Overview

A Guest at the Feast uncovers the places where politics and poetics meet, where life and fiction overlap, where one can be inside writing and also outside of it. From the melancholy and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an extraordinary essay on his own cancer diagnosis, Tóibín delineates the bleakness and strangeness of life and also its richness and its complexity. As he reveals the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists and the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as the intricacies of Marilynne Robinson's fiction. The imprint of the written word on the private self, as Tóibín himself remarks, is extraordinarily powerful. In this collection, that power is gloriously alive, illuminating history and literature, politics and power, family and the self.

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9780241970614

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Reviews

Erudite essays from one of the world's finest writers . . . Throughout, the poetry of Toibin's prose is as impressive as always. In [the] title piece, he writes that his mother was 'what most of us still write for: the ordinary reader, curious and intelligent and demanding, ready to be moved and changed.' Readers like her will savor every page of this book * Kirkus Reviews, starred * Toibin's voice is so powerful and distinct, his descriptions so precise . . . He is, perhaps, Ireland's greatest living male writer -- Laura Hackett * Sunday Times * I love everything Colm Toibin has written -- Nicola Sturgeon * New Statesman * A work of art, an emotional reckoning with a century of change * The Times on The Magician * Both epic and intimate . . . a moving portrait of three generations of sprawling, loving, fractious family life . . . a triumph * Financial Times on The Magician *

Erudite essays from one of the world's finest writers . . . Throughout, the poetry of Toibin's prose is as impressive as always. In [the] title piece, he writes that his mother was 'what most of us still write for: the ordinary reader, curious and intelligent and demanding, ready to be moved and changed.' Readers like her will savor every page of this book * Kirkus Reviews, starred * I love everything Colm Toibin has written -- Nicola Sturgeon * New Statesman * A work of art, an emotional reckoning with a century of change * The Times on The Magician * Both epic and intimate . . . a moving portrait of three generations of sprawling, loving, fractious family life . . . a triumph * Financial Times on The Magician *

I love everything Colm Toibin has written -- Nicola Sturgeon * New Statesman * A work of art, an emotional reckoning with a century of change * The Times on The Magician * Both epic and intimate . . . a moving portrait of three generations of sprawling, loving, fractious family life . . . a triumph * Financial Times on The Magician *

Author Information

Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy in 1955. He is the author of nine novels including The Master, Brooklyn, The Testament of Mary and Nora Webster and, most recently, House of Names. His work has been shortlisted for the Booker three times, won the Costa Novel Award and the Impac Award. He has also published two collections of stories and many works of non-fiction. He lives in Dublin.

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