HoCoPoLitSo Presents an Encore Reading by Colm Tóibín

HoCoPoLitSo, the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society, will host its 33rd Annual Evening of Irish Music and Poetry with award-winning novelist Colm Tóibín on Friday, February 18, 2011 at 8 PM at the Jim Rouse Theater, 5460 Trumpeter Road, Columbia, MD 21044. 

Tickets available at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/136973 or by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope and check payable to HoCoPoLitSo, 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia, MD. Tickets are $35 general admission.  

For more information or tickets visit www.HoCoPoLitSo.org or call 443-518-4568.

Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in fiction for The Master, and shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for The Blackwater Lightship, Tóibín is the author of six novels, two short story collections, a play entitled, “Beauty in a Broken Place,” and six works of nonfiction. TheLos Angeles Times calls him “… his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power.”

Novelist, short story author, journalist, playwright and critic, Tóibín began his literary career as a journalist, traveling through South America and Argentina, and working at a news magazine Magill, before publishing his first novel The South in 1990, partly influenced by the time he spent in Barcelona. He often writes for the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. His nonfiction works include Walking Along the Border, Martyrs and Metaphors, Homage to Barcelona, The Story of the Night,Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives From Wilde to Almodovar, but Tóibín is primarily known for his works of fiction.

In the summer of 1967, at the young age of 12, his schoolteacher father died, and from the memory of well meaning visitors paying their respects was a woman whose mention of a daughter leaving for Brooklyn, who married there, sparked a seed for the book that would be written years later, Brooklyn, whose main character Eilis Lacy leaves Ireland in the 1950’s and heads to New York to work. “I was hoping that if you got the level of detail right then the reader would slowly become emotionally involved without knowing at what point that began,” says Tóibín. “All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.”

Writes The New York Times, “… in its search for the surprising yet inevitable chain of events that will illuminate a character’s – and the reader’s  - life, a short story has the power to summon, like a genie from a bottle, the ghost of lost happiness and missed chances. That’s partly why this kind of fiction can affect us as intensely as a novel.”Tóibín’s latest work, a short story collection called The Empty Family, follows another collection Mothers and Sons. In this recent work, Tóibín spares no one as he covers emotional and spiritual ground with literary dramas wrought with the painful aspects of a life lived, of parental death, the denouement of love, longtime regret, castaway memories, and the profound realization when memory meets the discomforts of reality.

“As writers, we must remain an uncomfortable, and even unpalatable presence,” saysTóibín. "We must demand as always the right to be awkward and circumspect ... maybe the rhythm of words used well might matter in ways which are unexpected in a dark time.”

Much has been said about this author who continues to write riveting portrayals of characters burdened with loss: “Tóibín is a writer of extraordinary emotional clarity,” writes Literary Review: “It’s truly remarkable that a writer of Tóibín’s great felicity, immense seriousness and general large awareness – a writer so naturally gifted as a novelist – can deliver short stories of such subtle empathy and brilliance. He’s dazzling,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story author Richard Ford.

Tóibín is said to look steely and contemplative in photographs, “in the flesh, though, there’s a sprightliness to him, a mischief,” writes The Telegraph. “As he sits in an armchair in his house in Dublin , he hugs his chest and emits squawks of delighted laughter. This after I’ve told him that a friend of mine – a woman – said that she found the sex scenes in his novel Brooklyn , winner of the Best Novel category in this year’s Costa Book Awards, entirely convincing “from a woman’s point of view.””

In a lecture given at an Irish Literature Exchange event, Colm Tóibín has said of Ireland , “We lived in a country known for its material poverty, its gnarled history and for its famous writers. We were lucky to live in a country which produced literary geniuses … The reader is enriched by reading, the world enhanced by writing, in ways that cannot be measured.”

HoCoPoLitSo is lucky to feature Colm Tóibín, whom we consider a literary genius in his own right, a literary world forever enhanced by his writing … and reading enriched by hischaracters, challenged with love and loss that cannot be measured.

Tóibín’s reading will be followed by a concert of traditional Irish music by Narrowbacks, and step dancing by the Culkin School . 

Proceeds from the Irish Evening underwrite HoCoPoLitSo's literary programs in theHoward County community.