Lavin is one of the subtlest Irish short story writers ever (and that competition is fierce). American-born but Irish raised from her teens on when her immigrant family return to Ireland, she has an outsider's sharp eye on Irish culture and foibles. If you want to get a feel for the textures of Irish experience in the postwar decades, read her

author is a high school teacher of English-the bio endearingly records that he coaches soccer too-which means he's able to pitch this complex novel to the general reader. More guides to difficult novels should be written by high school teachers! Thoroughly useful and a welcome addition to the Joyce bookshelf for those of us who have struggled with Joyce's dense prose

Lynch was awarded the Booker for this dystopian novel & may be the title‘s seer: just before he won, anti-immigrant riots erupted in his city, Dublin. the apocalyptic scenes mere days before his win-streetcars were set alight and looters struck-recall Prophet Song. It opens with a new right-wing government passing an Emergency Act. Soon, citizens are forced to flee. An unsettling read set in a just-around-the-corner imperiled Western democracy

on the cultural & spiritual aftermaths of Irish Civil War (1922-23). It finds unexamined testimony by men & women on both sides. If you've ever imagined what it'd be like to be caught in up a conflict in which you saw those close to you killed or worse, became the person who did the killing, then this is a thought-provoking book. Its attention to the sexual violence directed at women during the Civil War is overdue too

Many of us read Owen, Brooke, & Sassoon if we want WWI poetry so their peer, a lesser-read Jewish working class British poet, is a revelation. “Break of Day in the Trenches” has been called the greatest single poem the war produced. The classical and English literary heritage that was the unquestioned possession of an Anglican establishment poet such as Brooke is less available or relevant to Rosenberg, which may account for his relative neglect

a broke couple leave expensive Dublin for the countryside. opens with the multiple eyes of the creatures of the mountain under whose shadow they will live looking at them move in. a deep awareness of life that is not human throughout-have never read anything quite like it. a fitting style for our age. If you like human-centered novels this is not for you, but if you notice life on every scale when outdoors-and indoors-it is rewarding & original

Fitzgerald's first novel on a WWI-era Princeton student. He enjoyed adulation as the voice of his generation after its publication, but I'd prefer the hard-earned maturity of later works (The Beautiful & Damned & The Last Tycoon). A whiff of cocky undergraduate in the tone that's juvenile, though also poignant when one is mindful of what life had in store for the author, namely alcoholism & premature death

A great account of a disputed, confusingly named 18th c, immigrant wave from Ireland (by way of 17th c. Scotland). I read this alongside the more recent “The People of No Name“ by P. Griffin and the more recent again “Race, Politics and Irish America“ by M. Burke to get a balanced picture of a group about which far too much twaddle's been written! Start with this though as Leyburn is from 1962 so is cited by books on the topic that come after

Kilroy uses non-realism-gothic & folktales of the devil-because the story it tells is too outrageous for realism. This novel's most outlandish moments are often real events: In the Celtic Tiger period of rapid growth in Ireland, the middle classes used one mortgaged property as collateral for the next. The fraud depicted in the novel regarding property and corrupt politicians is true also. want to understand mass delusion? read this novel

antidote to sentimental novels on rural Ireland. bleak but lyrical novel about toxic masculinity on a sheep farm in a contemporary Ireland. Religion is here but its empty ritual masking the real blood sacrifice of generation after generation of farm men sacrificed to tradition & land hunger. humorous in a bitter way, and Hughes soars to the heights of lyricism at times. She's one to watch

published after the civil and Anglo-Irish wars in 1920s Ireland and set then. The blithe Anglo landed elite close their eyes to the implications for them of the coming break with Empire that had precipitated the chaos. (Bowen was of this class, but was critical.) A novel about how people are not always aware that history is happening right now. Little happens for most the novel, and that lack of chaos is, in hindsight, celebrated.

new version of The Last Tycoon (1941)-originally published after Fitzgerald‘s premature death while in Hollywood. Unfinished then, so this scholar-editor‘s 1993 attempt to reassemble is done well. Even the air of vagueness and disjoint caused by the original incompleteness adds to effect since it's a pic of Hollywood as surreal place where usual rules don‘t apply. Asearing picture of the Hollywood machine in the 1930s and the “ethnics“ therein

