Band of Thebes

IMPAC Dublin Longlist

Good on you, Melbourne library, for choosing What the Family Needed, the forthcoming gay-inclusive novel by local gay author Steven Amsterdam, as your nomination for the IMPAC Dublin Award. And isn't it even more invigorating to see that a novel arguing gay culture as the foundation of all culture, Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child, is the nominee from seven places as diverse as Moscow, Belgium, Greece, Prague, New Zealand, London, and San Diego? 

The IMPAC longlist is one of the best snapshots of international reading preferences. This year, libraries in 120 cities in 44 countries nominated 154 books, all in English now but originally published in 19 languages. Among queer books (some by straight authors) on the longlist are:

The Absolutist by John Boyne [nominated by Finland and Liverpool]

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach [eight U.S. cities and Belgium]

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai [Tallahassee]

Damned by Chuck Palahniuk [Naples, Italy]

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst [seven cities]

We the Animals by Justin Torres [NYC and Hartford] 

What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam [Melbourne]

Although I'm not familiar with all 154 books, the list noticeably lacks lesbians. 

The year's overall most nominated book is Julian Barnes' Booker winner The Sense of an Ending, chosen by fifteen libraries. The Sisters Brothers is nominated ten times and The Tiger's Wife tied with The Art of Fielding at nine. Last year, Emma Donoghue's Room earned twenty nominations.

Colm Tóibín Criticizes Vargas Llosa's Casement, Gay Sex

At last. World's most apt critic for the material, Colm Tóibín reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Dream of the Celt [Kindle] about queer Irish rebel Roger Casement and he brings a slicing clarity to the gay question:

"Vargas Llosa’s views on what are known as the Black Diaries do more damage to the novel, however, than his heavy-handed treatment of Casement’s Irish dreams and his German sojourn does.

"In his careful appendix to the diaries Séamus O Síocháin writes:

If one accepts the existing evidence from outside the diaries for Casement’s homosexuality … if one accepts that the type of homosexual lifestyle depicted in the diaries conforms to what today is a recognisable variant; and if one accepts that Casement directed his moral wrath not at sexual behaviour but at individuals or institutions he considered to be oppressive of individuals or communities, then we begin to see many of the references to Casement’s ‘dividedness’ in a new light. Claims that the author of the diaries is ‘subhuman’, ‘moronic’, ‘schizoid’, can then be seen for what they are: reflections of the moral positions of those making the judgments rather than of Casement’s morality.

"Vargas Llosa strongly believes that Casement was ‘divided’, his body ‘sometimes at odds with values he espoused’. He is, of course, entitled to take whatever moral position on Casement’s sexual activities he wishes to take; if he wants to read the entries in the Black Diaries as ‘noxious obscenities’ then he is free to do so. But the idea that Casement wrote the entries ‘but did not live them, at least not integrally, that there is in them a good deal of exaggeration and fiction, that he wrote certain things because he would have liked to live them but couldn’t’ does not stand up to much scrutiny. More important, it means that Vargas Llosa as a novelist is writing about a reduced fictional figure. In his version of the story the Casement travelling in the Congo and the Putumayo is a great humanitarian, a man filled with zeal, with deep and horrified concern, a more passionate and effective Kofi Annan. In most of the narrative, Casement is not only simplified, which any novelist has a right to do with a figure from history, but he is simple, not of much interest – which is a different matter.

"Were the diary entries written about things that didn’t happen, but belonged instead in the realm of the wishful, then they would surely have a much greater erotic charge than the scribbled notes that Casement wrote. Most of the entries merely record the transaction, sometimes with a reference to the size of the companion’s penis, the amount of money paid and the location where the sex took place. Sometimes there is another cryptic comment; occasionally an entry is entirely cryptic. Vargas Llosa’s question in his epilogue about the possibility of these notes having been ‘falsified’ is hardly worth asking. O Síocháin, having considered all the evidence, concludes that ‘the various pieces of evidence, positive and negative, suggest that the Black Diaries are the work of Roger Casement’ and could not have been forged."

