The stunning new short novel from the award-winning and bestselling author of Brooklyn and Long Island.Miquel and his father are living an uneasy life together in his mother's family house in the Pyrenees. Miquel’s mother left the year before, in a rage, and died alone in a snowstorm. Miquel’s brother has too abandoned what’s left of the family.But the construction of a new bridge will soon end the valley's remoteness. No longer will these...

A compelling portrait of a beloved poet from one of today's most acclaimed novelistsIn 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...

“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, 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, Ven...

From the New York Times best-selling author of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín’s first collection of poetry explores sexuality, religion, and belonging through a modern lensFans of Colm Tóibín’s novels, including The Magician, The Master, and Nora Webster, will relish the opportunity to re-encounter Tóibín in verse. Vinegar Hill explores the liminal space between private experiences and public events as Tóibín examines a ...

2014 Audie Award Finalist for Audiobook of the Year,Literary Fiction, and Solo Narration—Female!Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, Colm Tóibín's provocative, haunting, and indelible portrait of Mary presents her as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity.In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her so...

'It is the battle between those who use a toothbrush and those who don't.' So wrote Augusta Gregory to W.B. 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. In this remarkable biographical essay, Colm Toibin examines the contradictions that defined the position of this essential figure in Irish cultural history. The wife of a landlord and MP who had been personally responsible for introducing measures that...

Colm Tóibín’s personal account of encountering James Baldwin’s work, published in Baldwin’s centenary year.Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. He had completed his first year at an Irish university and was struggling to free himself from a religious upbringing. He had even considered entering a seminary and was searching for literature that would offer illumination and insight. Inspired by the novel Go Tell...

The acclaimed British novelist and short story master who "recruits admires with each book" (Hilary Mantel) discusses her latest novel with fellow author Colm Tóibín (House of Names). Ingeniously moving between past and present, Late in the Day exposes how infinite alternate configurations lie beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives. With a reading by Rita Wolf (An Ordinary Muslim).

The Spring 2011 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Colm Tóibín. This first issue of Ploughshares’ 40th anniversary volume year features selections of poetry and prose made by award-winning writer Colm Tóibín, including new work from poets such as Eavan Boland, Nick Laird, Paul Muldoon, CK Williams, and Bruce Bond, and prose writers Tessa Hadley, Thomas Mallon, Rabih Alameddine, Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, and Hester Kaplan, among others. The volume also includes a profile by Toibin, an i...

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by LitHub and The Millions!From one of the most engaging and brilliant writers of our time comes a “not to be missed” (LitHub) collection of eleven essays about growing up in Ireland during radical change; about cancer, priests, popes, homosexuality, and literature.“IT ALL STARTED WITH MY BALLS.” So begins Colm Tóibín’s fabulously compelling essay, laced with humor, a...

Introduction by Colm TóibínOne of the final masterpieces from one of the world’s greatest authors, Henry James’s The Ambassadors is now available for the first time in a Modern Library edition, with a new Introduction by acclaimed novelist Colm Tóibín. A keenly observed tale of a man’s awakening to life, this dark comic novel follows Lewis Lambert Strether, a middle-aged widower, on a mission to Europe to convince his fiancée’s wayward son to forsake the p...

With an illuminating new introduction by Colm Tóibín, here is Thom Gunn’s extraordinary memorial to love, life, and death in the time of the AIDS crisis.The Man with Night Sweats is a haunting depiction of a world ravaged by illness that is part elegy for those who have been lost and part evocation of the changes that await those who survive.Thom Gunn’s collection is one of the few works of literature that have fully met both the aesthetic and the ...