidarity in unlikely places [...]

Read Full Post »

Ah, the c-word. That’s cunt, by the way. Recently several Anti-Room contributors were discussing how they feel about this loaded word, so we decided it was time for a group post. SUSAN DALY You’ll only hear this word from me once: cunt. And I only spell it out here in all its inglorious four-letter violence [...]

Read Full Post »

The other day, I found myself in Hodges Figgis with a friend of mine, who was looking for “a book about anxiety; but none of that self-help shit”. He was milling around the psychology section, attempting to find something that didn’t have a punchy subtitle, in the vein of “think yourself calm!” Needless to say, [...]

Read Full Post »

Since reading this post on social etiquette by US blogger Maggie Mason earlier in the week, I’ve been mulling over my own social graces (or lack thereof). I’d like to think I was reared reasonably well, and parts of her list make perfect sense to me, but I can’t quite get my head around some [...]

Read Full Post »

One need not be familiar with Chekov’s gun as a narrative principle to know that a plot regarding a secret military experiment containing a dozen vampires in a subterranean facility is bound to feature a hunt for human blood.  After a superlative first three sections, I went through the rest of Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” with a grimace.  [...]

Read Full Post »

Benedicta Attoh came to Ireland in 2000 when Nigeria’s democracy was still in its infancy. It was a year that saw bitter religious bloodletting in Kaduna in February, riots between Muslims and Christians across the North throughout the summer and by autumn: the outlawing of all tribal malitia groups by an increasingly unstable government. She arrived in [...]

Read Full Post »

You know, I was once chased down a road- while driving- by a soon to be ex-boyfriend who was foaming at the mouth slightly and screaming, ‘Stop that fucking car you bitch! You better fucking pull over! I’m warning you!’ Pull over? As my beloved daughter might say, ‘lolziees!’ I put it in third and [...]

Read Full Post »

Later today (update: scroll down for longlist) the longlist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize will be announced. The initial longlist of 13 books should result in a slight bump in sales, but then apparently TV Book clubs sell more books than a Man Booker nomination. In the run up the longlist announcement, speculation has [...]

Read Full Post »