Colm Tóibín

"One of our most beloved contemporary poets", is how former Ireland Professor of Poetry Paula Meehan describes Philip Casey (1950-2018). Cherished by many for his tenderness, fortitude, hope and tenacity, Philip was an award-winning novelist, admired poet and vital presence on the Irish literary scene for four decades. Philip battled repeated health challenges, stood up for causes he believed in, and relished making mischief. He was, in the words of the poet Theo Dorgan, "some man for one man". Philip believed in the idea of a community of writers, and his open-mindedness drew others towards him - whether to his Dublin home, or to his grassroots support base in his earlier home of Hollyfort, Co Wexford. His booming laugh and powerful handshake were legendary. The many contributors, including Sebastian Barry, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Dermot Bolger, Moya Cannon and Thomas Lynch, praise Philip Casey's gifts as a writer of poetry and fiction, as well as highlighting their admiration for him as a man.

Vpervye na russkom - roman Kolma Tojbina, avtora "Volshebnika" i "Bruklina", kniga - finalist Bukerovskoj premii, laureat Mezhdunarodnoj Dublinskoj premii IMPAC, "izyskannoe osveschenie vnutrennego mira Genri Dzhejmsa" (New York Times). Sovremennyj klassik otdaet dan uvazhenija odnomu iz stolpov amerikanskoj i mirovoj literatury, predteche modernizma. Vydajuschijsja khudozhnik, master tonkogo psikhologicheskogo portreta, pokazan vo vsej svoej ujazvimosti i odinochestve - ot provala postanovki ego pesy "Gaj Domvil" v londonskom teatre Druri-lejn, poka v sosednem teatre publika rukopleschet premere "Kak vazhno byt sereznym" Oskara Uajlda, do vizita v provintsialnyj anglijskij gorodok Raj, gde Dzhejms poselilsja na sklone let, ego brata, filosofa Uiljama Dzhejmsa, i s mnogochislennymi reministsentsijami k kljuchevym epizodam biografii proslavlennogo dobrovolnogo izgnannika, kotoryj predpochel London, Florentsiju i Parizh rodnomu Bostonu... "Negromkij shedevr, rabota neobychajnoj sereznosti i soprichastnosti, raskryvajuschaja nam genija vo vsej ego chelovecheskoj polnote. I napisan etot glubokij roman - ne poboimsja slova - masterski" (New York Observer).

Penguin Readers is an ELT graded reader series for learners of English as a foreign language. With carefully adapted text, new illustrations and language learning exercises, the print edition also includes instructions to access supporting material online.Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction, introducing language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content.The eight levels of Penguin Readers follow the Common European Framework of Reference for language learning (CEFR). Exercises at the back of each Reader help language learners to practise grammar, vocabulary, and key exam skills. Before, during and after-reading questions test readers' story comprehension and develop vocabulary.Brooklyn, a Level 5 Reader, is B1 in the CEFR framework. The text is made up of sentences with up to four clauses, introducing present perfect continuous, past perfect, reported speech and second conditional. It is well supported by illustrations, which appear regularly.When Eilis gets a job in Brooklyn, New York, she leaves her family in Ireland to travel to a new country. It is an exciting adventure, with lots of new people and things to learn, but Eilis misses Ireland. When she meets someone special, Eilis must choose between her past and her future.Visit the Penguin Readers websiteExclusively with the print edition, readers can unlock online resources including a digital book, audio edition, lesson plans and answer keys.

A Guest at the Feast uncovers the places where politics and poetics meet, where life and fiction overlap, where one can be inside writing and also outside of it.From the melancholy and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an extraordinary essay on his own cancer diagnosis, Tóibín delineates the bleakness and strangeness of life and also its richness and its complexity. As he reveals the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists and the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as the intricacies of Marilynne Robinson's fiction.The imprint of the written word on the private self, as Tóibín himself remarks, is extraordinarily powerful. In this collection, that power is gloriously alive, illuminating history and literature, politics and power, family and the self.'Tóibín's voice is so powerful and distinct, his descriptions so precise, that a single thread does weave through each of these pieces and does not snap . . . perhaps Ireland's greatest living male writer' Sunday Times'An unsurprisingly erudite, gracefully written unpicking of the world' Independent

THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2022SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION 2022From one of our greatest living writers comes a sweeping novel of unrequited love and exile, war and family.The Magician tells the story of Thomas Mann, whose life was filled with great acclaim and contradiction. He would find himself on the wrong side of history in the First World War, cheerleading the German army, but have a clear vision of the future in the second, anticipating the horrors of Nazism.He would have six children and keep his homosexuality hidden; he was a man forever connected to his family and yet bore witness to the ravages of suicide. He would write some of the greatest works of European literature, and win the Nobel Prize, but would never return to the country that inspired his creativity.Through one life, Colm Tóibín tells the breathtaking story of the twentieth century.___________________________________'As with everything Colm Tóibín sets his masterful hand to, The Magician is a great imaginative achievement -- immensely readable, erudite, worldly and knowing, and fully realized' - Richard Ford'No living novelist dramatizes artistic creation as profoundly, as luminously, as Colm Tóibín . . . reading him is among the deepest pleasures our literature can offer' - Garth Greenwell'This is not just a whole life in a novel, it's a whole world' - Katharina Volckmer

The sixth volume in the popular Very Christmas series from New Vessel Press, this collection transports readers to the Emerald Isle with stories and poems sure to bring holiday cheer. This anthology is packed with beloved classics, forgotten treasures, and modern masterpieces. You'll find wondrous works by James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Enright, William Trevor, Colm T ib n, Bernard MacLaverty, and many more. See how Christmas is done in snowy Dublin and on the mean streets of Belfast, from west coast to east, and even across sea and ocean to Irish communities in London and New York City. Put a flickering candle in the window and a steaming dinner on the table, and celebrate the Irish way--Nollaig Shona Daoibh--and Merry Christmas

An intimate study of three of Ireland's greatest writers from one of its best-loved contemporary voices 'A father...is a necessary evil.' Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know Colm Toibin turns his incisive gaze to three of Ireland's greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, and their earliest influences: their fathers. From Wilde's doctor father, a brilliant statistician and amateur archaeologist, who was taken to court by an obsessed lover in a strange premonition of what would happen to his son; to Yeats' father, an impoverished artist and brilliant letter-writer who could never finish apainting; to John Stanislus Joyce, a singer, drinker and story-teller, a man unwilling to provide for his large family, whom his son James memorialised in his work. Colm Toibin illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways they surface in their work.

Colm Toibin's Brooklyn is a devastating story of love, loss and one woman's terrible choice between duty and personal freedom. 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.'With this elating and humane novel, Colm Tóibín has produced a masterwork' Sunday Times 'The most compelling and moving portrait of a young woman I have read in a long time' Zoë Heller Guardian, Books of the Year 'A work of such skill, understatement and sly jewelled merriment could haunt your life' Ali Smith TLS, Books of the Year

On the day of his daughter's wedding, Agamemnon orders her sacrifice. His daughter is led to her death, and Agamemnon leads his army into battle, where he is rewarded with glorious victory.Three years later, he returns home and his murderous action has set the entire family - mother, brother, sister - on a path of intimate violence, as they enter a world of hushed commands and soundless journeys through the palace's dungeons and bedchambers. As his wife seeks his death, his daughter, Electra, is the silent observer to the family's game of innocence while his son, Orestes, is sent into bewildering, frightening exile where survival is far from certain. Out of their desolating loss, Electra and Orestes must find a way to right these wrongs of the past even if it means committing themselves to a terrible, barbarous act.House of Names is a story of intense longing and shocking betrayal. It is a work of great beauty, and daring, from one of our finest living writers.

Depicting characters like the eponymous young sculptor in Roderick Hudson and spaces like the crowded galleries in The Wings of the Dove, Henry James’s iconic novels reflect the significance of the visual culture of his society. In this book, novelist and critic Colm Tóibín joins art historian Marc Simpson and Declan Kiely of The Morgan Library & Museum to reveal how essential the language and imagery of the arts—and friendships with artists—were to James’s writing.The authors consider the paintings, photographs, drawings, and sculpture produced by artists in James’s circle, assess how his pictorial aesthetic developed, and discuss why he destroyed so many personal documents and what became of those that survived. In examining works by figures such as John La Farge, Hendrik Andersen, and John Singer Sargent alongside selections from James’s novels, personal letters, and travel writings, Tóibín, Simpson, and Kiely explore the novelist’s artistic and social milieu. They show him to be a writer with a painterly eye for colors and textures, shapes and tastes, and for the blending of physical and psychological impressions. In many cases, the characters populating James’s fiction are ciphers for his artist friends, whose demeanors and experiences inspired James to immortalize them on the page. He also wrote critically about art, most notably about the work of his friend Sargent.A refreshing new perspective on a master novelist who was greatly nourished by his friendships with artists, Henry James and American Painting reveals a James whose literary imagination, in Tóibín’s words, “seemed most at ease with the image” and the work of creating fully realized portraits of his characters.

