A Night of Irish Storytelling with Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín reads and reflects on storytelling, drawing on fiction exploring Irish identity, exile, and emotional life across his acclaimed body of work.
Why we picked this
Tóibín is one of the few novelists who can make restraint feel devastating. Hearing him read and explain how he builds emotional pressure through what's left unsaid is worth the trip on its own.
Colm Tóibín’s novels (Brooklyn, The Master, Nora Webster, The Magician) share a quality that’s difficult to describe and impossible to imitate: a surface stillness that accumulates into grief, longing, and recognition so gradually you don’t realize it’s happening until it’s already happened. He is among the finest prose stylists writing in English today.
This evening at the Center for Fiction will include a reading and extended conversation about the art of Irish storytelling — a tradition Tóibín locates not in sentiment or blarney but in the discipline of attending to ordinary interior life with total seriousness. Exile, silence, and the weight of family history run through nearly everything he’s written, and he’s spoken before about how those themes chose him rather than the reverse.
The Center for Fiction is the right venue for this: small enough to feel intimate, with an audience that comes specifically for fiction. Tóibín events in New York don’t come around often.