But disappointed readers hunting for magnificence, take heart: Tóibín praises Vargas Llosa's 1981 novel, saying "In The War of the End of the World [Kindle], in Helen Lane’s translation (which the author, perhaps with his tongue in his cheek, asserts ‘may be better than the original’), there is a sweeping confidence in the rhythms, a brilliance in the choice of detail and the analysis of motives; a wonderful complexity is given to character and event. Something emerges from the book that not only soars above the sources Vargas Llosa used, but also above his own careful structuring and narration, and it has a rare tragic force that is grave and deeply affecting." 

Born September 1: Tomlin, Casement, Stebbins, King

Detroit's funniest daughter, Mary Jean Tomlin was featured on Merv Griffin when she was twenty-six and landed a spot on Laugh-In when she was thirty, creating the telephone operator Ernestine. Wanting to expand another character, Edith Ann, the bratty child in the big chair, Tomlin found the Peabody winning after school special writer Jane Wagner. They clicked. They've been life partners and collaborators for forty-one years. Compared to other longterm couples, say, Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews, their output has been phenomenal. Wagner wrote and directed Tomlin projects ranging from Grammy winning comedy albums and Emmy winning tv specials to hit movies (The Incredible Shrinking Woman) to super flops (Moment by Moment, co-starring John Travolta) to Tony-winning Broadway megahits (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe). Beyond her endeavors with Wagner, Tomlin most frequently worked with Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts, A Prairie Home Companion), and gave star performances in 9 to 5, All of Me, Big Business, and Flirting with Disaster. She's had recurring roles on many top television shows Murphy Brown, The West Wing, Will & Grace, Desperate Housewives, and Damages. In March 1977, when Time was still a news magazine, Tomlin was its cover story; Wagner is identified first as "a friend" but later the article says they share a house off the Sunset Strip. Tomlin co-produced and narrated The Celluloid Closet, an act many took as her coming out. She's a hysterical actress, of course, but is she also a little hysterical? Her meltdowns on the set of I Heart Huckabees are more than a little salty, yet minor compared to the tantrum thrown by the director. Remember, nothing is harder than comedy.

Also born today: Roger Casement, the gay Irish rebel hanged by the Brits in 1916 and subject of Nobel winner Mario Vargas Llosa's fine new novel The Dream of the Celt [Kindle]; Emma Stebbins, sculptor of the Central Park landmark Angel of the Waters, which you know as Bethesda Fountain, and girlfriend of actress Charlotte Cushman; and Dave King, author of the 2005 indie hit novel The Ha-Ha [Kindle] and husband of Franklin Tartaglione.

Born July 10: Fiona Shaw, Marcel Proust

How nimble is that Fiona Shaw. Last year she appeared in Terrence Malik's The Tree of Life and twelve episodes of True Blood. Born in County Cork in 1958, she earned her degree from University College there, then trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Long a star of the West End, she broke out to select American audiences in a small role in the very best of all Jane Austen adaptations, Persuasion, in 1995 and the following year wowed New York with her one-person performance of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land for which she won a Drama Desk Award. The year prior she had amazed and angered London audiences when she played Richard II, directed by Deborah Warner, also a lesbian. Collaborating frequently with Warner, notably in the National Theatre adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook, Shaw co-starred with former model Saffron Burrows as lesbian lovers, just as they were in real life. And Warner was partners with Winterson. Both couples have since separated. Shaw still lives in Primrose Hill.

Years before Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner’s novels, contemporary with Braque, Gris, and Picasso’s cubist paintings, and with Einstein’s shattering theories of physics, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust created a work of art whose central concern is time. Published over fourteen years, the seven volumes of his epic novel A la recherche du temps perdu radically reshape conventional narrative to recreate the sensation of memory, the past co-existing in thought simultaneous with the present, as each moment of the present becomes the past. Many, many critics, including Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, consider the work as a whole to be the greatest novel of the century or of all-time. It is also a landmark in gay literature. Volume Four is titled Sodom and Gomorrah and contains lengthy essays on homosexuality (often seen as a rebuttal to Andre Gide's recent Corydon), but every volume encompasses gay characters, observations, and experiences -- the majority of which are negative. One rationale for this dark view is that Proust had co-opted his own happy memories of gay love in trying to imagine heterosexual love for his characters, leaving him only bitter reminiscences when he wrote about aspects of gay life. Another theory is that he himself was uncomfortable with his sexuality, which manifested itself always with the lower classes and especially with his own servants. His deepest relationship was with his chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli, who lived with his wife in Proust’s townhouse. Proust also had an affair with his secretary, Albert Nahmias, the namesake for the novel’s love interest, Albertine. When he went to sex clubs, Proust liked to be whipped and humiliated. Very, very rich from an inheritance, he typically slept during the day and wrote at night, both while lying in his blue bed, in his bedroom cork-lined for silence, now permanently on display in Paris’s Musée Carnavalet.