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. Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed.

It is the late 1960s in Ireland. Nora Webster is living in a small town, looking after her four children, trying to rebuild her life after the death of her husband. She is fiercely intelligent, at times difficult and impatient, at times kind, but she is trapped by her circumstances, and waiting for any chance which will lift her beyond them.

For Mary, her son has been lost to the world, and now, living in exile and in fear, she tries to piece together the memories of the events that led to her son's brutal death. To her he was a vulnerable figure, surrounded by men who could not be trusted, living in a time of turmoil and change.

From Colm Tóibín comes New Ways to Kill Your Mother, a fabulously entertaining book about writers and their families.In this wonderfully entertaining and enlightening collection, Colm Tóibín not only explores the often tense relationship between writers and their families but also conveys, with a rare tenderness and wit, the great joy of reading their work. Here is W.B. Yeats harshly responding to his own father's literary efforts; Thomas Mann ruining his children's prospects; Tennessee Williams haunted by his sister's mental illness; and John Cheever being beastly to his wife.Praise for New Ways to Kill Your Mother:'A brilliant book...Tóibín is a supple, subtle thinker, alive to hints and undertones, wary of absolute truths' Robert Hanks, New Statesman'A penetrating and often very funny inquiry into the fraught complicity between parent and child, brother and sister' Daily Telegraph'Insightful and compassionate, assured and knowledgeable, never less than fascinating. An impressive, fine and engaging collection' Independent on Sunday

In the captivating stories that make up The Empty Family Colm Tóibín delineates with a tender and unique sensibility lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals, often willingly, cast adrift from their history. 'I imagined lamplight, shadows, soft voices, clothes put away, the low sound of late news on the radio. And I thought as I crossed the bridge at Baggot Street to face the last stretch of my own journey home that no matter what I had done, I had not done that.'From the young Pakistani immigrant who seeks some kind of permanence in a strange town to the Irish woman reluctantly returning to Dublin and discovering a city that refuses to acknowledge her long absence each of Tóibín's stories manage to contain whole worlds: stories of fleeing the past and returning home, of family threads lost and ultimately regained.'Exquisite . . . The chief reason to read these stories is the peculiar power of Colm Tóibín's prose' Telegraph 'Astonishingly precise, depicting complex and conflicted states of mind with rare clarity' Observer 'Beautifully observed' Sunday Times

Follow Colm Tóibín's lone religious pilgrimage along the Irish border during the tumultuous summer of 1987.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.

A devastating story of love, loss and one woman's terrible choice between duty and personal freedom. Fall in love with Brooklyn ahead of its bestselling follow-up, Long Island.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.***'With this elating and humane novel, Colm Tóibín has produced a masterwork' Sunday Times'Unforgettable' Spectator'The most compelling and moving portrait of a young woman I have read in a long time' Zoë Heller, Guardian'Magnificent' Sunday TelegraphThe book that inspired the major motion picture starring Saoirse Ronan.

In a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when a job is offered in America, it is clear that she must go. Leaving her family and home, Eilis sets off to forge a new life for herself in Brooklyn. Young, homesick and alone, she gradually buries the pain of parting beneath the rhythms of a new life - days at the till in a large department store, night classes in Brooklyn College and Friday evenings on the dance floor of the parish hall - until she realizes that she has found a sort of happiness. But when tragic news summons her back to Ireland, and the constrictions of her old life unexpectedly give way to new possibilities, she finds herself facing a terrible choice: between love and happiness in the land where she belongs and the promises she must keep on the far side of the ocean. "Brooklyn" is a tender story of great love and loss, and of the heartbreaking choice between personal freedom and duty. In the character of Eilis Lacey Colm Toibin has created a remarkable heroine and in "Brooklyn" a novel of devastating emotional power.

Set in Ireland in the 1990s, Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship tells the story of the Devereux family, and reveals the intense connection between grandmother, mother and daughter. Dora Devereux, her daughter Lily and her granddaughter Helen – have come together after years of strife and reached an uneasy truce. Helen’s adored brother Declan is dying. Two friends join him and the women in a crumbling old house by the sea, where the six of them, from different generations and with different beliefs, must listen and come to terms with one another. 'It is in his emotional choreography that Tóibín shows himself to be an exceptional writer' – Sunday Telegraph