Maxima Library

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 she has found a sort of happiness. As she falls in love, news comes from home that forces her back to Enniscorthy, not to the constrictions of her old life, but to new possibilities which conflict deeply with the life she has left behind in Brooklyn.

In the quiet character of Eilis Lacey, Colm Tóibín has created one of fiction's most memorable heroines and in Brooklyn, a luminous novel of devastating power. Tóibín demonstrates once again his astonishing range and that he is a true master of nuanced prose, emotional depth, and narrative virtuosity.

In a brilliant, nuanced and wholly original collection of essays, the novelist and critic Colm Tóibín explores the relationships of writers 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. Tóibín, 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

New Ways to Kill Your Mother.

Through the relationship between W. B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, and J. M. Synge and his mother, Tóibín examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyle’s writing on his parents, Tóibín perceives an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheever’s journals, Tóibín illuminates this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children. “Educating an intellectual woman,” Cheever remarked, “is like letting a rattlesnake into the house.” Acutely perceptive and imbued with rare tenderness and wit,

New Ways to Kill Your Mother

is a fascinating look at writers’ most influential bonds and a secret key to understanding and enjoying their work.

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.

An anthology of stories edited by Zadie Smith

A stellar host of writers explore the cornerstone of fiction writing: character

The Book of Other People is about character. Twenty-five or so outstanding writers have been asked by Zadie Smith to make up a fictional character. By any measure, creating character is at the heart of the fictional enterprise, and this book concentrates on writers who share a talent for making something recognizably human out of words (and, in the case of the graphic novelists, pictures). But the purpose of the book is variety: straight "realism"-if such a thing exists-is not the point. There are as many ways to create character as there are writers, and this anthology features a rich assortment of exceptional examples.

The writers featured in The Book of Other People include:

Aleksandar Hemon

Nick Hornby

Hari Kunzru

Toby Litt

David Mitchell

George Saunders

Colm Tóibín

Chris Ware, and more.

It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what Tóibín, 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 ranges seamlessly back and forth over James's life, from his memories of his prominent Brahmin family in the States-including the suicide of his father and the tragic early death of his troubled sister Alice-to his settling in England, in a cherished house of his own choosing in Rye. Along the way it offers hints, no more, of James's troubled sexual identity, including his fascination with a young English manservant, his (apparently platonic) night in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes and his curious obsession with a dashing Scandinavian sculptor of little talent but huge charisma. Another recurrent motif is James's absorption in the lives of spirited, highly intelligent but unhappy young women who die prematurely, which helped to inform some of his strongest fiction. The subtlety and empathy with which Tóibín inhabits James's psyche and captures the fleeting emotional nuances of his world are beyond praise, and even the echoes of the master's style ring true. Far more than a stunt, this is a riveting, if inevitably somewhat evasive, portrait of the creative life.

From The Washington Post

Say, with due reverence, "the Master" and any serious novel-reader instantly knows you are referring to Henry James (1843-1916). No one else in American or English literature comes close to matching James in his austere dedication to the writer's life. From the time of his first story – about adultery, published in 1865 – he elected to follow a path of essential loneliness. James mingled with society, dined with the great and the good on two continents, and listened and observed with guarded intensity. He made himself into the most sensitive possible register of social nuance, unspoken yearnings, hidden liaisons. But he remained apart from the fray, looking on the tumultuous, sorrowful human comedy with a pity tempered by compassionate understanding for our failings, sins and wounding misjudgments. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner might almost be James's artistic motto. All his own joys were, to the eyes of the world, muted, perhaps nonexistent. In one of his novels a character proclaims: "Live life. Live all you can. It's a mistake not to," and yet the Master himself seems never to have heeded this liberating affirmation and instead funneled all his animal vitality into the making of such masterpieces as The Portrait of a Lady, "The Turn of the Screw," "The Aspern Papers," The Ambassadors, and that greatest of all accounts of a missed life, "The Beast in the Jungle."

Colm Toibin alludes to each of these novels, novellas and stories (and several others) in this moving portrait of the artist in late middle age. Here the Irish novelist – hitherto best known for The Blackwater Lightship, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize – builds on the research and speculations of numerous scholars to construct a novel about James's interior life. This requires the utmost delicacy. In one sense, The Master might almost be viewed as an extreme example of what the French call the vie romancée, a highly embellished form of biography that goes beyond austere scholarship to adopt the exuberance and methods of fiction. Henri Troyat's Tolstoy, for instance, was faulted for being too exciting, too artful, too much like a Tolstoy novel. Similar charges have been leveled at the work of Peter Ackroyd on Dickens and Edmund Morris on Ronald Reagan. Readers tend to grow uneasy when they start to wonder where the facts stop and the artistic license begins.

