Search results for ""Author Colm Toibin""

An intimate study of three of Ireland's greatest writers from one of its best-loved contemporary voices, Colm Tóibín__________________In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know Colm Tóibín takes three of Ireland's greatest writers - Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce - and examines their earliest influences: their fathers. With his inimitable wit and sensitivity, Tóibín introduces us to Wilde Senior, the philandering doctor whose libel case prefigured that of his son; the elder Yeats, an impoverished artist who never finished a painting; and to John Stanislaus Joyce, the hard-drinking, storytelling father of James, who couldn't feed his own family. This is an illuminating study of how each of these men cast a long shadow not only over the lives of their famous sons, but over the works for which they are celebrated and cherished.__________________'Astonishing to read. Tóibín has a hawk-like eye for literary subtleties, and a generosity towards his subjects that is warm' Sunday Times'Funny, exciting, illuminating, wonderful, so engaging. Tells us more than a little about our own selves along the way' Irish Times'There is something interesting and insightful on almost every page' Observer'Sparkling, subtle, witty and often deeply moving . . . A classic' Fintan O'Toole, New Statesman'Scintillating, imaginative, enlightening and powerfully moving throughout' Roy Foster, Spectator

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In the summer after the Anglo-Irish Agreement, when tension was high in Northern Ireland, Colm Tóibín walked along the border from Derry to Newry. Bad Blood is a stark and evocative account of this journey through fear and hatred, and a report on ordinary life and the legacy of history in a bleak and desolate landscape. Tóibín describes the rituals – the marches, the funerals, the demonstrations – observed by both communities along the border, and listens to the stories which haunt both sides. With sympathy and insight Bad Blood captures the intimacy of life along one of the most contested strips of land in Western Europe.

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Colm Tóibín's Lady Gregory's Toothbrush is a beautiful insight into the life of outspoken Irishwoman, Augusta Gregory.A remarkable figure in Celtic history, she was married to an MP and land-owner, yet retained an unprecedented independence of both thought and deed, actively championing causes close to her heart. At once conservative and radical in her beliefs, she saw no conflict in idealizing and mythologizing the Irish peasantry, for example, while her landlord husband introduced legislation that would, in part, lead to the widespread misery, poverty and starvation of the Great Famine. Nevertheless, as founder of the Abbey Theatre, an outspoken opponent of censorship, and mentor, muse, and mother-figure to W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory played a pivotal role in shaping Irish literary and dramatic history. Moreover, despite her parents’ early predictions of spinsterhood, she was no matronly figure, engaging in a passionate affair while newly-wedded and, as she approached sixty, falling for a man almost twenty years her junior.

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It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is far from home - and homesick. And just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There she will be confronted by a terrible dilemma - a devastating choice between duty and one great love.

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Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of ten previous novels, including The Master, Brooklyn, and The Magician, and two collections of stories. He has been three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2021, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Tóibín was appointed the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022-2024. Long Island is his eleventh novel.

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No book since Mrs Shelley's Frankenstein, or indeed any other at all has come near yours in originality, or terror - Poe is nowhere..."-Charlotte Stoker (Mother of Bram Stoker).Originally published in 1897, Bram Stoker's Dracula has spawned countless new editions, inspired over fifty films, and hundreds of reimaginings. The iconic and terrifying character of Stoker's imagination has permeated our conciousness in such away that Dracula is the seminal vampire of popular culture.Set across London and into the darkest corners of Eastern Europe, Dracula is told through the journal entries and letters of its protagonists as they strive to survive the presence of Count Dracula in their lives. Young lawyer Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to assist in a land transaction, but finds himself trapped in the Count's castle, tormented by strange and unearthly occurrences. After a miraculous escape, he returns to England, only to find that the Count has followed him to London and has begun tracking his fiancé, Mina...Reprinted in its original form, this edition of Dracula is perfect for a first time reader, or as a classic to keep forever.

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'A masterwork... an almost unbearable, tumultuous, blood-pounding experience' Washinton PostWhen Another Country appeared in 1962, it caused a literary sensation. James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit.'In Another Country, Baldwin created the essential American drama of the century' Colm Tóibín

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De Profundis and Other Prison Writings is a new selection of Oscar Wilde's prison letters and poetry in Penguin Classics, edited and introduced by Colm Tóibín.At the start of 1895, Oscar Wilde was the toast of London, widely feted for his most recent stage success, An Ideal Husband. But by May of the same year, Wilde was in Reading prison sentenced to hard labour. 'De Profundis' is an epistolic account of Oscar Wilde's spiritual journey while in prison, and describes his new, shocking conviction that 'the supreme vice is shallowness'. This edition also includes further letters to his wife, his friends, the Home Secretary, newspaper editors and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas - Bosie - himself, as well as 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', the heart-rending poem about a man sentenced to hang for the murder of the woman he loved. This Penguin edition is based on the definitive Complete Letters, edited by Wilde's grandson Merlin Holland. Colm Tóibín's introduction explores Wilde's duality in love, politics and literature. This edition also includes notes on the text and suggested further reading. Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin. His three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and A House of Pomegranates, together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, won him a reputation as a writer with an original talent, a reputation enhanced by the phenomenal success of his society comedies - Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. Colm Tóibín is the author of five novels, including The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, and a collection of stories, Mothers and Sons. His essay collection Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar appeared in 2002. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction.