Mario Vargas Llosa Does Roger Casement

If ever there was a book that demanded to be reviewed by Colm Tóibín, it's Mario Vargas Llosa's brand new novel about the gay, Irish rebel Roger Casement, The Dream of the Celt [Kindle], just out from FSG. At this point Tóibín can review a Nobel laureate more or less on equal footing and he has already written deeply about Casement in the LRB.

Until then, critical opinion has been virtually unanimous that the book is interesting, important, and well worth your while, but marred by flat or wooden writing that fails to bring the subject to life to the extent he did in The Feast of the Goat [Kindle].

NYTBR: "How did Casement’s closeted yet (so it would seem) hotly pursued homosexuality shape his identity? Vargas Llosa doesn’t speculate, reserving most of his thoughts on the question for his epilogue, as if to deliberately avoid what he calls the 'novelesque.' Instead, he restricts himself to underscoring the ever-present dangers of the abuse of power."

The Guardian: "Vast and intriguing novel... Parts struggle to contain a proliferation of expository detail and qualifying reference. There are a fair number of undramatised biographical passages, which make for bumpy reading, even if one takes a latitudinarian position about the role of information in novelistic prose."

Ángel Gurría-Quintana in the FT: "certainly gripping and, at times, Vargas Llosa tells it with panache. But he has a vast canvas to fill, and his exhaustive trudge through the well-documented parts of Casement’s life sometimes feels too dutiful, the prose too cliché-ridden... One of the most controversial elements of Casement’s story was the publication of the Black Diaries, in which he allegedly entered details of his various homosexual encounters. They were circulated anonymously while Casement awaited a reprieve from execution, and contributed to public opinion turning against him. Scholars still argue about their authenticity. Vargas Llosa has concluded that they were written by Casement but may have been a record of imagined dalliances. It is a shame that this crucial facet of Casement’s contradictory personality is so cursorily dealt with by the author, whose taste for the epic and the melodramatic too often gets in the way of any psychological complexity."

Born May 30: Colm Tóibín

How has Nick Hornby become the go-to literary screenwriter, now adapting Tóibín's Brooklyn for a film starring Rooney Mara? Either people really liked An Education or it's because Hornby's wife is again producing.

Predicting future Nobel Prize honorees is a thankless, largely pointless pastime, yet it's true that everything the Nobel winners in literature have, Colm Tóibín has too: an impressive body of novels illuminating an overlooked group of people, many books of nonfiction, journalism, history, and travel, a staggering and seemingly effortless range of important critical essays, vision, verve, and gravitas.

After being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Tóibín’s debut novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of the Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his revelatory novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros.

His Brooklyn was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and won a Costa award. Tóibín's current Lammy finalist, The Empty Family, is flat-out magnificent. Only two weeks until the publication of his essay collection, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families [Kindle]. 

Celebrating Peter Cameron & Anticipating Mario Vargas Llosa

     