But Toibin's impersonation of James works beautifully. The prose is appropriately grave and wistful, the sentences stately without being ponderous, the descriptions at once precise and evocative. The action, such as it is, moves smoothly from a time of temporary desolation to memories of horrible physical and mental suffering to angst-filled comedy (James dithering about how to deal with two drunken servants, James uncertain about how to dispose of the dresses of a dead woman). Toibin focuses on his subject in the years between 1895, when James's play "Guy Domville" was hooted on its opening night, and 1899, when his elder brother William came to visit at Lamb House, his beloved residence in Rye. But in between Toibin recreates scenes from James's childhood, offers a subtle interpretation of the apparent back injury – the so-called great "vastation" – that kept him out of the Civil War and helped make him an artist, and systematically introduces many of the people important in the writer's life. Most of these are women: his protective mother; his bitterly witty invalid sister Alice; the life-enhancing Minny Temple, adored by all the young men at Harvard, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and – most heartbreaking of all – the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, who quietly fell in love with James and then killed herself when it seemed he had abandoned her. All these figure as agents who help him determine his artistic destiny or as temptations to relinquish it for a more human existence. Toibin does suggest that James's fundamental nature was homosexual, if largely unexpressed: He is notably fine in evoking the erotic tension between the novelist and a servant named Hammond (presumably fictional) and the "bewitched confusion" James feels for the sculptor Hendrik Andersen, portrayed here as muscular, ambitious, rather stupid and blindly selfish. One never knows where love will strike.

Toibin's masterly prose excels particularly in an easy-going command of the style indirect libre, which conveys a character's mental processes in the third person: "He wished that he was halfway through a book, with no need to finish until the spring when serialization would begin. He wished he could work quietly in his study with the haunting gray morning light of the London winter filtered through the windows. He wished for solitude and for the comfort of knowing that his life depended not on the multitude but on remaining himself." James himself specialized in this technique – he preferred to avoid dialogue as much as possible – because it allowed for the gradual unspooling of a thought, the patient dissection of an emotion or a motive. In The Master, Toibin uses it not only to enter James's mind but also as a means of giving us his reflections on his vocation. Though a novel, The Master is almost a breviary of the religion of art. Consider these three different, but equally striking, passages:

"Once it became more solid, the emerging story and all its ramifications and possibilities lifted him out of the gloom of his failure. He grew determined that he would become more hardworking now. He took up his pen again – the pen of all his unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. It was now, he believed, that he would do the work of his life. He was ready to begin again, to return to the old high art of fiction with ambitions now too deep and pure for any utterance."

"And in one of those letters [to John Gray] she had written the words which… Henry thought now maybe meant more to him than any others, including all the words he had written himself, or anyone else had written. Her words haunted him so that saying them now, whispering them in the silence of the night brought her exacting presence close to him. The words constituted one sentence. Minny had written: 'You must tell me something that you are sure is true.' That, he thought, was what she wanted when she was alive and happy, as much as when she was dying… The words came to him in her sweet voice, and as he sat on his terrace in the darkness he wondered how he would have answered her if she had written the sentence to him."

"As an artist, he recognized, Andersen might know, or at least fathom the possibility, that each book he had written, each scene described or character created, had become an aspect of him, had entered into his driven spirit and lay there much as the years themselves had done. His relationship with Constance would be hard to explain; Andersen was perhaps too young to know how memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain." There are many other wise, if often rather doleful, observations in The Master, for the book seeks, in part, to show how a novelist transmutes his own experiences into something rich and strange and true: So, Minny Temple and Alice James are reimagined, in part, as Isabel Archer or Daisy Miller. Sometimes one feels a little too strongly that Toibin is plumping down the "real" events and figures behind the better known fictive ones. Sometimes it seems that he veers close to the besetting fault of so much historical fiction, that of having the hero mention or meet virtually every famous figure of the time. For instance, in the final pages of the book, in a single conversation, he presents William James outlining the lectures that will become The Varieties of Religious Experience, Henry James describing his current projects – clearly "The Beast in the Jungle" and The Ambassadors – and their visitor Edmund Gosse announcing that he's been mulling over a book about his childhood, one that will obviously become the only thing people still read by him, the wonderful Father and Son. Excessive? Perhaps. But such great works are the final justification for lives spent thinking and writing about the nature of human experience.

The Master is hardly a typical summer book, but it is convincing and enthralling. Those of an investigative bent might read it with an occasional glance through some of the biographical scholarship that Toibin cites in his acknowledgments. Others, new to James, might go on to look at the Master's actual work, starting perhaps with John Auchard's recently revised Portable Henry James (Penguin), an exceptional work of selection and distillation. But you don't need to do either of these. Colm Toibin has written a superb novel about a great artist, and done it in just the right way. It is worth reading just for itself – and for insights like this one: At Harvard, we are told, the young Henry James suddenly understood "the idea of style itself, of thinking as a kind of style, and the writing of essays not as a conclusive call to duty or an earnest effort at self-location, but as play, as the wielding of tone." That is something I am sure is true.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

For Colm Tóibín and Carmen Callil there is no difference between literary and commercial writing — there is only the good novel: engrossing, inspirational, compelling. In their selection of the best 200 novels written since 1950, the editors make a case for the best and the best-loved works and argue why each should be considered a modern classic. Enlightening, often unexpected, and always engaging this tour through the world of fiction is full of surprises, forgotten masterpieces and a valuable guide to what to read next. The complete list of included authors is as follows:

