New journal offers penny for literary thoughts

At its launch in Cork’s Roundy Bar, writer William Wall said new literary journal, The Penny Dreadful, “could be the next Paris Review or ‘Granta’.”

Wall, who was long-listed for the 2005 Man Booker prize for his novel, This is the Country, has two satirical prose pieces in the journal.

If the two editors of The Penny Dreadful can maintain the high writing standard of their first issue, then maybe Wall’s prediction won’t have been grandiose. The Penny Dreadful contains work by Theo Dorgan, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and John W Sexton, and poems translated from Irish by Alan Titley. There are 24 contributors, and an interview with Roddy Doyle, by Marc O’Connell, one of the editors.