Martyrs and Metaphors

An essay dealing with the relationship between literature and public life in Ireland.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/dlpp_all/1471/thumbnail.jp

PEN Hemingway Keynote Address

Irish novelist Colm Tóibín comments on Hemingway’s literary style, including his use of linguistic simplicity and omission in The Sun Also Rises. Compares his prose to Cézanne’s brushstrokes. References A Moveable Feast

The Heather Blazing

Eamon Redmond is a much admired and successful judge in Dublin, happily married to Carmel and father of two grown-up children. Every summer the family stays in a beautiful house on the coast at Ballyconnigor. It is here, one summer, that Eamon reflects on his life as a judge.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/dlpp_all/1463/thumbnail.jp

Mothers and Sons

Mothers and Sons is a deeply penetrating and beautifully written meditation on the dramas surrounding this most elemental of relationships. Each of the nine stories focuses on a moment in which an unspoken balance shifts; in which a mother or son do battle, or experience a sudden crisis, thus leaving their conception of who they are subtly or seriously altered.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/dlpp_all/1456/thumbnail.jp

House of Names: A Novel

A retelling of the story of Clytemnestra and her children in the legendary Greek city of Mycenae, describes how at the side of her lover she plots to murder her long-absent husband for his betrayals and infidelities. By the award-winning author of The Master.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/dlpp_all/1447/thumbnail.jp

The Trial of the Generals: Selected Journalism

Tóibín traveled widely in South America, settling for a time in Buenos Aires. There he attended and reported the trial of the generals responsible for the Falklands War and for the disappearance of untold numbers of Argentine citizens.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/dlpp_all/1469/thumbnail.jp

The Story of the Night

Set in Argentina in the 1980s, this novel follows the progress of a lonely young man trying to live openly with his homosexuality. His coming out mirrors the country\u27s emergence from the repressive rule of the Generals to tentative new hope under the early Menem government.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/dlpp_all/1460/thumbnail.jp

The Blackwater Lightship

With AIDS about to claim a well-loved young man, three generations of his family are reunited at his bedside in Ireland, in a novel that explores the nature of love and the complex interrelationships among family members.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/dlpp_all/1459/thumbnail.jp

New Ways to Kill Your Father

In 1969, two years after my father died, my mother, my sisters and I went to Wexford for the launch of a new history of the 1798 Rising called The Year of Liberty by Thomas Packenham. The Rising was important for us: from our housing estate we could see Vinegar Hill where "our side", the rebels, had made their last stand. From early childhood I knew certain things (I hesitate to say facts) about the Rising, how the English had muskets whereas we just had pikes, how the English poured boiling ..