Colm Tóibín

Presents a fictionalized study based upon the many biographical materials and family accounts of nineteenth-century novelist Henry James and examines his life of loneliness, despair, and failed relationships.

"Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world to which she was born. And now she fears she may be drawn back into it. Wounded, strong-willed, clinging to secrecy in a tiny community where everyone knows your business, Nora is drowning in her own sorrow and blind to the suffering of her young sons, who have lost their father. Yet she has moments...

A sequence of nine short works explores the intricate bonds between mothers and sons as reflected at pivotal junctures that shift the way each sees and understands the other.

It is Ireland in the late twentieth century. Eamon Redmond is a judge in the Irish High Court who is beginning to discover how painfully unconnected he is from other human beings.

"Colm Tóibín begins his incisive, revelatory Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know with a walk through the Dublin streets where he went to university--a wide-eyed boy from the country--and where three Irish literary giants also came of age: Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce. Elegant, profound, and riveting, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but...

"A wide variety of poems, ranging in setting and topic, Vinegar Hill deals with gay experience and with the experience of loss, with memory and a fading past as well as the present moment"--

"In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences--the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling...

"From one of the most engaging and brilliant writers of our time comes a collection of essays about growing up in Ireland during radical change; about cancer, priests, popes, homosexuality, and literature"--