The Empty Family, by Colm Tóibín For #ShortStoryMonth, I’m recapping some favorite story collections—and chief among the story writers I admire is Colm Tóibín. And his 2011 collection, The Empty Family is one I always keep close by, dipping into the pages to take in the voices of its starkly […]
Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín At the heart of Colm Tóibín‘s new novel is the story of a woman, a story, he says, he’d been circling around for years. It’s there, in his novels and stories (eight novels and a collection) as a metaphor, an idea at the perimeter. That novel, […]
The Empty Family, by Colm Tóibín Colm Tóibín’s story collection, The Empty Family (released January 4, 2011) is one I always keep close by, dipping into the pages to take in the voices of its starkly vivid narrators. The prose is emotionally precise in the tradition of William Trevor and […]
The Empty Family, by Colm Tóibín The Empty Family, Colm Tóibín’s most recent collection of stories (released in 2011), is a book I always keep close by, dipping into the pages that on each reading remain fresh and affecting. Tóibín’s stories unfold with searing emotional accuracy. For me, the narration […]
Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin Toibin’s 2009 novel, which won that year’s Costa Award, is a lovely and haunting story set in 1950s Dublin and New York. It tells of Eilis Lacey, born and raised in Enniscorthy, in Ireland’s County Wexford, and her immigration to the United States as a young […]
Nora Webster, by Colm Tóibín At the heart of Colm Tóibín‘s new novel is the story of a woman, a story, he says, he’d been circling around for years. It’s there, in his novels and stories (eight novels and a collection) as a metaphor, an idea at the perimeter. That novel, […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.