Lady gregory's capacity to occupy mutually contradictory positions was essential to her heroic work as a founder and director of the Abbey Theatre – nurturing Synge and O'Casey, battling rioters and censors – and to her central role in the career of W. Yeats; she was referring to the riots at the Abbey Theatre over The Playboy of the Western World, and she knew which side she was on.

Toíbín's account of yeats's attemts – by turns glorious and graceless – to memorize Lady Gregory's son Robert when he was killed in the First World War, and of Lady Gregory's pain at her loss and at the poet's appropriation of it, is a moving tour de force of literary history. She was yeats's artistic collaborator writing most of Cathleen Ní Houlihan, his helpmeet, for example, and his diplomatic wing.

Yeats. Early in her writing life, her politics were staunchly unionist – yet she campaigned for the freedom of Egypt from colonial rule. It is the battle between those who use a toothbrush and those who don't. So wrote Augusta Gregory to W. B. Toíbín also reveals a side of Lady Gregory that is at odds with the received image of a chilly dowager.

B.

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce

As charming as they are illuminating, these stories of fathers and sons provide a singular look at an extraordinary confluence of genius” Bookpage. Oscar wilde, writing about his relationship with his father stated: “Whenever there is hatred between two people there is bond or brotherhood of some kind…you loathed each other not because you were so different but because you were so alike.

W. B. Yeats wrote of his father, a painter: “It is this infirmity of will which has prevented him from finishing his pictures. Tóibín recounts the resistance to English cultural domination, the birth of modern Irish cultural identity, and the extraordinary contributions of these complex and masterful authors.

The qualities i think necessary to success in art or life seemed to him egotism. James’s father was perhaps the most quintessentially Irish, a singer, garrulous, widely loved, and drinker with a volatile temper, who drove his son from Ireland. From the multiple award-winning author of the master and brooklyn, and literature through the lives of the fathers of three of ireland’s greatest writers—Oscar Wilde's father, and resonant, and James Joyce's father—“Thrilling, wise, history, this book aptly unites Tóibín’s novelistic gifts for psychology and emotional nuance with his talents as a reader and critic, William Butler Yeats's father, an illuminating look at Irish culture, in incomparably elegant prose” The New York Times Book Review.

Colm tóibín begins his incisive, bad, revelatory Mad, Dangerous to Know with a walk through the Dublin streets where he went to university and where three Irish literary giants came of age. An entertaining and revelatory book about the vexed relationships between these three pairs of difficult fathers and their difficult sons” The Wall Street Journal, Bad, Mad, Dangerous to Know illustrates the surprising ways these fathers surface in the work of their sons.

The South: A Novel

In 1950, katherine proctor leaves Ireland for Barcelona, determined to escape her family and become a painter. But katherine cannot escape her past, forces her to reexamine all her relationships: to her lover, as Michael Graves, her art, a fellow Irish émigré in Spain, and the homeland she only thought she knew.

The south is a novel of classic themes—of art and exile, and of the seemingly irreconcilable yearnings for love and freedom—to which Colm Tóibín brings a new, passionate sensitivity. There she meets miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and begins to build a life with him.

We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It: A Memoir of My Irish Boyhood

In the tradition of frank mccourt’s angela’s ashes and alice taylor’s to school Through the Fields, Tom Phelan’s We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It is a heartfelt and masterfully written memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1940s. Tom phelan, muddy, spent his formative years working with his wise and demanding father as he sought to wrest a livelihood from a farm that was often wet, who was born and raised in County Laois in the Irish midlands, and back-breaking.

It was a time before rural electrification, the telephone, and indoor plumbing; a time when the main modes of travel were bicycle and animal cart; a time when small farmers struggled to survive and turkey eggs were hatched in the kitchen cupboard; a time when the Church exerted enormous control over Ireland.

. We were rich and we didn't know it recounts Tom’s upbringing in an isolated, rural community from the day he was delivered by the local midwife. With tears and laughter, it speaks to the strength of the human spirit in the face of life's adversities.

The Empty Family: Stories

In “two women, takes a job in her homeland, ” an eminent Irish set designer, aloof and prickly, and is forced to confront devastating emotions she has long repressed. The new spain” is the story of an intransigent woman who returns home after a decade in exile and shatters the fragile peace her family has forged in the post-Franco world.

