Search results for ""Author John McGahern""

A landmark event: the collected stories of 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Tóibín).'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel.' Melvyn Bragg'Gentle, lyrical, an amorist of language, a natural historian of the soul.' Irish Times'Exquisite stories . . . Here is a Dublin of tatty dancehalls and uneasy courtships, of kisses in damp doorways and unfulfilled hungerings . . . Writing of extraordinary beauty.' Guardian

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The iconic debut novel by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Tóibín).Elizabeth Reegan, after years of freedom - and loneliness - marries into the enclosed Irish village of her upbringing. The children are not her own; her husband is straining to break free from the servile security of the police force; and her own life, threatened by illness, seems to be losing the last vestiges of its purpose. Moving between tragedy and savage comedy, desperation and joy, John McGahern's first novel is one of haunting power.'Marvellous.' Susan Hill, Times'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel.' Melvyn Bragg'Reminds one of the young Joyce ... McGahern is the real thing.' Spectator

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An enlightening collection of essays, reviews and speeches by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Tóibín).'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel.' Melvyn BraggMcGahern did not spread himself thinly as a writer. Nearly all of his creative energy went into what was central for him: the great novels and stories that are now part of the canon of Irish and world literature. Yet he spoke out when he felt he had something worth saying and his non-fiction writings are of great interest to anyone who loves his work, and to all those interested in the recent history of Ireland. This book brings together all of McGahern's surviving essays, reviews and speeches. In them his canon of great writers - Tolstoy, Chekhov, James, Proust and Joyce - is cited many times, with deep and subtle appreciation. His discussions of Irish writers who influenced him are generous and brilliant - among them Michael McLaverty, Ernie O'Malley and Forrest Reid. His interventions on issues he felt strongly about - sectarianism, women's rights, the power of the church in Ireland - are lucid and far-sighted.

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John McGahern's astounding memoir of his childhood:'A glowing masterpiece.' Hilary Mantel'The one Irish writer everyone should read.' Colm TóibínAs wise and compelling a book as any of his elegiac and graceful novels.' David Mitchell'I have admired, even loved, McGahern's work since his first novel ... Memoir strips the skin off his fiction as he faces a desperate early life with great force and tenderness.' Melvyn BraggThis is the story of John McGahern's childhood, his mother's death, his father's anger and violence, and how, through his discovery of books, his dream of becoming a writer began. At the heart of Memoir is a son's unembarrassed tribute to his mother. His memory of walks with her through the narrow lanes to the country schools where she taught and his happiness as she named for him the wild flowers on the bank remained conscious and unconscious presences for the rest of his life. A classic family story, told with exceptional restraint and tenderness, Memoir cannot fail to move all those who read it.'Magnificent ... Stand[s] supreme in the Irish canon.' Irish Times'Profoundly beautiful.' Daily Telegraph'Extraordinary, spellbinding, spiritual.' Irish Independent''In a tremendously distinguished career, he has never written more movingly, or with a sharper eye.' Andrew Motion, Guardian

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A haunting novel by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Tóibín). A day, crucial and cathartic, in the life of a young Catholic schoolteacher who has returned to Ireland after a year's sabbatical in London where he married an American divorcee. As a result he now faces certain dismissal by the school authorities. Moving from the earliest memories of both the man and the woman, the novel recreates their breaking of the shackles of guilt and duty into the acceptance of a fulfilling adult love.'A beautiful, irresistible work of imagination. Sunday Telegraph'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel.' Melvyn Bragg

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McGahern's command of the short story places him among the finest practitioners of the form, in a lineage that runs from Chekhov through Joyce and the Anglo-American masters. When the collection was first published in 1992, the Sunday Times said 'there is a vivid pleasure to be had in the reading of these stories,' while for Cressida Connolly in the Evening Standard 'these wonderful stories are sad and true . . . McGahern is undoubtedly a great short story writer.' Many of the stories here are already classics: 'Gold Watch', 'High Ground' and 'Parachutes', among others. McGahern's spare, restrained yet powerfully lyrical language draws meaning from the most ordinary situations, and turns apparently undramatic encounters into profoundly haunting events: a man visits his embittered father with his new wife; an ageing priest remembers a funeral he had attended years before; a boy steals comics from a shop to escape the rain-bound melancholy of a seaside holiday; an ageing teacher, who has escaped a religious order, wastes his life in a rural backwater that he knows he will never leave.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME McGahern's 'masterpiece: the sort of book which you can give anyone of any age and know that they will be changed by it' (Colm Tóibín) by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel).'A book that can be read in two hours, but will linger in the mind for decades.' Sunday TelegraphOnce an officer in the Irish War for Independence, Moran is now a widower, eking out a living on a small farm where he raises his two sons and three daughters. Adrift from the structure and security of the military, he keeps control by binding his family close to him. But as his children grow older and seek independence, and as the passing years bring with them bewildering change, Moran struggles to find a balance between love and tyranny.'McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own.' John Updike'An overwhelming experience.' The Times'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel.' Melvyn Bragg

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The provocative novel by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Tóibín).Michael, a writer of pornographic fiction, creates an ideal world of sex through his two stock athletes, Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael, while he bungles every phase of his entanglement with an older woman who has the misfortune to fall in love with him. But his insensitivity to this love is in direct contrast to the tenderness with which he attempts to make his aunt's slow death in hospital tolerable, while his employer, Maloney, failed poet and comic king of pornographers, comes gradually to preside over this broken world. Everywhere in this rich novel is the drama of opposites, but, above all, sex and death are never far from each other.'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel.' Melvyn Bragg

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The celebrated second novel by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Tóibín) is 'a perfectly written tour de force' (Sunday Times) and 'the best novel to come out of Ireland in many years.' (Irish Times)Set in rural Ireland, John McGahern's second novel is about adolescence and a guilty, yet uncontrollable sexuality that is contorted and twisted by both puritanical state religion and a strange, powerful and ambiguous relationship between son and widower father. Against a background evoked with quiet mastery, McGahern explores with precision and tenderness a human situation, superficially very ordinary, but inwardly an agony of longing and despair.'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel.' Melvyn Bragg

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Sinclair; The Sisters; Swallows; The Rockingham Shoot; The Power of DarknessJohn McGahern, the leading Irish novelist of his generation, wrote a substantial number of compelling scripts for radio and television. This volume brings together five of his produced works, at the heart of which sits the previously unpublished The Rockingham Shoot, a dark and powerful play for television that concerns a Nationalist teacher whose attempt to prevent his pupils beating at a pheasant shoot held in honour of the British Ambassador leads to a shockingly violent incident. Collectively, these dramatic works offer an evocative and often stark account of a deeply troubled and divided nation.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME McGahern's 'masterpiece: the sort of book which you can give anyone of any age and know that they will be changed by it' (Colm Tóibín) by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel).'A book that can be read in two hours, but will linger in the mind for decades.' Sunday TelegraphOnce an officer in the Irish War for Independence, Moran is now a widower, eking out a living on a small farm where he raises his two sons and three daughters. Adrift from the structure and security of the military, he keeps control by binding his family close to him. But as his children grow older and seek independence, and as the passing years bring with them bewildering change, Moran struggles to find a balance between love and tyranny.'McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own.' John Updike'An overwhelming experience.' The Times'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel.' Melvyn Bragg

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Stories by one of the outstanding Irish writers of today, author of Nightlines, The Barracks, The Dark, The Leavetaking, The Pornographer, High Ground, Amongst Women (nominated for the Booker Prize in 1990) and That They May Face the Rising Sun.

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The stories in High Ground are set in ordinary places, in the streets and suburbs and dancehalls of Dublin, the small towns and fields of the midlands, the big houses of the beleaguered Anglo-Irish in the aftermath of their ascendancy, the whole changing country propelled in a generation from the nineteenth into the late twentieth century.

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Now a major motion picture: the Booker-shortlisted author's last novel: a 'masterpiece' (Observer) by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel)Joe and Kate Ruttledge have come to Ireland from London in search of a different life. In passages of beauty and truth, the drama of a year in their lives and those of the memorable characters that move about them unfolds through the action, the rituals of work, religious observances and play. We are introduced, with deceptive simplicity, to a complete representation of existence - an enclosed world has been transformed into an Everywhere.'McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own.' John Updike'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel.' Melvyn Bragg

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'Magnificent.' Irish Times'Much to savour.' The Times'An event in Irish culture.' TLSThe collected letters of John McGahern, 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett.' (Guardian)John McGahern is consistently hailed as one of the finest Irish writers since James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.This volume collects some of the witty, profound and unfailingly brilliant letters that he exchanged with family, friends and literary luminaries - such as Seamus Heaney, Colm Tóibín and Paul Muldoon - over the course of a well-travelled life.It is one of the major contributions to the study of Irish and British literature of the past thirty years, acting not just as a crucial insight into the life and works of a much-revered writer - but also a history of post-war Irish literature and its close ties to British and American literary life.'McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own.' John Updike

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Read the greatest rediscovered classic of recent years 'A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life' Ian McEwan William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death, his colleagues remember him rarely.Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value - of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history - and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life. 'A brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise and elegant novel' Nick Hornby ‘A terrific novel of echoing sadness’ Julian Barnes

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'Magnificent.' Irish Times'Much to savour.' The Times'An event in Irish culture.' TLSThe collected letters of John McGahern, 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett.' (Guardian)John McGahern is consistently hailed as one of the finest Irish writers since James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.This volume collects some of the witty, profound and unfailingly brilliant letters that he exchanged with family, friends and literary luminaries - such as Seamus Heaney, Colm Tóibín and Paul Muldoon - over the course of a well-travelled life.It is one of the major contributions to the study of Irish and British literature of the past thirty years, acting not just as a crucial insight into the life and works of a much-revered writer - but also a history of post-war Irish literature and its close ties to British and American literary life.'McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own.' John Updike

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Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. 'My only concern', John McGahern once said, 'is that I get the sentence right and describe my world clearly and deeply.''The Country Funeral' witnesses three brothers, John, Philly and Fonsie Ryan, as they travel west from Dublin to Gloria Bog - the heart of the territory where so many of McGahern's stories take place - to attend the funeral of their uncle. Depicting the customs and rituals of the day, McGahern exquisitely traces how the brothers react to the area in unexpected and tender ways, and face their own feelings about the transience of life.Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.

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