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‘Graham Greene's beautiful and disturbing novel is filled with tenderness, humour, excitement and doubt’ The Times A leak is traced to a small sub-section of the secret service, sparking off the inevitable security checks, tensions and suspicions. The sort of atmosphere, perhaps, where mistakes could be made? For Maurice Castle, it is the end of the line anyway, and time for him to retire to live peacefully with his wife and child. But no-one escapes so easily from the lonely, isolated, neurotic world of the SIS.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY COLM TÓIBÍN

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In Dubliners, James Joyce takes us on an extraordinary journey with the ordinary men and women from the city of his birth. In 'Araby' a young boy struggles with everyday tasks in the face of a growing infatuation with his neighbour's sister; in 'The Boarding House' a single mother orchestrates a marriage proposal for her daughter; in 'The Dead' the ideas of birth and decay are played out over the course of a dinner. From short, lyrical stories to the novella-length masterpiece which concludes this collection, Dubliners is as alive with feeling as it was when first published.

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This book collects, for the first time, Colm Toibin's critical essays on Henry James. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James's life, The Master, Toibin brilliantly analyzes James from a novelist's point of view. Known for his acuity and originality, Toibin is himself a master of fiction and critical works, which makes this collection of his writings on Henry James essential reading for literary critics. But he also writes for general readers. Until now, these writings have been scattered in introductions, essays in the Dublin Times, reviews in the New York Review of Books, and other disparate venues. With humor and verve, Toibin approaches Henry James's life and work in many and various ways. He reveals a novelist haunted by George Eliot and shows how thoroughly James was a New Yorker. He demonstrates how a new edition of Henry James's letters along with a biography of James's sister-in-law alter and enlarge our understanding of the master. His "Afterword" is a fictional meditation on the written and the unwritten. Toibin's remarkable insights provide scholars, students, and general readers a fresh encounter with James's well-known texts.

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After WWII, a small Italian town struggles to emerge from under the thumb of Fascism. With wit, tenderness, and irony, Elsa, the novel’s narrator, weaves a rich tapestry of provincial Italian life: two generations of neighbors and relatives, their gossip and shattered dreams, their heartbreaks and struggles to find happiness. Elsa wants to imagine a future for herself, free from the expectations and burdens of her town’s history, but the weight of the past will always prove unbearable, insistently posing the question: “Why has everything been ruined?”

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Written during Jane Austen's race against failing health, Persuasion tells the story of Anne Elliot, a woman who - at twenty-seven - is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years ago, she was persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. When Anne and Frederick meet again, he has acquired both, but still feels the sting of her rejection. A brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, Austen's last completed novel is also a movingly told love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.

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Sean Scully is one of today’s best-loved abstract painters. His familiar signature style of lines or bands of colour, alluding to architectural elements such as portals, windows and walls, is one of the most instantly recognizable in contemporary painting. This book brings together for the first time his photographs of the dry stone walls found on the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland.

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Every Christmas, the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan displays one of the crown jewels of its extraordinary collection: the original manuscript of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with its detailed emendations, deletions and insertions in Dickens’ hand. Here, for the first time in a beautiful trade edition, is a facsimile of that invaluable manuscript, along with a typeset version of the story, a fascinating introduction by the Morgan’s chief literary curator on the history of the story and a new foreword by Colm Tóibín celebrating its timeless appeal.

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Remembered in his native Ireland primarily as a harpsichordist and interpreter of Bach’s music, and in the UK as a conductor of the ground-shaking early music group Musica Reservata, John Beckett also composed avant-garde incidental music, performed on several instruments and was an authoritative, if controversial, conductor. Music was not his only passion: he was interested in films, the theatre, art and pottery, and loved to travel. His varied career included devising music programmes for Radio Éireann, writing for The Bell magazine, working in Dublin’s Pike Theatre, presenting and performing for the BBC Third Programme, composing music for his famous cousin Samuel Beckett, founding Musica Reservata, conducting Bach cantata concerts in Dublin over a ten-year period, and working as a producer and presenter for BBC Radio 3. Despite his reputation as a gruff, confrontational individual with a fondness for Guinness, whiskey and garlic, he made many friends and was familiar with Dublin’s intellectual, musical and bohemian milieu, such as the writers Aidan Higgins, Anthony Cronin, Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and James Plunkett, composers E.J. Moeran and Frederick May, counter-tenor Alfred Deller, musician John O’Sullivan, Desmond MacNamara, Ralph Cusack, singer and sculptor Werner Schürmann, publisher John Calder and musician David Cairns. Complex, self-deprecating and private, John’s character and achievements are examined with detail garnered from information both published and in archival collections in Ireland and the UK. Recollections from those who knew him at different stages of his life enliven this fascinating biography. The book also examines the development of Musica Reservata, and contains excerpts from unpublished letters written by Samuel Beckett. Extracts from correspondence between John and James Plunkett, Aidan Higgins, Arland Ussher and music critic Charles Acton are also included.

