Kirjahaku

"Joyce fans should thank their lucky stars." -The New York Times Arguably the most influential writer of the twentieth century, James Joyce continues to inspire writers, readers, and thinkers today. Now Edna O'Brien, herself one of Ireland's great writers, approaches the master as only a fellow countryman can. From Joyce's adolescence through his travels abroad to the publication of Ulysses-the scandalous masterpiece that was initially banned in the U nited States but later hailed as one of the most brilliant novels of the twentieth century-O'Brien traces the arc of Joyce's remarkable life. Her biography is a tribute, at once affectionate and stern, from a contemporary writer to one of our most significant literary ancestors.

An evocative play about Virginia Woolf's life and relationships with her husband, Leonard, and her lover, Vita Sackville-West.

Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life.-National Public Radio When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and contemplation. Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but deteriorating house in Ireland, her story moves through convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, the wild parties of the '60s in London, and encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as a celebrated writer and the guest of Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton. Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have imprinted upon and enhanced one lifetime.

With her inimitable gift for describing the workings of the heart and mind, Edna O'Brien introduces us to a vivid new cast of restless, searching people who-whether in the Irish countryside or London or New York-remind us of our own humanity. In Send My Roots Rain, Miss Gilhooley, a librarian, waits in the lobby of a posh Dublin hotel-expecting to meet a celebrated poet while reflecting on the great love who disappointed her. The Irish workers of The Shovel Kings have pipe dreams of becoming millionaires in London, but long for their quickly changing homeland-exiles in both places. Green Georgette is a searing anatomy of class, through the eyes of a little girl; Old Wounds illuminates the importance of family and memory in old age. In language that is always bold and vital, Edna O'Brien pays tribute to the universal forces that rule our lives.

A fiercely beautiful novel about one woman's struggle to reclaim a life shattered by betrayal from the 2018 winner of the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. One night, in the dead of winter, a mysterious stranger arrives in the small Irish town of Cloonoila. Broodingly handsome, worldly, and charismatic, Dr. Vladimir Dragan is a poet, a self-proclaimed holistic healer, and a welcome disruption to the monotony of village life. Before long, the beautiful black-haired Fidelma McBride falls under his spell and, defying the shackles of wedlock and convention, turns to him to cure her of her deepest pains. Then, one morning, the illusion is abruptly shattered. While en route to pay tribute at Yeats's grave, Dr. Vlad is arrested and revealed to be a notorious war criminal and mass murderer. The Cloonoila community is devastated by this revelation, and no one more than Fidelma, who is made to pay for her deviance and desire. In disgrace and utterly alone, she embarks on a journey that will bring both profound hardship and, ultimately, the prospect of redemption. Moving from Ireland to London and then to The Hague, The Little Red Chairs is Edna O'Brien's first novel in ten years -- a vivid and unflinching exploration of humanity's capacity for evil and artifice as well as the bravest kind of love.

Collected here for the first time are stories spanning five decades of writing by the "short story master" (Harold Bloom). As John Banville writes in his introduction to The Love Object, Edna O'Brien "is, simply, one of the finest writers of our time." The thirty-one stories collected in this volume provide, among other things, a cumulative portrait of Ireland, seen from within and without. Coming of age, the impact of class, and familial and romantic love are the prevalent motifs, along with the instinct toward escape and subsequent nostalgia for home. Some of the stories are linked and some carry O'Brien's distinct sense of the comical. In "A Rose in the Heart of New York," the single-mindedness of love dramatically derails the relationship between a girl and her mother, while in "Sister Imelda" and "The Creature" the strong ties between teacher and student and mother and son are ultimately broken. "The Love Object" recounts a passionate affair between the narrator and her older lover. The magnificent, mid-career title story from Lantern Slides portrays a Dublin dinner party that takes on the lives and loves of all the guests. More recent stories include "Shovel Kings" -- "a masterpiece of compression, distilling the pain of a lost, exiled generation" (Sunday Times) -- and "Old Wounds," which follows the revival and demise of the friendship between two elderly cousins. In 2011, Edna O'Brien's gifts were acknowledged with the most prestigious international award for the story, the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. The Love Object illustrates a career's worth of shimmering, potent prose from a writer of great courage, vision, and heart. "The most striking aspect of Edna O'Brien's short stories, aside from the consistent mastery with which they are executed, is their diversity."-John Banville

In these selections from twenty years of her best short fiction, Edna O'Brien's A Fanatic Heart pulls the reader into a woman's experience. Her stories portray a young Irish girl's view of obsessive love and its often wrenching pain, while tales of contemporary life show women who open themselves to sexuality, to disappointment, to madness. Throughout, there is always O'Brien's voice--wondrous, despairing, moving--examining passionate subjects that lay bare the desire and needs that can be hidden in a woman's heart.

