Aiden O Reilly
  • Notes on what I’m reading
  • News
    • News
    • For the record
      • Kudos to The Missouri Review
  • Debut Book
    • Events, readings, etc.
  • Publications
    • Publications
    • Awards
    • About me

Website of Aiden O'Reilly

RSS FeedFacebook

Cut Through the Bone

Ethel Rohan

I admit to a bit of prejudice against short short stories. Often they seem imposed by busy editors who want to introduce new writers but don’t have the time to read through a stack of 5,000 word stories.

But I’d heard through the grapevine about Ethel Rohan’s work and looked up a few pieces online. She’s been in dozens of online magazines. I read Kriegsspiel first. It stuck in my head like a mind-probe. Then I read another one called Imagine. And then this slighly longer story where a family go to extraordinary lengths to show they will be a good home for a puppy.

I bought her collection Cut Through The Bone. Her stories have great variety, but they will often use the surreal to probe real emotions. The scene and voices are hyper lucid, but the motives will be obscure. There are traces of Kafka – who also wrote dozens of shorter pieces. It’s hard to describe what’s so attractive about her writing. The best pieces have that quality where you feel they stand as a completed whole, not something pasted together with the aim of entertaining the reader. And you can go back at look at it from various angles, but still you will not see it through to the core.

She’s one of the most interesting new writers around.

Selected Posts

  • Backstory of a book
    2019-02-22
  • Stinging Fly Wheldon essay
    2017-07-24
  • The Blocks by Karl Parkinson
    2016-10-02
  • London Trip
    2016-09-05
  • Honest Ulsterman interview
    2016-02-29
  • Greetings, Hero launch Hodges Figgis
    2014-11-21

Selected pages

  • Debut Book
  • Publications
  • Writers' Workbench at Block T

Crucial

  • . .
  • Asylum books
  • Buy the book at Kennys
  • Daniel Seery
  • David Mohan
  • Djelloul Marbrook
  • Gorse magazine
  • Slava Nesterov Artist
  • The Penny Dreadful
  • The road to publication
  • The Short Review
  • The Short Review
  • Unthology

Other links

  • . .
  • Karl Parkinson's The Blocks
  • Unthology 4 review
  • Wandering minstrel Larry Beau

What I'm up to

  • Buy the book at Kennys
  • Examiner review
  • Irish Times / Ashley Stokes
  • Irish Times Q+A Irish Times Q+A
  • The road to publication

Recent posts

  • The Guiltless Bystander – short story collection from the late David Wheldon
  • GIGANTIC by Ashley Stokes GIGANTIC by Ashley Stokes
  • Writers’ Workbench, Block T
  • Line by Neil Bourke
  • David Wheldon, writer and pathologist, passed away
  • The Heartsick Diaspora The Heartsick Diaspora

Quotation

The Tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction