I recently read (in the beautiful edition from #SwanRiverPress) Mervyn Wall's Leaves for the Burning, in which a disillusioned civil servant meets up with an old friend who is on his way to Yeats' funeral, "On foot, through sheer eccentricity."
The civil servant in question is Lucian Brewse Burke, ten years in the Irish midlands, where "the empty grey-green fields stretch[ed] away, until in the distance they lost themselves in the sad peaty hills." Echoes of Flann O'Brien but more melancholy. 📚

Finished Mervyn Wall's melancholy & riotous Leaves for the Burning. Regret, manslaughter, drink, Yeats. Certain public servant types don't fare well: "We're the men of vision. We're the ones who did well out of [revolutionaries'] sacrifice."
Another cracker from #SwanRiverPress.
https://swanriverpress.ie/srp-title/leaves-for-the-burning

#DIKBChallenge23 Day 5-a book w. LGBTQIA+ representation. A bit left field: Forrest Reid's highly-rated Tom Barber trilogy. The mutedly gay Reid's "youthful male characters are often in search of an ideal companion & often trying to compensate for unhappy relations with family."
Quotation from Dan Studer's article on the trilogy in Issue 1 of #SwanRiverPress's journal The Green Book, which contains writing on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic literature. https://swanriverpress.ie/green-book-issue/the-green-book-1/

… pathways to Infinity and Oblivion: from Guy Dickinson’s stunning and mysterious topology of the spirit, Epistle Two: Cartographies (@tracing_silence), to the latest Iain Sinclair cabinet of furiosities, Agents of Oblivion, from Swan River Press. I’m looking forward to spending quite a bit of time getting lost in them.
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#ArtistsBooks #GuyDickinson #TracingSilence #IainSinclair #DaveMcKean #SwanRiverPress #Bookstodon