A treasure of world literature back in print, featuring a new introduction by Eimear McBride This omnibus edition includes the novels The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss. The country girls are Caithleen "Kate" Brady and Bridget "Baba" Brennan, and their story begins in the repressive atmosphere of a small village in the west of Ireland in the years following World War II. Kate is a romantic, looking for love; Baba is a survivor. Setting out to conquer the bright lights of Dublin, they are rewarded with comical miscommunications, furtive liaisons, bad faith, bad luck, bad sex, and compromise; marrying for the wrong reasons, betraying for the wrong reasons, fighting in their separate ways against the overwhelming wave of expectations forced upon "girls" of every era. The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue charts unflinchingly the pattern of women's lives, from the high spirits of youth to the chill of middle age, from hope to despair, in remarkable prose swinging from blunt and brutal to whimsical and lyrical. It is a saga both painful and hilarious, and remains one of the major accomplishments of Edna O'Brien's extraordinary career.

Wild Decembers is a newly reissued edition of the novel by Edna O'Brien, "one of the most celebrated writers in the English language" (NPR's Weekend Edition). Wild Decembers charts the quick and critical demise of relations between Joseph Brennan and Mick Bugler--"the warring sons of warring sons"--in the countryside of Western Ireland. With her inimitable gift for describing the occasions of heartbreak, O'Brien brings Joseph's live for his land to the level of his sister Breege's love for both him and his rival, Bugler. Breege sees "the wrong of years and the recent wrongs" fuel each other as Bugler comes to claim recently inherited acreage on what her brother calls "my mountain." A classic drama ensues, involving the full range of bonds and betrayals and leavened by the human comedy of which Edna O'Brien rarely loses sight. A dinner dance in the village of Cloontha and the seduction of Mick Bugler by an eager pair of uninhibited sisters rival Joyce in their hectic exuberance. But as the narrative unfolds, the reader is drawn into the sense of foreboding in a place where "fields mean more than fields, more than life and more than death too."

In the Forest is a newly reissued edition of the terrifying novel from "one of the greatest writers in the English-speaking world" (The New York Times), Edna O'Brien. "O'Brien brings together the earthy and delicately poetic: she has the sound of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf." --Newsweek O'Brien takes her reader into the mind of Michen O'Kane, a murder who terrorizes the countryside of western Ireland, and traces his transformation from a neglected child to a twisted killer. In the Forest is based on a true story of local horror, and O'Brien provides fragments of O'Kane's story while leaving her reader to try and make sense of his psyche.

The Light of Evening is a reissued edition of the novel by award-winning author Edna O'Brien.In Edna O'Brien's twentieth work of fiction, an elderly widow on her deathbed in rural Ireland tells the story of her life--a story of love, family, estrangement, and motherhood. "O'Brien brings together the earthy and delicately poetic: she has the sound of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf." --Newsweek

A newly reissued edition of this haunting, poetic coming-of-age novel from "one of the great writers...in the English-speaking world" (The New York Times) "O'Brien's evocative prose shows the chilling hold that history and the dead clamp on the living." --Paul Gray, Time"O'Brien brings together the earthy and the delicately poetic: she has the soul of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf." --Ray Sawhill, Newsweek In A Pagan Place, Edna O'Brien returns to Ireland, the uniquely wonderful, terrible, and peculiar place she once called home. After leaving to join a religious community in Belgium, a young woman remembers her childhood on the western coast of Ireland. She reflects on the rituals of rural life, the people she encountered, and the enchanting beauty of the landscape. This is the Ireland of country villages and barley fields, of mischievous girls and druids in the woods. As the impressions of her former home intensify, her mind turns to the shocking event that led to her departure.

Love and tragedy converge in a seaside town in The High Road, a newly reissued novel from Edna O'Brien, the author of Girl and "one of the most celebrated writers in the English language" (NPR's Weekend Edition) This richly peopled, compellingly readable novel explores the many lives of women--as mystic, mother, daughter, and lover. There is Iris, with her "winsome wonsome" ways, no longer young; there is Charlotte, a troubled debutante who has fled from society; and there is the narrator, Anna, who feels that her emotional life has folded until she meets a young Spanish girl named Catalina. Set in a seaside enclave on the Mediterranean coast, The High Road is a passionate account of lost love and the return to loving, where currents of regret and loneliness clash with a fiery instinct for survival.