The literary gods confused their players at last’s Tribeca dinner night honoring Coral Glynn [Kindle] and I was permitted a place at the head table with Peter Cameron and his FSG editor/publisher Jonathan Galassi. Praise for Peter poured in from every inch of the elegant, candlelit room while I besieged Jonathan asking about his own new book of poems charting his love for a younger man, Left-handed [Kindle], and about Mario Vargas Llosa’s forthcoming The Dream of the Celt. Jonathan confirmed that in the novel Irish nationalist Roger Casement is actively gay though, like others, Vargas Llosa thinks some of his lustier diary entries were fantasies. Preorder now or mark June 5 on your calendar because this promises to be the true queer novel of the summer (while John Irving will inevitably grab more attention for his bi book In One Person [Kindle] out May 8). Also with us were, among others, cover artist Duncan Hannah, performing artist John Kelly who is enthralled with Sarah Schulman’s new The Gentrification of the Mind [Kindle], and Peter’s (very beautiful) Italian translator Giuseppina Oneto who also translated Wolf Hall, Andrew Sean Greer, Kiran Desai, and Gore Vidal, and announced that Peter’s previous novel is again riding high on the Italian bestseller lists thanks to a movie tie-in. Have you done your part so the same can be said of Coral Glynn in America?

Wilde's Tomb Cleaned of Kisses and Behind Barrier

Quick, is there a glass wall in Oscar Wilde's fairy tales? Because now there is one around his grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery. The Irish government and the Irish Fund for France paid roughly 50,000 euros to clean the tomb with its Jacob Epstein's Assyrian nude figures, which by tradition have been covered in kisses from devoted queers and outcasts. Authorities also erected a 7-foot plate glass barrier to keep pilgrims from puckering up. Anyone could have predicted this: Now people kiss the glass.

Rupert Everett attended the unveiling with Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, 66. Next fall, Rupert plans to star in and direct a film he's written about Wilde's final three years, costarring Colin Firth, Emily Watson and Tom Wilkinson. The Guardian reports:

"Singling out earlier films about Wilde – by Robert Morley, Peter Finch and Stephen Fry – he said: 'All other films stop when [Wilde] goes to prison. I think that's partly because the heterosexual world … still can't face what they did to him … after [Wilde] came out of prison, if an Englishman saw him in the street he was absolutely entitled to go up and slap him or spit at him ... everybody abandoned him.

"'It's the most extraordinary story – and a very short time ago … I think people can't really face that side of him. It's too cruel."

Emma Donoghue's Room Gets 20 IMPAC Nominations

Twenty libraries in seven countries nominated Emma Donoghue's bestselling, much shortlisted Room for the very rich IMPAC Dublin fiction prize. Her nearest competition is David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet with thirteen nominations and Jonathan Franzen's Freedom with twelve.

The handful of queer titles on the very, very long longlist include Kathleen Winter's Annabel, Kathe Koja's gay-inclusive Victorian-era novel of brothels and puppets, Under the Poppy, and Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall.

Read the entire list of 147 titles here.

Born October 24: Emma Donoghue, B.D. Wong

Emma Donoghue, 42 today, is so much more than the author of Room [[Kindle]], her runaway bestseller that last year was shortlisted for the Booker, the Orange Prize, the Governor General's Award, the Galaxy International prize, and won the Rogers Writers' Trust prize. Four months before Room, Knopf published her essential and immensely entertaining, decade-in-the-making exploration of lesbians in literature, Inseparable [[Kindle]]. In six previous novels she proved herself equally at home in the present (Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing) and the past (Slammerkin, Life Mask, The Sealed Letter). She has also written three collections of stories, four plays, and five radio plays. Ordinarily she lives with her partner Chris and their children, Una and Finn, in Ontario but this year they're in Nice. Don't envision her lollygagging on the beach. She's completing the screenplay of Room, a book of short stories about travel called Astray (pubbing September 2012), and a historical novel about an 1870s frog catcher named Jeanne Bonnet who was frequently arrested in San Francisco for wearing men's clothes and was murdered at 27.

A fourth generation Chinese-American, B.D. Wong made his Broadway debut in 1988 in M. Butterfly, for which he became and remains the only actor to win the five major theater prizes for the same role. But it was not enough to convince David Cronenberg to cast him in the movie version five years later, when he chose John Lone instead. Wong starred with Margaret Cho in her much praised, quickly canceled series All American Girl, then played a priest on Oz, and for ten years running Dr George Huang on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He and his ex-partner Richie Jackson, an agent, are parents of a son named Foo, the surviving one of two twins born extremely prematurely. Wong wrote a book about the experience called Following Foo.

Finalists for PEN American and O'Connor International Awards

The PEN American Center has announced their awards in seventeen categories, adding still more honors for Justin Spring's Secret Historian [[Kindle]] and Wendy Moffat's A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster [[Kindle]], the only two biography finalists to Stacy Schiff's winning Cleopatra [[Kindle]]. The New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross was a finalist for his book Listen to This in the essay category won by Mark Slouka for Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations.

FYI, the top award, the PEN/Bingham Prize was shared by the hugely talented Danielle Evans for her story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and Susanna Daniel for her debut novel Stiltsville about a married couple living just above Biscayne Bay.

Read the full list of finalists and winners in drama, poetry, science writing, sports writing, translation and more at the PEN American site.

In Dublin, judges of one the world's premiere literary prizes, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, have announced their six finalists for 2011. You already know Tóibín's magnificence and that The Empty Family is mandatory reading. If you don't know Yiyun Li's work, start with this superb collection which includes two queer stories and was a favorite book of 2010 for both Lucy Jane Bledsoe and A.S. Byatt.

Yiyun Li, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

Alexander Macleod, Light Lifting

Edna O'Brien, Saints and Sinners

Suzanne Rivecca, Death Is Not an Option

Colm Tóibín, The Empty Family

Valerie Trueblood, Marry or Burn

The winner will be announced September 18 at the close of the Cork Short Story Festival.

Born May 30 - 31: Bertrand Delanoë, Colm Tóibín

Before 2001, the largest city to elect a gay mayor was Winnipeg. Then, in the spring of that year, came Paris, Berlin, and Hamburg. Tunisian-born French Socialist Bertrand Delanoë (left) had come out in 1998, in a televised interview when a journalist asked if he was gay. As a member of the Paris city council and a member of the senate, he had always supported glbt rights, and had often marched in Paris’s pride parade. As mayor, he has been a great innovator in ways to improve the quality of free, public, communal life in the city, which he does not want to become a museum. In 2002 he began the hugely popular Paris Plage, turning two miles along the Seine into a beach. That same year he also initiated La Nuit Blanche, slang for sleeplees night, a sundown-to-sunrise festival of the arts in museums and public spaces throughout the city. About 2:30 AM, as he was greeting people in the crowded Hotel de Ville, he was stabbed by Azedine Berkane. Delanoë insisted the events should continue, though his wound was more serious than initially reported and he was hospitalized for two weeks. Berkane’s act was not premeditated—Delanoë had not been scheduled to be at Hotel de Ville—but when he found himself with his five-inch knife close to the mayor, Berkane felt it his duty as “the weapon-bearing arm of the Koran” to stab Delanoë because “the Koran advocates the execution of homosexuals.” Berkane was sentenced to a psychiatric hospital. In April 2007, doctors suggested he be allowed a three-month trial release. He fled and, despite an all-points bulletin manhunt, is still at large. In 2009 Delanoë was re-elected with 58% of the vote. His term goes to 2014.

Predicting Nobel Prize honorees is a thankless, largely pointless pastime, yet it's worth noting today that everything the Nobel winners in literature have, Colm Tóibín has too: an impressive body of novels illuminating an overlooked group of people, many books of nonfiction, journalism, history, and travel, a staggering and seemingly effortless range of important critical essays, vision, verve, and gravitas. After being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Tóibín’s debut novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of the Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his revelatory novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros. His Brooklyn was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and a Booker finalist. His new book, The Empty Family, is flat-out magnificent, giving everything you want from fiction.

Three books Tóibín considers major influences on his work are The Sun Also Rises, Giovanni’s Room, and Go Tell It On the Mountain, and he told B&N his ten favorite novels, not in order, are: Company, Beckett; A Book of Common Prayer, Didion; Doctor Faustus, Mann; Daniel Deronda, Eliot; Age of Iron, Coetzee; Amongst Women, McGahern; The Portrait of a Lady, James; The Trial, Kafka; Things Fall Apart, Achebe; Island, McLeod; and The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul.

Predicting Nobel Prize honorees is a thankless, largely pointless pastime, yet it's worth noting today that everything the Nobel winners in literature have, Colm Tóibín has too: an impressive body of novels illuminating an overlooked group of people, many books of nonfiction, journalism, history, and travel, a staggering and seemingly effortless range of important critical essays, vision, verve, and gravitas. After being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Tóibín’s debut novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of the Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his revelatory novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros. His Brooklyn was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and a Booker finalist. His new book, The Empty Family, is flat-out magnificent, giving everything you want from fiction.

