New Irish Writing, Book Dedications, Mary Gaitskill on Madame Bovary

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Elizabeth Day talks to Lisa McInerney and Lucy Caldwell, two young writers born in the same year but from different sides of the Irish border. 100 years since partition, they discuss how a literary culture once defined by exile and sectarian identities is being reconfigured in exciting new ways today. Dedications and acknowledgements in books offer fascinating insights into authors' self-fashioning and desires to ingratiate themselves with certain readers. Professor Adam Smyth explains how what seems like an a new trend actually goes back to the time of Virgil. And US author Mary Gaitskill choses Flaubert's Madame Bovary as a book she'd never lend - a novel which coincidentally was dedicated to the lawyer who defended at an obscenity trial after the depiction of adultery scandalised 19th century France. Book List – Sunday 23 May and Thursday 27 May The Rules of Revelation by Lisa McInerney The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney The Blood Miracles by Lisa McInerney Being Various: New Irish Short Stories edited by Lucy Caldwell Multitudes by Lucy Caldwell Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín A Belfast Woman by Mary Beckett A Literary Woman by Mary Beckett Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney Book Parts edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid Wild Fire by Nelson DeMille The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert