Overview

Chasing after a family secret--a curious silence surrounding a long-lost ancestor--led the author on a pilgrimage through the landscape, history and literature of Ireland. His journey of self-discovery, flavoured by poems, stories, lore and legend, reflects his idea that literature may be the key that explains the past and reveals the present.Serving as part memoir and part journalistic chronicle, this work offers a unique look at how memory, literature and travel shape one's definition of oneself. Also serving as a love letter to Ireland with chapters on native born authors such as James Joyce, Frank O'Connor, Seamus Heaney and more, this book explores the deeper influences of what makes a man a writer, scholar, adventurer, husband and father.

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9781476691596

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Reviews

"Michael Pearson's The Road to Dungannon is a book like no other, a highly original and wonderfully deft weaving together of memory and history, place and time, knowledge and mystery, the personal and the political, darkness and light. Pearson's erudition is constantly illuminating but he also takes us with him on a journey into the unexplored byways of the Irish imagination. Anyone with a love for Ireland will relish this unique exploration of its past and present."" - Fintan O'Toole, author of We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland ""Michael Pearson is one of our nation's finest memoirists."" - Willie Morris, former editor of Harper's Magazine ""The Road to Dungannon is a reader's book - and a writer's book, a travelogue, memoir, critical literary survey of Irish writing, detective story, chatroom, and, thematically, a thoroughly modern, genealogical quest for identity. From the beginning, Michael Pearson, American writer and professor, seeks to do what Sean O'Casey did in his autobiographies, locate 'the things that made me.' Pearson is a vigilant and insightful tracker. In gathering the known and discovered influences on him, whether it is his mysterious grandfather, or modern and contemporary Irish writers, or the landscapes that reach out from the Bronx and Dublin, Pearson, in the end, hosts a celebratory party of Irishness deep in the American psyche and toasts the upsurge of spirit alive in that continuing bond."" - Philip Raisor, author of That Naked Country and editor of Tuned and Under Tension: The Recent Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass ""Michael Pearson is a wayfarer in search of connection, a keen observer ever attentive to the fit word, a born storyteller. To his large-hearted exploration of Irish letters past and present and to his search for his own heritage he brings a deep love of place and the literature that rises from it. Pearson's engaging voice and wide knowledge make The Road to Dungannon a book to be savored. A masterwork."" - Janet Peery, National Book Award Finalist for The River Beyond the World ""Michael Pearson's The Road to Dungannon reminds me of a tasty Gaelic turducken--it's Irish history, wrapped inside literary criticism, encased in a memoir, all finally sheathed in a missing-person's detective story, a kind of Gone Granddad. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like this, and it all goes down well, especially if chased by a Guinness and a shot of Teeling Irish whisky. Pearson's life-long love of Ireland and her writers is both obvious and lyrical, but the most unusual and valuable segments for me are his interview-rich surveys of Eire's up-and-coming wordsmiths. Every earnest trekker through the vast and shifting bogscapes of Ireland and Irish literature should consider it an essential travel guide."" - Joe Jackson, author of Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary ""Pearson's examination of Ireland and its literary children in The Road to Dungannon is elegant, engrossing, and even romantic. So much so, that it does the near impossible - makes me feel a twinge of pride for my own pale, pale Irish body."" - Steve Basilone, writer for the television series The Goldbergs ""The Road to Dungannon, Michael Pearson's lovely and multifaceted new memoir, whisks us away on a stirring quest of literary and hereditary discovery. With harmony and counterpoint the author conducts us on borderless journeys across place, time, mind, and spirit. A splendid book."" - John McManus, author of Fox Tooth Heart, Bitter Milk and Stop Breakin Down"

Author Information

Michael Patrick Pearson is a professor of literature and creative writing and the author of hundreds of essays and seven books. He lives in Williamsburg, Virginia.

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