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Mary Beth Keane’s novel,
Ask Again, Yes, published in May 2019, is a lyrical, moving tale spanning 40 years, about Irish American cops, family, love, alcoholism and mental illness. Told with tenderness and empathy for the human condition, it is sprinkled with just the right amount of humor to carry the story along.
NPR’s Maureen Corrigan called
Ask Again, Yes, “one of the most unpretentiously profound books I’ve read in a long time.”
Mary Beth, who took time out from promoting her book to answer our What Are You Like? questions, is the daughter of Irish immigrants. Her mother is from Mayo and her father is from Connemara – and her insights into the nature of the Irish informs her books.
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Samuel Beckett created the greatest body of literary work – novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and, most famously, plays for theatre, radio, and TV – in the 20th century. But the Irishman and his artistic output is often judged, unfairly, as too esoteric, too inaccessible. Perhaps it’s best not to analyze his work, instead just to give in to it, listen to the musicality of his language and, for a while, live in his absurd, tragic, and very funny universe. Inmates in prisons around the world – with little or no education – instinctively “get” Beckett. They’ve been staging and performing Waiting for Godot, the most emblematic story of waiting ever, for over 50 years.
J.P. Donleavy at his home in Levington Park House. (Photo: Noel Shrine) By Noel Shrine, Contributor
At 89, J.P. Donleavy celebrated 60 years of his best-selling cult-classic, The Ginger Man. At his countryside retreat near Mullingar, he spoke to Noel Shine about his extraordinary life and the novel that gave rise to his notoriety all those years ago.
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J.P. Donleavy first came to prominence at a time in the 20th century when to be a novelist had a certain cachet. An era when television, pop music, and the virtual world of the internet had yet to be subsumed into the culture. A more innocent time when the church-state axis held sway over the moral compass in much the same way the humanist brigade do now. It was a far-off land, where to utter the word “nipple” was considered taboo and “balloons,” positively inflammatory. It was against this backdrop that a loose affiliation of young, Irish writers converged on late 1940s Dublin to form wha
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The Irish tradition in the New York City Fire Department is undeniably rich. But it also must be said that stories of the FDNY inevitably tilt towards the male perspective, since the department has only been hiring females since the early 1980s, following a contentious court battle.
But in her absorbing and compelling first novel, Ashes of Fiery Weather, Kathleen Donohoe manages to tell a decades-spanning story of firefighters that also puts female characters at the forefront. There are wives and widows, yes, but also an Irish-born female firefighter. As much an Irish immigrant novel as it is an FDNY story, Ashes of a Fiery Weather – the title comes from the mournful Wallace Stevens poem “Our Stars Come from Ireland” – opens in 1983 at a Brooklyn funeral. Galway-born Norah O’Reilly is mourning the loss of her firefighter husband Sean, who was killed in the line of duty.