A Night of Irish Storytelling with Colm Tóibín

Join us for an evening with Colm Tóibín, the award-winning author of Brooklyn and Long Island, as he visits The Center to regale us with stories written by himself and the late, under-recognized Irish American author, Mary Lavin.

Tóibín has earned international acclaim for his precise, compassionate prose and his ability to illuminate the private edges of history. A regular contributor to the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Review of Books, and a professor at Columbia University, he has shaped contemporary Irish literature while mentoring and inspiring generations of writers. His newest collection, The News from Dublin, marks a long-anticipated return to short fiction.

Spanning Ireland, Spain, and America, these stories trace families caught in the currents of loss and longing, from a mother delivering devastating wartime news to a brother fighting for a dying sibling’s chance at survival. Spare yet emotionally expansive, they demonstrate Tóibín’s unmatched gift for rendering ordinary lives with extraordinary depth.

Alongside his new work, Tóibín will also introduce An Arrow in Flight, a curated selection of stories by Mary Lavin, the Irish-American writer once hailed as a master in the lineage of Chekhov and Wharton. Widely celebrated in her time yet now under-recognized, Lavin wrote with sharp humor and profound emotional intelligence about marriage, family, and the pressures of mid-century Irish life. Tóibín’s advocacy helps restore her rightful place in the canon, shining new light on a writer whose influence can still be felt in contemporary fiction.

Join Tóibín as he reflects on the intimacy, rigor, and enduring power of the short story and on the voices, past and present, that continue to shape Irish literature.