ith the recent publication of the first volume of Beckett’s letters I started to recall the last time I met Beckett in Paris in 1988. We first met in April, 1985. It had been three years since our meeting at the café in the Hotel PLM. At noon. Noon being the time he had suggested. The suggested hour. At the time, there was the usual feeling one gets upon meeting one’s … [Read more...] about A Last Meeting With Beckett
Literature
Review of Books
Recommended Over the last decade or so, Brooklyn has gone from a byword for gritty urban life – the place where Pete Hamill and Spike Lee told their stories – to a punch line referring to the chic hipsters who have flocked to the borough. Colm Toibin might seem an unlikely candidate to add a fascinating new chapter to Brooklyn’s literary life. After all, his novels, such as … [Read more...] about Review of Books
Oscar Wilde on Show
An exhibition at the Morgan Library attracts Oscar Wilde enthusiasts. Expensively dressed, impeccably mannered and gifted with a voice so beguiling his contemporaries marveled at him, Oscar (Fingal O’Flaherty Wills) Wilde was also one of the wittiest men of his age. Even today, just to hear his name is to anticipate delight. That’s why his cult, which began in his own … [Read more...] about Oscar Wilde on Show
Review of Books
Recommended Back in the mid-1990s, it seemed like everything Irish was cool. Bono was a global rock star, Riverdance was an international sensation, and Frank McCourt sold millions of books. Then, there was Seamus Heaney. The notion of a popular poet seemed almost quaint in the digital age. Yet when Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, he became yet another Irish … [Read more...] about Review of Books
The Triumph & the Tragedy
Mary Pat Kelly’s new novel Galway Bay captures the essence of the Great Starvation and the 19th-century Irish-American experience. Ireland has a terrible history. As a kid in school reading about that history I was always afraid to turn the page; what seemed like a hopeful turn of events always was undone by a traitor or some clever English piece of skulduggery – the Indians … [Read more...] about The Triumph & the Tragedy