It is Enniscorthy in the southeast of Ireland in the early 1950s. Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation.Slowly, however, the pain of parting is buried beneath the rhythms of her new life – until she begins to realize that ...
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. T?ib?n, celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays, and currently the Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, traces and interprets those intriguing, eccentric, often twisted family ties in Through the relationship between W. B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, and J. M. Synge and his mother, T?ib?n examines a world of relations, richly comic or ...
Helen's brother is dying, and with two of his friends she waits for the end in her grandmother's crumbling old house. Her mother and grandmother, after years of strife have come to an uneasy peace. The six of them, from different generations and beliefs, are forced to come to terms with each other.
It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what T?ib?n, highly talented Irish author of The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, has ventured here, with a remarkable degree of success. The book is a fictionalized study, based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclipsed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde. Thereafter the book ...
