Colm Tóibín

In Ireland in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one of many who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving behind her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, the pain of parting is buried beneath the rhythms of...

From the thrilling imagination of bestselling, award-winning Colm T?ib?n comes a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra?spectacularly audacious, violent, vengeful, lustful, and instantly compelling?and her children ... In House of Names, Colm T?ib?n brings a modern sensibility and language to an ancient classic, and gives this extraordinary character new life, so that we not only believe Clytemnestra?s thirst for revenge, but applaud it. He brilliantly...

A provocative imagining of the later years of the mother of Jesus finds her living a solitary existence in Ephesus years after her son's crucifixion and struggling with guilt, and anger.

Tells the story of Henry James, a famous novelist born into one of America's intellectual first families two decades before the Civil War. James left his country to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers. In stunningly resonant prose, Tóibín captures the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man who never married, never resolved his sexual identity, and whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed...

T̤oivin returns to his native shores from Brooklyn for the bulk of these nine pristine stories, all--save one--contemporary tales of lives haunted by loss, whether it's the legacy of a sexually abusive priest in an already complicated love triangle in "The Pearl Fishers," the long-absent gay son who returns to Dublin from New York to attend to his mother's last moments in "One Minus One," or the aching void that greets an academic's return to a family...

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.

In his essay on Tennessee Williams, the author reveals an artist profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, he examines a world of family relations, and in Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents illuminates an Ireland reinvented. From John Cheever's journals he makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his intimates. Educating an intellectual woman, Cheever remarked, is like letting...

"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"--

"Here is an American mind contemplating contemporary society and culture with wit, imagination, and a brave intelligence. Tillman upends expectations, shifts tone, introduces characters, breaches limits of genre and category, reconfiguring the world with the turn of a sentence. Like other unique thinkers, Tillman sees the world differently--she is not a malcontent, but she is discontented. Her responses to art and literature, to social and political...

The authors reveal their picks for the best American and English novels published since 1950, including works by such writers as Jane Smiley, Patrick White, Anne Tyler, Anthony Powell, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo.