A Guest at the Feast

Download or read book A Guest at the Feast written by Colm Toibin and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From bestselling and Booker-nominated author Colm Tóibín comes a beautiful collection of essays ranging from personal memoir to brilliantly acute writing on religion, literature and politics. From the melancholy and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an extraordinary essay on his own cancer diagnosis, Tóibín delineates the bleakness and strangeness of life and also its richness and its complexity. As he reveals the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists and the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as the intricacies of Marilynne Robinson's fiction.The imprint of the written word on the private self, as Tóibín himself remarks, is extraordinarily powerful. In this collection, that power is gloriously alive, illuminating history and literature, politics and power, family and the self.