Agatha Christie, Henry Green, Frank Hardy, Georgette Heyer, Sam Hanna Bell, Daphne du Maurier, Patrick Hamilton, Carson McCullers, Anthony Powell, J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Malamud, R. K. Narayan, Flannery O’Connor, John Steinbeck, Evelyn Waugh, Mulk Raj Anand, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, L. P. Hartley, Rosamund Lehmann, Amos Tutuola, Kingsley Amis, William Golding, Elizabeth Jenkins, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, Patricia Highsmith, Vladimir Nabokov, Janet Frame, Jack Kerouac, Elizabeth Taylor, Rebecca West, Chinua Achebe, Isak Dineson, John O’Hara, Alan Sillitoe, William Burroughs, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Grace Paley, Harper Lee, Olivia Manning, John Updike, P. G. Wodehouse, Joseph Heller, V. S. Naipaul, Muriel Spark, Patrick White, Maureen Duffy, William Faulkner, Doris Lessing, Edna O’Brien, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, John Le Carré, Mary McCarthy, Sylvia Plath, Wilson Harris, Hubert Selby Jr., Frank Sargeson, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Laurence, Jean Rhys, Paul Scott, John Fowles, Christina Stead, William Styron, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, William H. Gass, Iris Murdoch, B. S. Johnson, Mary Lavin, Mario Puzo, Robertson Davies, Patrick O’Brian, Frederick Forsyth, Mordecai Richler, Francis Stewart, Eudora Welty, J. G. Farrell, Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, David Lodge, Alistair MacLeod, Anne Rice, David Storey, Beryl Bainbridge, John Cheever, Joan Didion, Margaret Drabble, Jessica Anderson, Maurice Gee, Graham Greene, Roy A. K. Heath, Ian McEwan, Thomas Flanagan, Mavis Gallant, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Hardwick, Norman Mailer, V. S Naipaul, Anthony Burgess, Shirley Hazzard, Russell Hoban, Bernard MacLaverty, Marilynne Robinson, John Kennedy Toole, Fay Weldon, William Maxwell, Alasdair Gray, Thomas Harris, Salman Rushdie, Robert Stone, Bruce Chatwin, Thomas Keneally, Alice Walker, Edmund White, Martin Amis, J. G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Anita Desai, Balraj Khanna, Jayne Anne Phillips, Helen Garner, Anita Brookner, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Brian Moore, Jeanette Winterson, Richard Ford, Kazuo Ishiguro, Peter Taylor, Barbera Vine, Kaye Gibbons, Carl Hiaasen, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Micheal Ondaatje, Francis Wyndham, Peter Carey, Raymond Carver, Pete Dexter, Elizabeth Jolley, Frank Moorhouse, Bapsi Sidhwa, Anne Tyler, Tom Wolfe, John Banville, Oscar Hijuelos, Amy Tan, A. S.Byatt, J. M. Coetzee, Micheal Cunningham, Roddy Doyle, Elmore Leonard, John McGahern, David Malouf, Alice Munro, Pat Barker, Angela Carter, Amit Chaudhuri, Bret Easton Ellis, Timothy Mo, Norman Rush, Iain Sinclair, Jane Smiley, William Trevor, Tim Winton, Eugene McCabe, Patrick McCabe, Donna Tartt, Jeffrey Eugenides, Gita Mehta, E. Annie Proulx, Will Self, Irvine Welsh, Sebastian Faulks, Vikram Seth, Jonathan Coe, Louis de Bernières, Alan Hollinghurst, P. D. James, James Kelman, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Penelope Fitzgerald, Rohinton Mistry, Margaret Atwood, Patrick McGrath, Graham Swift, Tobias Wolff, Jim Crace, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Charles Frazier, V. S Pritchett.

Colm Tóibín is one of the most acclaimed novelists writing today. Both The Master and Brooklyn were shortlisted for the Booker prize and the later won the Costa Prize. He lives in Dublin. Carmen Callil founded the publishers, Virago, and later became Managing Director of Chatto and Windus. She is the author of Bad Faith: A Story of Family and Fatherland (2006), which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

The first novel by one of the greatest writers of Latin American literature is a semiautobiographical story reflecting the energy and chaos of early 20th-century Buenos Aires.

Feeling the alienation of youth, Silvio Astier's gang tours neighborhoods, inflicting waves of petty crime, stealing from homes and shops until the police are forced to intervene. Drifting then from one career and subsequent crime to another, Silvio's main difficulty is his own intelligence, with which he grapples. Writing in the language of the streets and basing his writings in part on his own experience, with his characters wandering in a modern world, Arlt creates a book that combines realism, humor, and anger with detective story. Although astronomically famous in South America, Roberto Arlt's name is still relatively unknown in Anglophone circles, but the rising wave of appreciation of South American literature is bringing him to the fore.