Three books Tóibín considers major influences on his work are The Sun Also Rises, Giovanni’s Room, and Go Tell It On the Mountain, and he told B&N his ten favorite novels, not in order, are: Company, Beckett; A Book of Common Prayer, Didion; Doctor Faustus, Mann; Daniel Deronda, Eliot; Age of Iron, Coetzee; Amongst Women, McGahern; The Portrait of a Lady, James; The Trial, Kafka; Things Fall Apart, Achebe; Island, McLeod; and The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul.

Three Tóibín Interviews: From Schubert to Bartok

Video proof of Colm Tóibín's endless charms. Chris Castellani interviewed him in Cambridge yesterday afternoon, prior to his evening reading of "Two Women." Discussing straight writers, Toibin says, "They mean no harm." (If the clip doesn't load properly, see it here.)

To watch an earlier interview by Paul Holdengraber at the NYPL, click here.

Or you can read this interview in which Tóibín compares his previous story collection Mothers and Sons [[Kindle]] to The Empty Family [[Kindle]]. "The tone is the first book is calmer, almost like Schubert's piano music. By the second book, Bartok has taken over. It's all edge and anger, or enough of it is to make a difference." He says "The Colour of Shadows" is his favorite story. Of his work overall he explains, "The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one. I do admire Josipovici. We should all be better than we are."

Born April 4: Graham Norton

Born Graham Walker in Bandon, County Cork, Ireland, he popped over to London to train as a drama instructor but justly wound up on stage and in front of the camera. His success as a presenter and interviewer was instantaneous, like champagne uncorked. Effortlessly fun and engaging, he often outshines his guests. His childish delights ought to be embarrassing -- as he admits, "Now, this isn't big or clever," -- but those antics are often very, very funny, especially when he employs his best telephone manner. He called a sheriff's office in a Midwestern state about their law prohibiting intercourse with live fish, and, with Roseanne as his witness, rang up the Austrian tourist board to ask about visiting the north central village called Fucking. ("Is Fucking nice in winter?") It oughtn't be funny, you know that, but just try to remain stone-faced during his interview with speed daters. Frodo laughs so hard he kicks his feet up in the air and rolls off the couch. Norton's two books are an autobiography, So Me, and greatest hits from his advice column, Ask Graham.

Best of 2011: The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín's The Empty Family [[Kindle]] ranks with a handful of books (by Alice Munro, William Trevor, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tatyana Tolstaya, Mavis Gallant, Julie Hecht, Annie Proulx, and Raymond Carver) as one of the great story collections of the past quarter century. His stories are larger and recent high praise is insufficient for the power they achieve.

Often, the stories easily inhabit three settings. Always, the present moment is balanced by the weight of the past. A trio of themes -- loss, solitude, dislocation -- yield infinite brilliance. In a mere fifteen pages “One Minus One” covers Texas, New York, and Dublin; the narrator’s failed relationship with the man he’s addressing; and a lifetime of family strain resurfacing as his mother dies. My favorite, “Two Women,” conveys Dublin, Los Angeles, and Guatemala as a wonderfully brusque set dresser Frances Rossiter reluctantly returns to her native Ireland to work on a movie.

“The lowness of the buildings in Dublin, shops that were cheap imitations of larger and better shops in bigger cities, ways of dressing that were either shabby or pretentious, and ways of moving in the street that lacked alertness or any style, all began to irritate her. At the weekend, especially on Fridays, the hotel lobby and the bars filled up with drinkers, and once or twice, having pushed her way through a crowd of half-drunken men and women, she was proud of having lived most of her life away from such people and glad that the staff of the hotel, unfailingly polite and self-effacing, came from elsewhere.
        It struck her that she really would not come back, that she would work in future anywhere but here. Even Gabi’s efficiency and sweetness seemed complacent to her, and some of the men moving sets were too slow, almost openly lazy. She found it difficult, especially in the third and fourth weeks of filming, not to show her impatience. She loved intelligent, decisive people who did things briskly, and on a few occasions when she had to phone home and found herself speaking down the line to Rosario, she realized how much she missed Rosario’s intelligence, almost exquisite at times in its depth of perception, and her way of moving, so elegant and careful and poised.”

