Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín is an Irish author.

Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín was born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, Ireland, and is the author of several novels, including The Blackwater Light Ship, Brooklyn and The Master, which was short-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize. It won the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the 2004 Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year Award. In 2011 Tóibín was named Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.

cover image of the book Voices in the Evening

Voices in the Evening

by Natalia Ginzburg

Translated by D.M. Low

With a contribution by Colm Tóibín

After WWII, a small Italian town struggles to emerge from under the thumb of Fascism. With wit, tenderness, and irony, Elsa, the novel’s narrator, weaves a rich tapestry of provincial Italian life: two generations of neighbors and relatives, their gossip and shattered dreams, their heartbreaks and struggles to find happiness. Elsa wants to imagine a future for herself, free from the expectations and burdens of her town’s history, but the weight of the past will always prove unbearable, insistently posing the question: “Why has everything been ruined?”

More Information
cover image of the book The Hour of the Star

The Hour of the Star

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Benjamin Moser

With a contribution by Paulo Gurgel Valente and Colm Tóibín

The devastating final work by Brazil’s greatest modern writer, The Hour of the Star tells the haunting tale of Macabéa—a typist who lives in the slums of Rio—underfed, sickly, and unloved, yet inwardly free.

Now 20% off for a limited time!

More Information
cover image of the book The Hour of the Star

The Hour of the Star

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Benjamin Moser

With a contribution by Colm Tóibín

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector’s consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life’s unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn’t seem to know how unhappy she should be. As Macabéa heads toward her absurd death, Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader’s preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

More Information
cover image of the book Animalinside

Animalinside

by László Krasznahorkai

Translated by Ottilie Mulzet

With a contribution by Colm Tóibín

As if some chained being had to shake its essence free, as if art taken to its limit were a form of howling, Animalinside explodes from its first line: “He wants to break free, attempts to stretch open the walls, but he has been tautened by them, and there he remains in this tautening, in this constraint, and there is nothing to do but howl. . . .” To create this work that strains against all constraints, László Krasznahorkai began from one of Max Neumann’s paintings; Neumann, spurred into action, created 14 more images, which unleashed an additional 13 texts from the author. Animalinside is the rare case of two matchless artists meeting across disciplines, and New Directions is very proud to publish a limited edition of this powerful novella, exquisitely produced by Sylph Editions and the Cahiers Series of the American University of Paris with a deluxe seven-stage printing process for the amazing Neumann images.

More Information
Scroll to Top of Page