The current issue of IASIL is sufficiently congested to preclude further notice of the first rate works of biography and criticism books which poured from the presses this year - such as the Beckett biographies by Anthony Cronin and Samuel Knowlson, the Yeats biography by Roy Foster, and the latest critical investigations by Terry Eagleton and Seamus Deane. Added to which, we like to give an overview of creative writing of the country since the last issue. Both of these deficits will be made good in the next with the hope of establishing a pattern for future volumes of the Newsletter: business first, pleasure after.
The next issue should come out in a new broadsheet format, finally escaping from the A4, so reminiscent of school magazines and suchlike outpourings of literary tyros. [Oh, were very professional, aren't we, now? - Ed.]
The advertising panel taken by Gill & Macmillan in this issue is an earnest of the future in which the IASIL Newsletter will pay its way, and perhaps subsidise conference travel for students members of the Association. An undertaking made by the Editor at the AGM in Hofstra that vouchers for leading Irish-studies journals would be included in the Newsletter be have to be deferred to the second issue also. Our excuse is that brochures take time to manufacture too.