The nature of artifice is Frances’s life’s work – notice how she views even the real Dublin shops as “imitations” – and one sees how she's become its master:

“The director used to be young – she smiled at the thought as she opened the set drawings she had carried with her – but now he was no longer young. But he was not old enough to know that you got nothing extra from using a real pub, no matter how quaint and full of atmosphere, instead of a studio-built pub. A set, she knew, just needed a few spare props that suggested something; with a real pub, you would have to spend hours removing objects that suggested too much, and painting over colours that seemed faded to the eye but would jar once bright lights and a camera were shone on them.”

The story’s interest in the art of artifice expands, incorporating paintings at the National Gallery and how a movement by a guard there recalls the dead Irish actor (artifice personified) with whom she had a very long affair, the core romance of her life. Ultimately, a chance encounter on set in the burdensome pub penetrates Frances’s own carefully constructed facade, right down to her speech, which reverts to the softer, Irish cadences of her youth.

All the other stories are equally engaging, and their meticulous subtleties and intricate craft arrive almost hidden by compelling characers and compulsive plots. “The New Spain” unspools layers of ironies as Carme, a former radical communist who frittered away years of exile in London, returns to Barcelona then Menorca with drastically different standing in her uptight family now that she’s inherited half of her grandmother’s property. The novella “The Street” explores the loving, neutral, or brutal hierarchies among Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona, where one character is wholly dependent physically and financially on his attacker.

Gay relationships are the core concern of five or six of the stories. Francine Prose considers the best in the collection to be “The Pearl Fishers” about a gay man’s meal with a bourgeois couple, reuniting him with his first lover from boarding school and that man’s wife who is gaining fame as a crusader against past abuse. Readers of Brooklyn’s detailed hetero sex scenes who thought Tóibín would never be so explicit with his gay characters will especially appreciate those teenage flashbacks as well as the many male couplings and orgy in “Barcelona, 1975.” Returning to more oblique times, the first story, “Silence,” sees the author of The Master again imagine Henry James as a character, now through the eyes of his widowed dinner partner, who carefully recasts her passionate adultery as a story idea for him. Again the source of art and the urge to remake the past propel this collection to astonishing heights.

Cavalcade of Genius: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Colm Tóibín, Annie Proulx

You can have your blizzard nights stranded with a college swim team; there can be no greater thrill than this storm of literary brilliance. Just as I finished In Tearing Haste, the letters of travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor and Debo Mitford, yesterday was the on-sale of Colm Tóibín's new collection of (gay-inclusive) stories The Empty Family [[Kindle]] and Annie Proulx's first nonfiction, Bird Cloud [[Kindle]], a memoir of her buying 640 acres in Wyoming and trying to build the perfect house. I'll review each separately.

Older Irish Men's Coming Out Stories at NYC's Under the Radar Festival

The NYT spotlights an upcoming show called "Silver Stars" compiling coming out stories of older Irish men. A "spare musical staging of vignettes punctuated by multimedia elements," the piece originated in Dublin by the company Brokentalkers and is coming to New York next month:

These scenes, based on the true stories of older Irish men willing to flout tradition by frankly discussing their homosexuality, form the spine of “Silver Stars,” produced by Dublin company Brokentalkers, which runs at the Public Theater Jan. 8 to 16 as part of the Under the Radar Festival.

Created by three straight men — the composer and writer Sean Millar, and the Brokentalkers directors Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan — the show incorporates audio from interviews conducted by Mr. Millar as well as music, video and performances by a largely amateur cast of gay men who sing, dance and occasionally lip-sync to the interviews.

Mr. Millar said his inspiration for the work was an older gay friend who shared his life story as the two struggled to stay awake during a road trip across Ireland. “I began thinking about older guys who’d made tough decisions in really repressive Ireland, stuck to it, were punished for it,” he said during a video telephone interview from Dublin.

