Edna O'Brien

"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.

James Joyces roman Ulysses gælder som et af de absolutte hovedværker i verdenslitteraturen. I år er det 100 år siden romanen udkom. I den anledning udsendes denne fine lille biografi over Joyce i digteren Peter Laugesens oversættelse.James Joyce - der sandsynligvis er den mest indflydelsesrige forfatter idet tyvende århundrede – bliver ved med at inspirere forfattere, læsere og tænkere i dag. Edna O'Brien, selv en af Irlands store forfattere, skriver om mesteren, som kun en landsmand kan. Fra Joyces teenageår over hans rejser til udlandet til udgivelsen af Ulysses - det skandaløse mesterværk, der oprindeligt blev forbudt i USA, men senere hyldet som en af de mest geniale romaner gennem tiderne - følger O'Brien buen i Joyces bemærkelsesværdige liv. Hendes biografi er en hyldest, på én gang kærlig og hård, til en af vores mest betydningsfulde litterære forfædre.

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

The road silent, somnolent yet with a speech of its own, speaking back to them, father and child, through trappings of sun and fretted verdure, speaking of the old mutinies and a fresh crime mounting in the blood. The local community is shocked when a young teenager, Mary, attempts to get an illegal abortion, especially when they discover that she has been raped by her father. O'Brien charts Mary's emotional and psychological trauma, as her story is dragged first into the public realm and then into the law courts, with her power of choice usurped by militant factions on all sides. A haunting novel based on a real events.

History is everywhere. It seeps into the soil, the sub-soil. Like rain, or hail, or snow, or blood. Josie O'Grady is an elderly woman, living alone in her dilapidated big house on the outskirts of a rural Irish village. Then one day her bedroom door swings open to reveal McGreevy, an IRA terrorist on a bloody crusade, who has chosen her isolated house for sanctuary. As days pass, these two outsiders develop a grudging respect for each other, which grows into affection and friendship, but the police net is closing in and, with dawning horror, Josie starts to suspect that McGreevy is not only using her house as a refuge. Based on interviews with the IRA leader Dominic McGlinchy in Portlaoise Prison and published four years before the Good Friday Agreement, this thrilling, political, poetic novel is a portrait of the state of the Irish nation at the height of the Troubles.

En av den irländska litteraturens stora mästerverk, nu på svenska för första gången på fyrtio år.Kate och Baba växer upp i en strikt religiös miljö på den irländska landsbygden strax efter andra världskriget. Kate är romantiskt lagd, Baba en överlevare. Efter att ha lyckats bli relegerade från klosterskolan de går på, tar de sig till Dublin. Redo för kärleken och friheten i den stora staden, tvingas de konfrontera de förväntningar som påtvingas flickor i varje generation.När Två flickor på Irland kom 1960 väckte den stor skandal. Böckerna förbjöds av myndigheterna och brändes till och med på bål av kyrkan för sitt rättframma sätt att skildra unga flickors sexualitet.”Hon förändrade den irländska litteraturen genom att skriva in kvinnors upplevelser och inre liv i historien, och hon gjorde det med stil.” Andrew O’Hagan

Girl, Edna O'Brien's hotly anticipated novel, envisages the lives of the Boko Haram girls in a masterpiece of violence and tenderness. I was a girl once, but not anymore. So begins Girl, Edna O'Brien's harrowing portrayal of the young women abducted by Boko Haram. Set in the deep countryside of northeast Nigeria, this is a brutal story of incarceration, horror, and hunger; a hair-raising escape into the manifold terrors of the forest; and a descent into the labyrinthine bureaucracy and hostility awaiting a victim who returns home with a child blighted by enemy blood. From one of the century's greatest living authors, Girl is an unforgettable story of one victim's astonishing survival, and her unflinching faith in the redemption of the human heart.

Byron, more than any other poet, has come to personify the poet as rebel; imaginative and lawless, reaching beyond race, creed or frontier, his notorious flaws redeemed by a magnetism and ultimately a heroism that by ending in tragedy raised it and him from the particular to the universal.Everything about Lord George Gordon Byron was a paradox - insider and outsider, beautiful and deformed, serious and facetious, profligate but on occasion miserly, and possessed of a fierce intelligence trapped forever in a child's magic and malices. He was also a great poet, but as he reminded us, poetry is a distinct faculty and has little to do with the individual life of its creator.Edna O'Brien's exemplary biography focuses upon the diverse and colourful women in Byron's life.'O'Brien charts the many loves of the notorious 19th-century poet's reckless life in immediate and candid prose'Sunday Telegraph'Edna O'Brien has always had a gift for writing about affairs of the heart'Guardian'There is much to enjoy in this idiosyncratic and highly readable account of the poet whose writing enthralled and whose actions appalled in equal measure'Independent

One of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers turns her attention to one of the country's greatest novelists: James Joyce - in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the iconic classic ULYSSES.'As skilful, stylish and pacy as one would expect from so adept a novelist' Sunday Telegraph'A delight from start to finish . . . achieves the near impossibility of giving a thoroughly fresh view of Joyce' Sunday Times'Accessible and passionate, it is a book which should bring Joyce in all his glory and agony to a new and very wide audience' Irish Independent Edna O'Brien depicts James Joyce as a man hammered by Church, State and family, yet from such adversities he wrote works 'to bestir the hearts of men and angels'. The journey begins with Joyce the arrogant youth, his lofty courtship of Nora Barnacle, their hectic sexuality, children, wanderings, debt and profligacy, and Joyce's obsession with the city of Dublin, which he would re-render through his words. Nor does Edna O'Brien spare us the anger and isolation of Joyce's later years, when he felt that the world had turned its back on him, and she asks how could it be otherwise for a man who knew that conflict is the source of all creation.

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.

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

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.

Lose yourself in the legendary Edna O'Brien's simmering romantic tale of a woman rediscovering herself on the French Riviera ...'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'Surprising and beautiful and courageous .. A beacon.' Megan Nolan''Glittering energy.' Colm Tóibín 'Brilliant and brave.' Ann Patchett Separated from her husband and young son, Ellen leaves behind the loneliness of London for a new life of excitement and sexual freedom:a 'jaunt into iniquity' on the gorgeous French Riviera. However, she soon discovers that independence blurs into loneliness, especially when she receives some heart-breaking news ...Banned in several countries on first publication, August is a Wicked Month is a shimmering, sensual tale of a woman rediscovering herself - and it feels just as glorious, radical, and escapist as today.