Brooklyn is Colm Tóibín’s seventh novel and it is as close to perfect as a novel can get.

The narrator is Charlie Weir, a New York psychiatrist. The year is 1979.

My brother could never be called a wistful man, but there was more than a whisper of nostalgia in him when he spoke about their first days in America.

Edward Carey’s whimsical and affecting novel Alva & Irva is the story of twins who create a tiny city only to have it racked by an earthquake.

Sheila Kohler combines atmosphere and careful detail to create an original and absorbing work of fiction whose theme is innocence touched with corruption.

The author of The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, chats with novelist Patrick McGrath about the most famous resident of Broadmoor—Dr. William C. Minor.

Now comes An Irish Eye, the story of a young orphan girl called Dervla O’Shannon and her quest for a rather mysterious elderly gent called Corporal Stack.

This is Colm Tóibín’s third novel, and a very fine piece of work it is too.

Patrick McGrath is a master at thrusting his reader headlong into the minds of seemingly cogent and sane narrators who describe the bizarre and often mad passions of others.

A revival of Wallace Shawn’s Marie and Bruce directed by Scott Elliot is now in previews at the Acorn theater. Back in BOMB 59 he does lunch with novelist Patrick McGrath.

There is real horror here, in this destitution of mind and spirit, and it’s a brave writer who will take on such an empty soul and give her the controlling consciousness of a novel.

I continued to function, morning surgery, rounds after lunch, evening surgery, on-call at night. It was a cold winter, and Spike was vicious.

“I think that emotion as we know it comes into the world the moment we take on language. Your emotions are known to you through language.”

Ian McEwan discusses the Cold War, the myth of innocence, and forgetfulness.

My father’s relationship with Hilda Wilkinson properly began when he went to work on her pipes.

“When I started writing I ran through the genres. I never wrote autobiographically. First of all I wrote detective stories. After that I wrote a science fiction novel. Then, finally, a Gothic novel, and felt at once at home.”

Self-proclaimed “martyr to fiction” Peter Ackroyd gushes about his terminal Anglophilia.

Patrick McGrath discusses Graham Swift’s novel Out of This World, which was published by Poseidon Press in the Fall of 1989.