Memoir

Memoir PDF Author: John McGahern
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571250165
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
John McGahern's astounding memoir of his childhood: 'A glowing masterpiece.' Hilary Mantel 'The one Irish writer everyone should read.' Colm Tóibín As wise and compelling a book as any of his elegiac and graceful novels.' David Mitchell 'I have admired, even loved, McGahern's work since his first novel ... Memoir strips the skin off his fiction as he faces a desperate early life with great force and tenderness.' Melvyn Bragg This is the story of John McGahern's childhood, his mother's death, his father's anger and violence, and how, through his discovery of books, his dream of becoming a writer began. At the heart of Memoir is a son's unembarrassed tribute to his mother. His memory of walks with her through the narrow lanes to the country schools where she taught and his happiness as she named for him the wild flowers on the bank remained conscious and unconscious presences for the rest of his life. A classic family story, told with exceptional restraint and tenderness, Memoir cannot fail to move all those who read it. 'Magnificent ... Stand[s] supreme in the Irish canon.' Irish Times 'Profoundly beautiful.' Daily Telegraph 'Extraordinary, spellbinding, spiritual.' Irish Independent ' 'In a tremendously distinguished career, he has never written more movingly, or with a sharper eye.' Andrew Motion, Guardian

Memoir

Memoir PDF Author: John McGahern
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571250165
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 373

Get Book Here

Book Description
John McGahern's astounding memoir of his childhood: 'A glowing masterpiece.' Hilary Mantel 'The one Irish writer everyone should read.' Colm Tóibín As wise and compelling a book as any of his elegiac and graceful novels.' David Mitchell 'I have admired, even loved, McGahern's work since his first novel ... Memoir strips the skin off his fiction as he faces a desperate early life with great force and tenderness.' Melvyn Bragg This is the story of John McGahern's childhood, his mother's death, his father's anger and violence, and how, through his discovery of books, his dream of becoming a writer began. At the heart of Memoir is a son's unembarrassed tribute to his mother. His memory of walks with her through the narrow lanes to the country schools where she taught and his happiness as she named for him the wild flowers on the bank remained conscious and unconscious presences for the rest of his life. A classic family story, told with exceptional restraint and tenderness, Memoir cannot fail to move all those who read it. 'Magnificent ... Stand[s] supreme in the Irish canon.' Irish Times 'Profoundly beautiful.' Daily Telegraph 'Extraordinary, spellbinding, spiritual.' Irish Independent ' 'In a tremendously distinguished career, he has never written more movingly, or with a sharper eye.' Andrew Motion, Guardian

That They May Face the Rising Sun

That They May Face the Rising Sun PDF Author: John McGahern
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571212217
Category : Country life
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Considered by many to be the finest Irish writer now working in prose, John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun vividly brings to life a whole world and its people with insight and humour and deep sympathy. Joe and Kate Ruttledge have come to Ireland from London in search of a different life. In passages of beauty and truth, the drama of a year in their lives and those of the memorable characters that move about them unfolds through the action, the rituals of work, religious observances and play. By the novel's close we feel that we have been introduced, with deceptive simplicity, to a complete representation of existence - an enclosed world has been transformed into an Everywhere. 'It is a simple and ordinary story, calmly, wryly crafted with subtle detail - and therein lies McGahern's genius. As sharply, brilliantly observed as any he has written . . . McGahern, a supreme chronicler of the ordinary . . . has created a novel that lives and breathes as convincingly as the characters who inhabit it.' Irish Times

The Leavetaking

The Leavetaking PDF Author: John McGahern
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571250203
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
A haunting novel by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Tóibín). A day, crucial and cathartic, in the life of a young Catholic schoolteacher who has returned to Ireland after a year's sabbatical in London where he married an American divorcee. As a result he now faces certain dismissal by the school authorities. Moving from the earliest memories of both the man and the woman, the novel recreates their breaking of the shackles of guilt and duty into the acceptance of a fulfilling adult love. 'A beautiful, irresistible work of imagination. Sunday Telegraph 'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell 'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel .' Melvyn Bragg

By the Lake

By the Lake PDF Author: John McGahern
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804153191
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
With this magnificently assured new novel, John McGahern reminds us why he has been called the Irish Chekhov, as he guides readers into a village in rural Ireland and deftly, compassionately traces its natural rhythms and the inner lives of its people. Here are the Ruttledges, who have forsaken the glitter of London to raise sheep and cattle, gentle Jamesie Murphy, whose appetite for gossip both charms and intimidates his neighbors, handsome John Quinn, perennially on the look-out for a new wife, and the town’s richest man, a gruff, self-made magnate known as “the Shah.” Following his characters through the course of a year, through lambing and haying seasons, market days and family visits, McGahern lays bare their passions and regrets, their uneasy relationship with the modern world, their ancient intimacy with death.

