The News from Dublin
Stories
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- $299.00
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- $299.00
Descripción editorial
From Colm Tóibín, "one of the world's best living literary writers," (The Boston Globe), a brilliant new collection of nine short stories—many never before published.
Colm Tóibín is a master of the short story, able to summon an extraordinary intensity of emotion in a brief tale. Described as “his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” (Los Angeles Times), he brings to these stories an astonishing clarity and compassion. In “The Journey to Galway,” a mother learns of the death of her son, a fighter pilot in WWII, and must travel from Dublin to share the news with his wife and their three now fatherless children. In “Sleep,” published in The New Yorker, two lovers part as one of them cannot acknowledge or face his grief and fear after the death of his brother. And in the title story, death, again, is a central character as Maurice Webster travels to Dublin from Enniscorthy to petition the health minister for access to a new drug being tested for tuberculosis. Maurice’s younger brother is dying of TB, and this is the only hope.
Set in Spain, Ireland, and America, these gorgeous stories explore longing, estrangement from family, grief, the pull of the past, and complex, transcendent love.
This collection includes:
- “The Journey to Galway” (originally published in Faber Anthology)
- “A Free Man” (new)
- “Sleep” (originally published in The New Yorker)
- “The News from Dublin” (originally published in Faber Anthology)
- “A Sum of Money” (new)
- “Barton Springs” (originally published in Marlene Dumas catalogue)
- “Summer of ’38” (originally published in The New Yorker)
- “Five Bridges” (originally published in The New Yorker)
- “The Catalan Girls” (new)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The protagonists of these finely crafted stories from Tóibín (Long Island) reflect on their lives and how they wound up where they are. For the aging Irish narrator and his younger Jewish American lover in "Sleep," it was "Germany, Ireland, the internet, gay rights, Judaism, Catholicism: they have all brought us here. To this room, to this bed in America." In "The Journey to Galway," an Irishwoman grapples with grief in the wake of WWII. The story begins with the unnamed woman noting an "unusual silence," and her tale comprises painful recollections of those she lost in the war. "A Free Man" follows Joe, a failed Maynooth pontifical student and former math teacher, from Ireland to Barcelona, where he hopes to start a new life following a lengthy prison term for molesting teen boys. "The Catalan Girls," a novella, centers on discreet and resolute Montse, who, as a 10-year-old, migrates with her mother and elder sisters Conxita and Núria ("the rude one") from Spain to Argentina only to return 50 years later. The quiet humanity of Tóibín's characters is as arresting as his knack for rendering relationships and place. This collection offers much to admire.