BBC Says Boyzone Is First Boy Band To Show Gay Couple in Video

The Beeb is reporting that Boyzone have become the first boy band to feature a gay couple in their music video, Better. They're certainly not the first band to do so, but perhaps the distinction is newsworthy because boy bands are -- ?? -- supposed to be squeaky clean and aimed at tweens? A bit confusing, really, as this is the reunited Boyzone and they all have goatees and look older than their 31 - 36 years; is that really what tweens want? Anyway, the syrupy b&w video shows each of the other lads with a woman and out singer Stephen Gately with a pretty male model. They're Irish, so there's no actual snogging, just a lot of nose to nose affection crosscut with some Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific funny business. While singing.

IMPAC Dublin Longlist: Bennett, Leavitt, Smith, Winterson + 142 More

The IMPAC Dublin prize has announced their longlist for the 2009 award, which honors book-length fiction published in English (originally or in translation) during 2007, and among the nominees are at least four lgbt authors: Alan Bennett (The Uncommon Reader), David Leavitt (The Indian Clerk), Ali Smith (Girl Meets Boy), and Jeanette Winterson (The Stone Gods). The only nominated book to focus solely on a male - male romance is Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman who is straight. Another straight writer, Jonathan Coe, is nominated for his novel about a lesbian, The Rain Before It Falls. Marianne Wiggins' novel The Shadow Catcher reveals itself in its closing moments to be about a gay man but it hedges its bets in an unsatisfactory way.

Because the nominations come exclusively from libraries -- this year from 41 countries -- it's fascinating to see who suggested which titles. The Aciman is from Chicago; Bennet from Naples, Italy and Portland, Oregon; Leavitt from Adelaide, Beirut, and San Diego; Winterson from Waterford County, Ireland; and Coe from Brussels, Gent, Lisbon, and Thessaloniki. Take a look at their database.

At 100,000 euros, the prize is the world's richest for a single book of fiction, and at 146 nominees, it must also have the world's longest longlist. Some standouts are: Pat Barker, Louis Begley, Amy Bloom, Michael Chabon, J.M. Coetzee, Douglas Coupland, Peter Ho Davies, Don DeLillo, Junot Diaz, Annie Dillard, Nathan Englander, Anne Enright, Sebastian Faulks, Cristina Garcia, Elizabeth Hay, Peter Hoeg, Nick Hornby, Khaled Hosseini, Denis Johnson, A.L. Kennedy, Doris Lessing, Penelope Lively, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ian McEwan, Haruki Murakami, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Patchett, Arturo Perez-Reverte, Philip Roth, Matthew Sharpe, Graham Swift, and Rose Tremain.

The shortlist will be announced on April 2, 2009. Most years the IMPAC judges make excellent choices: In 2007 the winner was Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses and in 2006 it was Colm Toibin's The Master.

Notably absent are: Roberto Bolano, Peter Cameron, Dave Eggers, Louise Erdrich, Ha Jin, Thomas Mallon, Alice Munro, Richard Russo, Bob Smith, William Trevor, Edmund White, and an obscure Scottish writer named J.K. Rowling.

New in Paperback: Uncommon, Wilde, Landing

Alan Bennett's really delightful little book about the Queen becoming an avid reader with the help of a young gay palace worker, The Uncommon Reader, is finally available in paperback. Last year, it earned smashing reviews. It is still the perfect gift for book people. Although it will only take you thirty-six minutes to read, the story's charm is enduring.

Gyles Brandreth has published his second aesthete mystery, Oscar Wilde and a Game Called Murder, in which the playwright proves himself an exceptional sleuth. Famous contemporaries including Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker play an innocent parlor game with fatal consequences, leaving Wilde to solve a series of murders. Like his previous Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance, Brandreth's new novel has received good reviews. Publishers Weekly called the whodunit impressive and intricate.

Current Giller-Prize shortlist author Emma Donoghue published her fifth novel, Landing, last year and the paperback went on sale last week. A worldly flight attendant from Dublin and a woman from a small town in Canada called Ireland have an unexpected romance then settle down. Donoghue, who grew up in Dublin, fell in love with a Canadian woman ten years ago and now they live together in London, Ontario. Write what you know.