This biography chronicles how success changes you: the ways in which the people fall away, as you become consumed with your new life(style) which, if not managed carefully, can overwhelm and consume Read More
Let Me Explain You is a story about relationships—between sisters, between countrymen, between people and place, between food and memory, between languages, between time and space Read More
The collection conveys how the author, alongside his fellow New York City denizens, both does and doesn’t connect with strangers in public or in bedrooms Read More
July’s talent exists in her ability to create such complex, bizarre relationships while always raising the stakes, but her carefully erected world does require a willful suspension of disbelief. Read More
Colm Tóibín’s latest novel, Nora Webster, has landed on multiple best of the year lists. It’s a fitting tribute for a book that is largely about taking stock. Read More
"I'm not buying into 'we were all heroes' and 'we changed the world' and all that stuff. That's just too rah-rah and simplistic; we deserve a more nuanced understanding of those times and how it affected us, what motivated us then and what the outcomes are today." Read More
In Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search For Identity (Scribner), psychologist Andrew Solomon poses a fundamental question: How do you nurture a child who is nothing like you? Read More
Catholic groups and the Vatican have nothing to worry about. Tóibín, an Irishman raised Catholic, not only has the respect for Mary that one might have for their own mother, but also for who she is in terms of religion, and, arguably history – the ultimate, most famous mother of all. Read More
“A happy childhood,” Colm Tóibín tells us, “may make good citizens, but it is not a help for those of us facing a blank page.” Withholding or meddlesome fathers, control-freak mothers, siblings whose sexual hijinks would make polite society shudder—these are the stimuli that fill blank pages with art. And Tóibín in New Ways to Kill Your Mother (Scribner) mines this potent field of twisted and troublesome literary families for all it’s worth.
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It should come as no surprise that Colm Tóibín admires Henry James; Tóibín, after all, wrote a novelization of James’...
