This highly readable collection of eleven essays on James Joyce’s Dubliners accomplishes the much-needed task of rescuing the short stories from the clichés that have saddled interpretations of them.   Sean Sheehan   They challenge canonical readings that label them as anatomies of Dublin’s moral, psychological and political paralysis in […]

The work of Ecuadorian cultural critic Bolívar Echeverría has until now been off the radar for non-Spanish readers. Modernity and “Whiteness”, first published in 2010, has now been translated into English and it serves to introduce this Latin American intellectual and the novelty of his thought for a new audience. […]

If you could read only one book about World War II, it would have to be “Stalingrad”. Its epic high-voltage emotional charge, roller-coasting  through tragedy and triumph, has a non-fictional source.   Sean Sheehan   The story seamlessly blends the history of a military conflict with a supremely humane tale […]

Philosophy proper, for Žižek, begins with Kant. He accomplishes a great breakthrough in thought but leaves in its wake  a nagging problem that Žižek gnaws at with the persistence of a dog with a juicy bone.   Sean Sheehan   Kant has given us the transcendental horizon – mind-moulded frames […]

The remark about Malaya being a first-rate country for second-rate people, attributed to Noel Coward (himself now generally regarded as a second-rate writer), was not a racist slur on the Malays, Chinese and Indians who lived and worked there but a judgement call on those who administered this part of […]