Rory’s parents made sure that he became a reader.

THIS anthology aims to present the range of what American short-story writers have been capable of in the previous ten years,” says the editor of New American Stories, Ben Marcus, in a charming, if somewhat bloated and hyperbolic, introduction.

Debut novelist Eimear McBride has won the £30,000 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction only a week after winning the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.

Debut Irish novelist Eimear McBride has won the Women’s Prize for Fiction only three months after failing to win another high-profile award.

IN ‘Of One Mind’, one of the short stories in Mike McCormack’s new collection, Forensic Songs, the protagonist describes a ‘weightlessness’ that he has come to experience in his everyday life, a sense of being “at a remove, standing at arm’s length from myself.”