“Paper graveyards” is a collection of essays by Eduardo Cadava, a professor at Princeton, that sees photography as invested with a migratory potential, the ability to shift away from itself and form new relations with other media.   Sean Sheehan   Cadava’s approach could be regarded with suspicion, another postmodernist […]

The gas emissions from flights make up 2.4% of the world’s total carbon emissions and even a flight of a few hundred miles produces up to 50 times more pollution than a high-speed electric train.   Sean Sheehan   When you consider that some 75% of the world’s population never […]

Rebecca Tamás begins her book “Strangers” by recalling the 17th century Levellers and their proto-communist calls for radical democracy and common ownership of land.   Sean Sheehan   She is drawn to their prescient awareness of the need to connect political awareness with ecological concerns, the human and the nonhuman. […]

The depth of James Joyce’s writing provides source material for academics and culture vultures everywhere but while the number of books about Joyce are of oceanic proportions those worth staying on a bookshelf are disproportionately small by comparison.   Sean Sheehan   Andrew Gibson’s “Joyce’s revenge” and “The strong spirit” […]

All of China Mieville’s fiction is worth reading for its political, philosophical and cultural resonances, “the City & The City” and “Embassytown” are extraordinary.   Sean Sheehan   He is also a compelling writer of non-fiction and “A spectre, haunting”, a prequel of sorts to his earlier “October”, is a […]