A newly reissued novel from the author of Girl, "one of the most celebrated writers in the English language" (NPR's Weekend Edition) "As her disturbing novel clearly reveals, Edna O'Brien possesses what Henry James called an imagination fordisaster... Time and Tide] is an anthology of heightened moments...never less than brilliantly expressed." --Joel Conarroe, The New York Times Book Review Time and Tide is a fragmented novel detailing the loves and catastrophes--and catastrophic loves--of Nell, an Irish woman trying to make a life for herself in the literary world of London. "A whimsical beauty who has swapped the suffocating narrowness of her native land for the loveless brutality of England" (The Independent), Nell is in flight from bitter, controlling, and small-minded parents, yet risks becoming just such a mother to her own sons. She seeks comfort and acceptance, yet finds death, drugs, and "an orgy of humiliation" (The New York Times Book Review). She seeks companionship, yet finds one after another predatory man: sadists, alcoholics, unscrupulous doctors, and even child molesters. Can Nell extract from the "the vast inhospitality of a creaking world" some measure of beauty and grace? The answer, of course, is yes--but at the price of many illusions.

House of Splendid Isolation is a newly reissued novel from Edna O'Brien, the author of Girl--"one of the most celebrated writers in the English language" (NPR's Weekend Edition). The heartbreaking dilemmas and the noble and bloody history of Ireland come vividly to life in the tale of Josie, a widow living in a solitary house outside an Irish village, whose home becomes the hideout of an IRA terrorist.

Down by the River is a newly reissued novel from Edna O'Brien, the author of Girl--"one of the most celebrated writers in the English language" (NPR's Weekend Edition). Set in the author's native Ireland, a powerful and passionate novel about a young girl who becomes pregnant by her father--a situation made worse when it becomes fodder for the gossip mill of church, state, and the town square.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction "Superb... Lantern Slides] continues the quest for origin and explanation that has preoccupied O'Brien...Her stories unearth the primeval feelings buried just below the surface of nostalgia, using memories to illuminate both what is ridiculous and what is heroic about passion." --David Leavitt, The New York Times Book Review "Her stories are brilliantly realized and often very funny...O'Brien is quite simply one of the finest short story writers of our time." --Joyce Carol Oates A newly reissued collection of stories from the author of Girl, "one of the most celebrated writers in the English language" (NPR's Weekend Edition) In twelve stories peopled with deeply etched characters, whom we come to know instantly and intimately, Lantern Slides reveals the wit and passion of a master of the short fiction form. Rich and humorous, full of struggle and boldness, these stories are a singular reflection of Edna O'Brien's artistry.

The best-selling author's adaptation of one of Euripides' great tragedies In time of war unspeakable unthinkable things are done...Edna O'Brien's critically acclaimed adaptation of the Euripides play dramatises the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter to the cause of his campaign to win back Helen of Troy."O'Brien gives force and clarity to a notoriously corrupt text; what impresses is the swift narrative drive of this seventy-five minute version and the vigour and irony of O'Brien's language" Guardian"Edna O'Brien's silky new version of Euripides" Daily Mail "O'Brien's adaptation is loyal and respectful" Sunday Times "Eloquent and compelling" Sunday Telegraph

The iconic memoir from the Irish author of the legendary The Country Girls trilogy.'Get ready to applaud, ladies and gentlemen, because there is no one like her.' Anne Enright'One of the last great lights of the golden age of Irish literature.' Eimear McBride'Glittering energy.' Colm TóibínI thought of life's many bounties, to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter ...Born in Ireland in 1930 and driven into exile after publication of her controversial first novel, The Country Girls, was burned in public, Edna O'Brien is now hailed as one of the most majestic writers of her era - and Country Girl is her fabulous memoir.Born in rural Ireland, O'Brien weaves the tale of her life from convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, moving on to the wild parties of 1960s bohemian in London, encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans, love and unrequited love, and glamorous trips to America as a celebrity writer.Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have forged a legendary author. O'Brien recasts her life with the imaginative alchemy of a poet, and the result is a memoir of sparkling wisdom and honesty.

A haunting novel from the iconic Irish legend behind The Country Girls trilogy.'The taboo-breaking, the fabulous prose - there's no one like Edna O'Brien.' Anne Enright'Novels of heart-breaking empathy, rigorous honesty and peerless beauty.' Eimear McBride'A profound intelligence spurred on by a tangible, fizzing joy.' Megan Nolan'Brilliant and brave.' Ann Patchett'A revolution.' John Banville'Glittering energy.' Colm TóibínEdna O'Brien's chilling spectre of a novel, Night, is narrated by one of her most memorable characters, Mary Hooligan. Lying on a four-poster bed, unable to sleep, she recounts her (mis)adventures, courtships, and sexual encounters of the most transgressive kind in a narrative voice of blistering, radical originality.With an introduction by Andrew O'Hagan