John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition

John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition PDF Author: Stanley Van der Ziel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781782051640
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book argues how John McGahern was not only an acute social commentator but also an intelligent and perceptive reader interested in the nature and function of literature. It presents McGahern as a highly literary writer aware of the various literary traditions he had inherited, and shows how his imagination was shaped by his lifelong immersion in Irish, English and European literature. Stanley van der Ziel examines how McGahern's reading of classic books and authors determined the concerns of his novels and stories by placing some key elements of McGahern's aesthetic in their appropriate literary contexts.--

The Dark

The Dark PDF Author: John McGahern
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571250211
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
The Dark, John McGahern's second novel, is set in rural Ireland. The themes - that McGahern has made his own - are adolescence and a guilty, yet uncontrollable sexuality that is contorted and twisted by both a puritanical state religion and a strange, powerful and ambiguous relationship between son and widower father. Against a background evoked with quiet, undemonstrative mastery, McGahern explores with precision and tenderness a human situation, superficially very ordinary, but inwardly an agony of longing and despair. 'It creates a small world indelibly and without recourse to deliberate heightening effects of prose. There are few writers whose work can be anticipated with such confidence and excitement.' Sunday Times 'One of the greatest writers of our era.' Hilary Mantel, New Statesman

The Letters of John McGahern

The Letters of John McGahern PDF Author: John McGahern
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571326676
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 687

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Book Description
I am no good at letters. John McGahern, 1963 John McGahern is consistently hailed as one of the finest Irish writers since James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.This volume collects some of the witty, profound and unfailingly brilliant letters that he exchanged with family, friends and literary luminaries - such as Seamus Heaney, Colm Tóibín and Paul Muldoon - over the course of a well-travelled life. It is one of the major contributions to the study of Irish and British literature of the past thirty years, acting not just as a crucial insight into the life and works of a much-revered writer - but also a history of post-war Irish literature and its close ties to British and American literary life. 'One of the greatest writers of our era.' Hilary Mantel 'McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own.' John Updike

The Country Funeral

The Country Funeral PDF Author: John McGahern
Publisher: Faber Stories
ISBN: 9780571351848
Category : Ireland
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"My only concern", John McGahern once said, "is that I get the sentence right and describe my world clearly and deeply." 'The Country Funeral' witnesses three brothers, John, Philly and Fonsie Ryan, as they travel west from Dublin to Gloria Bog - the heart of the territory where so many of McGahern's stories take place - to attend the funeral of their uncle. Depicting the customs and rituals of the day, McGahern exquisitely traces how the brothers react to the area in unexpected and tender ways, and face their own feelings about the transience of life.

The Pornographer

The Pornographer PDF Author: John McGahern
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681378809
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
By “arguably the most important Irish writer since Samuel Beckett” (The Guardian), a character study of a young resident of Dublin who pens erotica for a living, making his money through fantasy while denying the realities of love and sex in his life. The Pornographer is the story of a writer down on his luck, not a Dubliner but a resident of Dublin penning far from erotic tales to make ends meet. These tales—revolving around the “delicious, unending revel” of Colonel Grimshaw and the typist Mavis Carmichael—form a mordant counterpoint to his own, much more complicated existence. Thirty years old, befogged by alcohol, sensitive yet indifferent to all emotional weather, he meets the slightly older Josephine, a clever, cautiously optimistic magazine editor who soon confesses her love, and though the feeling isn’t mutual (as he makes painfully clear) the affair goes on; Josephine becomes pregnant; and, this being Ireland in the seventies, the piper must be paid. Not cruel but callous, the pornographer reels through his days, paying regular visits to a beloved aunt from the country who now lies dying in Dublin, and to his publisher, a citified and cynical Polonius who advises him to “be careful not to let life in.” As the days turn into months, he begins to wonder what letting life in might look like. What would it mean, and where would it lead, to do right by others? First published in 1979, John McGahern’s fourth novel is a character study of rare and unsparing insight. In rhythmic, lyrical prose, McGahern gives voice to the longing and self-loathing of a soul caught between a traditional world he believes he has rejected and a brave new world of advertised freedoms, sexual and otherwise, which offers no guarantee of love.

We Were Young

We Were Young PDF Author: Niamh Campbell
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 1474611737
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
'Witty, fiery, wistful and even shocking, with engrossing heady prose, Campbell's style is unique' Irish Independent 'An immensely enjoyable novel, and a great validation of Campbell's uncanny emotional insight' Megan Nolan, Sunday Independent Cormac is a photographer. Approaching forty and still single, he suddenly finds himself 'the leftover man'. Through talent and charm, he has escaped small town life and a haunted family. But now his peers are all getting divorced, dying, or buying trampolines in the suburbs. Cormac is dating former students, staying out all night and receiving boilerplate rejection emails for his work, propped up by a constellation of the women and ex-lovers in his life. In the last weeks of the year, Cormac meets Caroline, an ambitious young dancer, and embarks on a miniature odyssey of intimacy. Simultaneously, he must take responsibility for his married brother, whose mid-life crisis forces them both to reckon with a death in the family that hangs over those left behind. Set in Dublin, a city built on burial pits, We Were Young is a dazzlingly clever, deeply enjoyable novel from a Sunday Times Short Story Award-Winning author. 'In 30 years from now will some literary critic be asking what is meant by "Campbellesque"? That would not surprise me in the slightest' Irish Times