Colm Tóibín

A "retelling of the Greek myth of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and their children -- a spectacularly audacious, violent and riveting story of family and vengeance"--Dust jacket. Since her husband King Agamemnon left ancient Mycenae to sail with his army for Troy, Clytemnestra rules along with her lover Aegisthus. Together they plot the bloody murder of Agamemnon on the day of his return. Clytemnestra reveals how her husband deceived her eldest daughter...

A provocative imagining of the later years of the mother of Jesus finds her living a solitary existence in Ephesus years after her son's crucifixion and struggling with guilt, anger, and feelings that her son is not the son of God and that His sacrifice was not for a worthy cause.

"Colm Tóibín begins his incisive, revelatory Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know with a walk through the Dublin streets where he went to university -- a wide-eyed boy from the country -- and where three Irish literary giants also came of age: Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce. Elegant, profound, and riveting, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers,...

In his essay on Tennessee Williams, the author reveals an artist profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, he examines a world of family relations, and in Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents illuminates an Ireland reinvented. From John Cheever's journals he makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his intimates. Educating an intellectual woman, Cheever remarked, is like letting...

"In 1950 Katherine Proctor leaves Ireland for Barcelona, determined to escape her family and become a painter. There she meets Miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and begins to build a life with him. But Katherine cannot escape her past, as Michael Graves, a fellow Irish émigré in Spain, forces her to reexamine all her relationships: to her lover, her art, and the homeland she only thought she knew"--Page 4 of cover.

Here is an American mind contemplating contemporary society and culture with wit, imagination, and a brave intelligence. Tillman upends expectations, shifts tone, introduces characters, breaches limits of genre and category, reconfiguring the world with the turn of a sentence. Like other unique thinkers, Tillman sees the world differently she is not a malcontent, but she is discontented. Her responses to art and literature, to social and political...