A refreshing setting-upper-class Mexico- & an eye-opening backdrop of British colonialism there, which I found out was real. I prefer gothic to horror & there was too much of the latter, but the gothic tone of the opening was good. Noemí was obtuse, as heroines in such scenarios have to be. The pregnancy-like effect on the central male of the substance at the heart of the plot was subversive & that substance is suddenly EVERYWHERE in pop culture!

moments of wit and even lyricism, and the opening is charming, but it descends into relentlessly charmless narcissism. The superficial manic pixie dream girl surface glitter may seem fun, but a warning: it may be triggering as it deals with cutting, rape, suicide, & eating disorders in a glib tone. Uneven & I ended up wishing the writer's parents had written their memoirs as they came across as fun, well-rounded and empathetic. The writer did not

Contemporary lineal descendants of George Washington run a secret diamond mine on enslaved labor. mine operator Culpepper plots to keep the African Americans in perpetual slavery by manufacturing a false proclamation that the North had lost the Civil War, & the lie continues into the twentieth century action of the story. The satire of racism and exploitation is biting, BUT the lack of individuation of the Black characters kind of undercuts that.

A big, flawed, brilliant, ambitious novel that ultimately works. Its fearlessly multicultural BUT relies on stereotypes, tho every character is given an equal measure of sympathy AND derision! Despite being just over two decades old, the ultimate optimism about a bright, multicultural future is dated, and its very British flippancy about minority religions & racism wouldn't be possible after 9/11, which occurred a year after publication.

Leaming‘s stress on Jackie's PTSD was illuminating at first, but was repeated so often it got gimmicky, but I liked the emphasis on Jackie's forties & onward, when she was a conservationist who saved NYC's Grand Central Railway when it was threatened with destruction and saw through notable books in her editor role. These kinds of details make it valuable overall, since it is, admittedly, a well-trodden story that is difficult to make fresh.

Poor Irish immigrant Stephen Fox gains a plantation but is conflicted about slavery as he ages. Read of it in “Race, Politics, and Irish America“ & was intrigued because Yerby was Black & Irish, which makes for a complicated depiction of an Irish planter. A 1946 bestseller - swashbuckling adventure & racy romances abound - that's often compared to “Gone with the Wind“, but the latter's “happy“ plantation is VERY different to Yerby's Black rebels.

Begins as a comedy of manners and a straightforward romance (but then, so does Jane Eyre.) Time is unmoored in the action and the unnamed narrator‘s social class is vague, and it is striking that the novel‘s title is not HER name, as would be conventional, but that of someone dead. The dominant dead woman's scent hauntingly lingers on old clothes & the burning question at the close is: has the narrator exorcised Rebecca OR become possessed by her?

The private James is fearful of the extrovert, audaciously gay Wilde in Tóibín‘s novel. Wilde is both diametrically opposed and yet strangely similar to James: both are queer, Irish & expat. A decisive interpretation of what occurs in the scene in which Holmes & James share a bed is impossible, which is deft as James left no evidence! I hated Tóibín‘s implication that Wilde‘s sons inspired the Turning of the Screw, BUT that was my only gripe.

The corrupt Bohane is a mash-up of the real city of Limerick, “Mad Max,” and film noir. Set in 2052 when some catastrophe appears to have befallen Bohane (or all of Ireland and Europe) the gorgeous prose is saturated with snatches of old films and songs (very Joycean) and the opening recalls Saturday Night Fever, In multicultural Bohane (where the Chinese-origin Chings have been local for generations), slang from America abounds. Very cool

London woman, estranged from her husband, has a meaningless vacation affair on the French Riviera. A prescient 1965 exploration of the darker aspects of the sexual revolution and its new oppressions: mandatory promiscuity and a stress on slimness that causes neurotic calorie-counting. Artificiality, decadence, bodily effluvia, and consumerism pervades. countering male-authored portraits of the 1960s as liberation

Murray‘s study of very early American writers looks at white racial identity and fears of losing whiteness in the new nation in both canonical and obscure fiction, but ultimately becomes about current white American racial anxieties. She suggests that white characters hovering between life and death challenged fixed racial categories. Enlightening and well written

Murray‘s study of very early American writers looks at white racial identity and fears of losing whiteness in the new nation in both canonical and obscure fiction, but ultimately becomes about current white American racial anxieties. She suggests that white characters hovering between life and death challenged fixed racial categories. Enlightening and well written.

