Biographies conventionally kick off with the subject’s family background or their birth and move onwards in chronological fashion.   Sean Sheehan   Clare Carlisle’s biography of Kierkegaard experiments with tradition and does something new – as befits the kind of philosopher she is writing about. The book opens with Kierkegaard […]

“Mama Amazonica” is a collection of poems by Pascale Petit with a strange dual setting that segues between a psychiatric ward, where the narrator’s  mother is a patient, and  the Peruvian Amazon rainforest.   Sean Sheehan   To help with the writing of the poems, Pascale Petit made two trips […]

Nearly two decades have passed since the publication of Norman Finkelstein’s “The Holocaust industry”. The exploitation of the Holocaust continues apace and, apart from the book’s impact costing Finkelstein his tenure at DePaul University in Chicago, little has changed.     Sean Sheehan   It comes as a welcome relief, […]

Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) was first arrested in Moscow at an underground printshop in 1929 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. In 1937 he was arrested again for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Kolyma region in the Russian Far East.   Sean Sheehan   He spent the next fifteen years […]