#tramp press

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'Sexists need not apply': publisher refuses to look at manuscripts addressed to 'Dear sirs'

Women behind Irish independent Tramp Press announce they will no longer consider submissions from authors who assume they are men, or list o

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“Irish publishing has no V.I.P. room”

Lisa Coen (L) & Sarah Davis-Goff from Tramp Press on Ireland’s scrappy literary scene: 

As Anne Enright said, there is no VIP room here. We – writers, readers, publishers, supporters, and all the paraphernalia required for a ringing, hopping, literary scene – are on the stage together.Our latest book, a collection of short stories on the theme of distance edited by Belinda McKeon, called A Kind of Compass, came out earlier this month, and I’m starting to think about a catchphrase: something simple, something true. Something’s afoot in contemporary Irish literature. We’re not here to take part, folks. We’re here to take over.”

Read full article in The Irish Times here. 

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“The Rape Essay (Or Mutilated Pages)” by Suzanne Scanlon

Recommended by Belinda McKeon

Issue No. 179

“Well yes of course I’d read it, but you know it’s hard—”

“You dated him anyway!”

“I mean how could I—”

“There’s a blog about that—”

“Something so cartoonish could not have been real, you know?”

Read the full story here!

About the Author

Suzanne Scanlon is the author of Promising Young Women (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2012), and Her 37th Year, An Index (Noemi Press, 2015). She lives in Chicago.

About the Guest Editor

Belinda McKeon is the author of two novels, Solace (2011) and Tender, which will be published in February 2016 by Lee Boudreaux Books, a new imprint of Little, Brown. Her journalism and non-fiction has been published in The Paris Review, A Public Space, The New York Times and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Rutgers University. Her website is www.belindamckeon.com.

* From This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (Little Brown and Company, 2009) by David Foster Wallace.

** From “On Not Being A Victim: Sex, Rape and the Trouble with Following Rules” by Mary Gaitskill, Harper's, March 1994.

"The Rape Essay (Or Mutilated Pages)" was originally published in A Kind of Compass: Stories on Distance (Tramp Press) and is reprinted by permission of the author. © Suzanne Scanlon 2015. All rights reserved.

Want it on your Kindle? Click below!

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GOWP Reviews: Dubliners 100 - Edited by Thomas Morris

Why don’t people ‘cover’ short stories? Is there something about literary works that make them more difficult to interpret this way than say a song or even a painting? Thomas Morris doesn’t seem to think so. Dubliners 100, published by nascent independents Tramp Press and edited by Tom Morris of The Stinging Fly, is presented as a ‘cover version’ of Joyce’s classic short story collection. 15 contemporary Irish authors each reimagine- or ‘cover’- a story from the collection. The idea behind the project is somehow simultaneously shrewd and refreshingly brave. Joyce’s name still has the power to sell books and Tramp is well aware of this I’m sure. But this book isn’t a gimmick- it exists to do more than just part straw-hatted Bloomsday tourists with their cash. Even if the results are somewhat mixed, this book has some serious literary merit.

At the head of the pack are Belinda McKeon, Paul Murray and Mary Morrissey. McKeon’s “Counterparts” replaces the alcoholism of the original with that most modern of addictions: social media. Farrington is replaced by Elizabeth, an expat Dubliner working in New York. The story is timely and cleverly engages with the source material without being afraid to critique it either. Like all great cover versions the story requires no familiarity with the original.

Paul Murray’s “A Painful Case” stays closer to its source. It is perhaps the most moving of all the stories in the collection. James Duffy is transformed into a caustic restaurant critic who lives a solitary, ascetic life inspired by a straight-edge punk rocker. An encounter with a mute Monk leads Duffy to drastically reconsider the life he has chosen. But just as Duffy seems prepared to open his life to others something terrible happens. Murray is on top form here.

Morrissey’s” An Encounter” is a more muted affair. Told in the second person, the story replaces the Wild West obsessed boys of the original with two average country girls interested in Ardmore studios. The narrator of the piece follows a strange man into the woods to see an arch. The language is beautiful and the overall effect is, like the original, eerie and haunting.

The major disappointments of the collection come from Peter Murphy and Pat McCabe. No one would envy Peter Murphy’s task: covering what is perhaps the most celebrated and studied Irish short of all time. “The Dead” is a masterpiece and there is little more to be said on the matter. It is perhaps best that Murphy choose the path he did. “The Dead” doesn’t really need a cover version and Murphy seems aware of this. The story is middling at best, but at least it has a sense of humour about itself.

