Colm Tóibín

Award-winning, bestselling author Colm Tóibín returns to the Thalia Book Club for a discussion on his latest novel with Elissa Schappell (Blueprints for Building Better Girls). With a performance from the novel by Amy Ryan (Birdman).

A "study of Irish culture, history, and literature told through the lives and work of three men--William Wilde, John Butler Yeats, and John Stanislaus Joyce--and the complicated, influential relationships they had with their complicated sons."--

"From one of the most engaging and brilliant writers of our time comes a collection of essays about growing up in Ireland during radical change; about cancer, priests, popes, homosexuality, and literature"--

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn to sponsor Eilis in America--to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"--she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

"The Magician opens at the turn of the twentieth century in a provincial German city where the young boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative, conventional father and a Brazilian mother, exotic and unpredictable, who will never fit in. He hides both his artistic aspirations and his homosexual desires from this father, and his sexuality from everyone. He longs for the charismatic, beautiful, rich, cultured young Jewish man, but marries his twin...

An Irish immigrant lands in 1950s Brooklyn, where she quickly falls into a romance with a local. When her past catches up with her, however, she must choose between two countries and the lives that exist within.

"Silence" is a brilliant historical set piece about Lady Gregory, widowed and abandoned by her lover, who tells the writer Henry James a confessional story at a dinner party. In "Two Women," an eminent Irish set designer, aloof and prickly, takes a job in her homeland, and is forced to confront devastating emotions she has long repressed. "The New Spain" is the story of an intransigent woman who returns home after a decade in exile and shatters the...

In a brilliant, nuanced, and wholly original collection of essays, the bestselling and award-winning author of Brooklyn and The Empty Family offers a fascinating exploration of famous writers' relationships to their families and their work. From Jane Austen's aunts to Tennessee Williams's mentally ill sister, the impact of intimate family dynamics can be seen in many of literature's greatest works. In New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Colm Tóibín-celebrated...

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).