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This book collects, for the first time, Colm Toibin's critical essays on Henry James. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James's life, The Master, Toibin brilliantly analyzes James from a novelist's point of view. Known for his acuity and originality, Toibin is himself a master of fiction and critical works, which makes this collection of his writings on Henry James essential reading for literary critics. But he also writes for general readers. Until now, these writings have been scattered in introductions, essays in the Dublin Times, reviews in the New York Review of Books, and other disparate venues. With humor and verve, Toibin approaches Henry James's life and work in many and various ways. He reveals a novelist haunted by George Eliot and shows how thoroughly James was a New Yorker. He demonstrates how a new edition of Henry James's letters along with a biography of James's sister-in-law alter and enlarge our understanding of the master. His "Afterword" is a fictional meditation on the written and the unwritten. Toibin's remarkable insights provide scholars, students, and general readers a fresh encounter with James's well-known texts.

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Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free/She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

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Edited by Paul Auster, this four–volume set of Beckett's canon has been designed by award-winner Laura Lindgren. Available individually, as well as in a boxed set, the four hardcover volumes have been specially bound with covers featuring images central to Beckett's works. Typographical errors that remained uncorrected in the various prior editions have now been corrected in consultation with Beckett scholars C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski. Beckett was interested in consciousness as a form of comedy close to tragedy and logic as a crime. He loved the tension in 'cogito ergo sum' and took a dim view of the connecting word, the 'ergo' in the equation. Cogitating was the nightmare from which his characters were trying to awake. Being was a sour trick played on them by some force with whom they were trying desperately not to reckon. Beckett produced infinite amounts of comedy about the business of thinking as boring, invalid, and quite unnecessary. His characters did not need to think in order to be, or be in order to think. They knew they existed because of the odd habits and deep discomforts of their bodies. I itch therefore I am." — Colm Toibin, from his Introduction

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2007 Audie Award Finalist for ClassicsOriginally published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises is Ernest Hemingway’s first novel and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style.​A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway’s most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. In his first great literary masterpiece, Hemingway portrays an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. “The ideal companion for troubled times: equal parts Continental escape and serious grappling with the question of what it means to be, and feel, lost.” —The Wall Street Journal

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'Soaringly beautiful, urgent and disturbing... A masterpiece.' Colm Tóibín, from the introduction'Dark and beautiful and brilliant' Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall Death in Spring is a dark and dream-like tale of a teenage boy's coming of age in a remote village in the Catalan mountains; a place cut off from the outside world, where cruel customs are blindly followed, and attempts at rebellion swiftly crushed. When his father dies, he must navigate this oppressive society alone, and learn how to live in a place of crippling conformity. Often seen as an allegory for life under a dictatorship, Death in Spring is a bewitching and unsettling novel about power, exile, and the hope that comes from even the smallest gestures of independence. 'Rodoreda has bedazzled me' Gabriel Garcia Marquez'Rodoreda's artistry is of the highest order' Diana Athill 'Read it for its beauty, for the way it will surprise and subvert your desires, and as a testament to the human spirit in the face of brutality and willful inhumanity.' Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing 'Utterly extraordinary' Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond

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Ulysses is widely regarded as the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Commemorating the 1922 publication of this modernist masterwork, One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” tells the story of the writing, revising, printing, and censorship of the novel.Edited by world-renowned Irish novelist and literary critic Colm Tóibín, this book presents ten essays by preeminent Joyce scholars and by curators of his manuscripts and early editions, as well as an interview with Sean Kelly, the New York gallery owner who donated his extensive Joyce collection to The Morgan Library & Museum. Beginning with Tóibín’s expert interpretation of the Dublin context for Ulysses, the volume follows Joyce in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris from 1914 up through the novel’s publication—and the international scandal and fame that ensues. It draws on Joyce’s notebooks and letters, as well as extant manuscripts and proofs, to provide new insights into Joyce’s life, the narrative and place of Ulysses, and the printed book.Rich and illuminating, this volume is essential for scholars, fans, and readers of the novel. Along with the editor, contributors include Ronan Crowley, Maria DiBattista, Derick Dreher, Catherine Flynn, Anne Fogarty, Rick Gekoski, Joseph M. Hassett, James Maynard, and John McCourt.

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In this gathering Anne Boyd Rioux has chosen fiction over the course of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s life. Woolson’s stories travel from the rural Midwest to the deep South and then across the Atlantic to Italy and Britain.

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This collection of prefaces, originally written for the 1909 multivolume "New York" Edition of Henry James' fiction, first appeared in book form in 1934 with an introduction by poet and critic R. P. Blackmur. In his prefaces, James tackles the great problems of fiction writing - character, plot, point of view, inspiration - and explains how he came to write novels such as "The Portrait of a Lady" and "The American". As Blackmur puts it, "criticism has never been more ambitious, nor more useful." The latest edition of this influential work includes a foreword by best-selling author Colm Toibin, whose critically acclaimed novel "The Master" is told from the point of view of Henry James. As a guide not only to James' inspiration and execution but also to his frustrations and triumphs, this volume will be valuable both to students of James' fiction and to aspiring writers.

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