McCabe’s “The Sisters” is, as you will find if you read the collection, simply dull. McCabe is one of the most accomplished comic writers Ireland has produced in the last century. Much of his work sparkles with a wit and intelligence that Joyce would have surely admired- just not this piece.

Maybe this will sound a bit glib, but I think the collection’s greatest achievement is reminding the reader just how vital Joyce’s short stories still are. Living as they do in the immense shadow created by Joyce’s novels, these stories at times can seem almost neglected; provincial tales that paved the way for the broader vision of the long works. Dubliners 100 reminds us that Joyce’s early themes of paralysis and inferiority have much to tell us in the post Celtic-Tiger age. None of the stories in the collection achieve the transcendence that so many great cover songs have- there is no Jeff Buckley ‘Hallelujah’ in here. But who could really expect there to be? It’s Joyce, after all.

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GOWP Reviews: Flight - Oona Frawley

Despite coming in at a slim 200 pages, Oona Frawley’s debut novel, Flight, is perhaps best described as an ambitious book. It seeks to paint a full and uncompromising picture of the immigrant experience in Ireland- from both sides of the playing field. The novel follows Sandrine: a Zimbabwean school teacher who flees the horrors of poverty and political violence that have come to define her homeland by immigrating to Ireland. Leaving her son and husband behind, the secretly pregnant Sandrine finds herself working full-time as a home carer for Tom and Clare: a once fiercely independent couple whose minds are now in the grip of dementia. Tom and Clare reluctantly depend on their world-weary daughter Elizabeth to help them live in a world they recognise less and less of.

     The novel's action is spread out across the globe: Ireland, the U.S, Vietnam and Africa all play a prominent role. Flight is a novel that is intimately aware of just how difficult it can be to forge a cultural identity in a globalised world. The story of Tom and Clare’s daughter Elizabeth is a particularly moving exposition of this phenomenon. Elizabeth is a member of a new breed of Irish children. Born to globetrotting parents, she is shuttled from continent to continent as a result of her father’s spice trading business. In Ireland she is harangued about her British sounding name, in Vietnam she befriends a girl who claims to be French despite having never been to France, and in America (the land without history), she is simply ‘Lizzy’: a normal high-school girl. Flight is the first Irish novel I have come across that gives these displaced children a voice. Significantly, one of the first things Sandrine notes about Elizabeth is that her accent is conspicuously different to the accents of her parents. Frawley does a wonderful job of exploring the things that alienate children from their parents. Flight is a novel that asks serious questions about what words like ‘family’ can really mean in 21st century Ireland.

     But it is Sandrine’s story that acts as the centrepiece of Flight. Rarely has the immigrant experience been so sensitively and deeply explored. The character of Sandrine forces the reader to empathise with the immigrant population as a whole. The story of Sandrine and her struggle to find a home goes a long way to dismantling the immigrant’s lonely and venerable status as ‘other’ in Irish society and literature. In Flight we see both sides of the coin. We are exposed to the struggles of those who left Ireland looking for a better life and the struggles those who have come to Ireland searching of the very same thing.

     Frawley writes long, lyrical sentences. The reader is effortlessly transported from the violent beauty of coastal Ireland to the oppressive heat of exotic Vietnam. Frawley is that rare thing: a gifted prose stylist who is also capable of dealing with complicated ideas and situations. Perhaps her one weakness as a writer is dialogue, which in Flight can often sound just slightly inauthentic. But this minor shortcoming is overcome by weaving most of the novel’s dialogue into passages of great descriptive beauty. Flight was written nearly ten years ago, around the time of the 2004 Citizens Referendum, and failed to find a home despite positive feedback. It is easy to see why. Flight is, as the beginning of this review states, an ambitious novel and as is often the case with brave, new work, it is difficult to categorize. And thus difficult to market. Flight is a novel for anyone interested in memory, identity, family, the dark side of the Celtic Tiger or the global world we now inhabit. It is also a novel for anyone who loves a great story that packs an emotional punch. It is a novel for lovers of lush, poetic prose. But it is probably not for people who dislike shedding quiet tears on public busses as they reach the end of novels (as this reviewer did). Flight is an impressive debut novel.

Flight is published by Tramp Press and available in available to buy here.

Words: Christian Cooney