Mary Kelly‘s historical study does what fiction alone has tended to do- it imagines the aftermath and inner history of a holocaust. She argues that the Great Famine of 1845 is a traumatic silence at the core of a fractured twentieth-century Irish-American culture and identity. This suppression of the shocking impetus for Irish emigration allowed for a transformation from denigrated “papists“ to “acceptable“ white ethnicity

Meagher was an elite Catholic revolutionary in 1840s Ireland. The nugget for me that conveys the book's able addressing of Meagher‘s Irish and American contexts together was that the Irish recruits in the Union Army were not necessarily abolitionist- in his Army role, Meagher ignored Lincoln/slavery when organizing Irishmen. Ironically, freedom for Ireland did not always translate to support of freedom for others

A male ages backwards until the story fades into the lack of consciousness of babyhood. Benjamin is born a ready-made foul-mouth of 70. Twenty years later, he's kicked out of college due to appearing to be 50, but the funniest moment comes when Ben is already sixty in real years but looks 10, and the playmate of his own grandson! Little indication here that Fitzgerald would go on to produce one of America‘s finest novels, but its fun

This is a very knowing and very political gothic magic realist novel about the rotten and rotting Irish gentry. Banville's first novel and one of his most accessible ones (well, accessible by Banville standards). Time travel, a 19thc-century circus, a famine, a gothic pile, and all done in exquisite prose. Quite the ride

Not the perfect gem of artistic integrity that Gatbsy is, but still great. follows the social and moral decline of 1910s WASPs Anthony and Gloria Patch. While awaiting an inheritance, they descend into addiction, debauchery, disinheritance, and relationship breakdown. The inheritance is restored at the close, but by then they are damaged A portrait of alcoholism and the idle waiting-to-be-rich and the connections between these phenomena

An original look at the Irish in centuries of US fiction, plays, movies, politics using frames of race, ethnicity and traumatic history. Fairy tale and gothic frames tell that story in a fresh way, so Graces Kelly‘s rise to royalty is the assimilation moment that allowed for Kennedy's rise. It seems that the Kennedy story is told with Gothic vocabulary (family curses and conspiracy) after the family's troubles erupt

Written with great authority and every page contains vital information and statistics, though it is not dry as a result. This seems to be one of the best books on the Irish Famine of the 1840s out there, so start with this if you want to be educated on the topic

A nicely written take on the Irish in the South by a university instructor. SO much more readable than many such books. He's an Irish immigrant in the South so conveys the history of the Irish there without feeling it is fully his. That insider/outsider tension makes the book special

Synge, a culturally sensitive Dubliner & peer of Joyce and Yeats, saw simplicity in the islanders of Aran and idealizes the setting, which is both this book‘s unforgettable charm and its chief fault. He is morbid throughout regarding the fate of Aran‘s young fishermen on the rough seas, feeling that he talked with men “who were under a judgement of death. Stark but lovely prose conveys Aran‘s wild beauty and isolation well

This cultural history examines the transported Irish, the Scots-Irish, and post-Famine Catholic immigrants through the words and lives of Black and white American and diasporic writers and public figures. The Irish “whitened” multiple times: in the slave-holding Caribbean, on America‘s frontiers and plantations, and on its eastern seaboard. Both colluders and victims, Irish immigrants carried sectarianism and violence with them.

recommend for those who share my interest in “not fully white“ history. Between 1880 and 1924, 4 million Italians immigrated and began to be “racially suspect.” They were barred from schools, film theaters, churches, and unions. like the Irish, they brought the ethnic divisions of the motherland with them, since Italians who met most prejudice were of Southern roots, similar to divisions between Protestant and famine Irish in the US.

Considers “how the oppressed became the oppressors“ : 1845 Famine Irish assimilated in America by clambering over African Americans. There's been a glib narrative that the Irish and African Americans shared tribulations, which this book exposes as a fallacy. would recommend if interested in the Irish facets of abolitionism and the often unsettling history of the Irish in America. The writing can be a bit opaque sometime, but persistence pays off.