Colm Toibin is the author of ten novels, including The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022-2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Toibin lives in Dublin and New York.
A noted Irish novelist and critic discovers the comforts of gay literature. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Departing from recent novels The Blackwater Lightship and The Story of the Night and nonfiction such as his Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border, Dublin-based writer Toibin offers nine case studies in as many chapters of how "gay life" has informed our readings of writers, artists and filmmakers like Oscar Wilde, Francis Bacon, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, Pedro Almodovar and Mark Doty. The chapter "Goodbye to Catholic Ireland" wonders if Cathal " Searchaigh is the first gay poet in the Irish language, and speaks against the Church's continued hold on the Irish life of the mind. (Oct. 29) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
John Banville Irish Times Is it permissible even to speak, as so many do nowadays, of a "gay community"? Toibin treats [this] and many other questions with confidence and authority, both of which attributes are only strengthened by the moderation of his tone and the depth of his compassion. He writes with rare tenderness of figures as disparate as Elizabeth Bishop and Francis Bacon, Thomas Mann and Roger Casement, Thom Gunn and Pedro Almodovar.
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