Tóibín is a master at portraying mute emotion, intense intimacies that remain unacknowledged or unspoken. And in the breathtaking long story “the street, ” Tóibín imagines a startling relationship between two Pakistani workers in Barcelona—a taboo affair in a community ruled by obedience and silence.

As the new york review of books has said, Tóibín “understands the tenuousness of love and comfort—and, after everything, its necessity. ”. Colm tóibín’s exquisitely written new stories, are about people linked by love, set in present-day Ireland, 1970s Spain and nineteenthcentury England, loneliness and desire.

Tóibín’s characters are often difficult and combative, compelled to disguise their vulnerability and longings. Yet he unmasks them, and in doing so offers us a set of extraordinarily moving stories that remind us of the fragility and individuality of human life. In this stunning collection, he cements his status as “his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” Los Angeles Times.

Silence” is a brilliant historical set piece about Lady Gregory, widowed and abandoned by her lover, who tells the writer Henry James a confessional story at a dinner party.

The Master: A Novel

Colm tóibín’s beautiful, subtle illumination of henry James’s inner life” The New York Times captures the loneliness and hope of a master of psychological subtlety whose forays into intimacy inevitably fail those he tried to love. Beautiful and profoundly moving, venice, the master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America’s first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late nineteenth century to live in Paris, Rome, and London among privileged artists and writers.

With stunningly resonant prose, moving, “the Master is unquestionably the work of a first-rate novelist: artful, and very beautiful” The New York Times Book Review. The emotional intensity of this portrait is riveting.

The Heather Blazing: A Novel

Colm tóibín’s second “lovely, understated” novel that “proceeds with stately grace” The Washington Post Book World about an uncompromising judge whose principles, when brought home to his own family, are tragic. Eamon redmond is a judge in ireland’s high court, a completely legal creature who is just beginning to discover how painfully unconnected he is from other human beings.

With effortless fluency, ” his wife, his first “girl, colm tóibín reconstructs the history of Eamon’s relationships—with his father, and the children who barely know him—and he writes about Eamon’s affection for the Irish coast with such painterly skill that the land itself becomes a character.

. The result is a novel of stunning power, “seductive and absorbing” USA Today.

The Blackwater Lightship: A Novel

But most of all, it is a novel about the incomparable capacity of stories to heal the deepest wounds. Under the crumbling roof of Dora's old house, Declan's two friends join the women as each waits for the end. Helen, to tend to helen's beloved brother, after a decade of estrangement, Declan, and her grandmother Dora have come together, her mother Lily, who is dying of AIDS.

In spare, luminous prose, colm Tóibín explores the nature of love and the complex emotions inside a family at war with itself. The six of them, from different generations and with different beliefs, are forced to plumb the shoals of their own histories and to come to terms with each other. It is ireland in the early 1990s.

His fourth novel is about morals and manners, and the clashes of culture and personality. The blackwater lightship is a beautifully written, deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn a tragic, untimely death.

A Month in Siena

Named one of the best books of the year by the washington post and evening standard after finishing his powerful memoir The Return, seeking solace and pleasure, Hisham Matar, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.

This is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape—current relationships, grief, intimacy, long-lasting love, and solitude—and shed further light on the present world around us. Praise for a month in siena“as exquisitely structured as The Return, driven by desire, loss, yearning, illuminated by the kindness of strangers.

A month in Siena is a triumph. Peter Carey. Artists he had admired throughout his life, evoke earlier engagements he’d had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments. Including beautiful full-color reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city.

That month would be an extraordinary period in the writer’s life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with a city and its inhabitants. From the pulitzer prize–winning author of The Return comes a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life.

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Mothers and Sons: Stories

These are haunting, profoundly moving stories by a writer who is himself a master. A man buries his mother and converts his grief to desire in one night. Many are trapped in lives they would not choose again, if they ever chose at all. Winner of numerous awards for his fifth novel, the master -- including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award -- Tóibín brings to this stunning first collection an acute understanding of human frailty and longing.

And in "a long winter, " colm tóibín's finest piece of cction to date, a young man searches for his mother in the snow-covered mountains where she has sought escape from the husband who controls and confines her. A famous singer captivates an audience, yet cannot beguile her own estranged son. With exquisite grace and eloquence, by unspoken emotions, Tóibín writes of men and women bound by convention, by the stronghold of the past.

Each of the nine stories in this beautifully written, intensely intimate collection centers on a transformative moment that alters the delicate balance of power between mother and son, or changes the way they perceive one another.