Dear Festival Friends,

“It’s like playing tennis,” Colm Tóibín has said about writing. “If you tried to think too much, you’d hit the ball out.”

In other words, just tell the story and get out of the way—trust the reader to fill in the blanks, particularly what’s going on inside a character’s head. Take Eilis Lacey, the beloved heroine of Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn and its sequel, Long Island. We feel we know the young Irish immigrant making her way in New York City, though we’re rarely told what she’s thinking. We puzzle it out for ourselves, and through that process, Eilis’s thoughts become our own.

Tóibín’s unadorned style traces back to his time as a field reporter in his native Ireland. To this day, a long sentence vexes him (“The less that’s in it, the better,” he’s said), as does any whiff of sentimentality. The result, somewhat surprisingly, is prose that can move you to tears. The Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jennifer Egan said it best in her review of Tóibín’s acclaimed 2014 novel Nora Webster: “The story of a middle-aged widow struggling to remake her life after the premature death of her husband, it is written without a single physical description of its characters or adverbial signpost to guide our interpretation of their speech … Yet it is precisely Tóibín’s radical restraint that elevates what might have been a familiar tale of grief and survival into a realm of heightened inquiry. The result is a luminous, elliptical novel in which everyday life manages, in moments, to approach the mystical.”

In his many brilliant novels and short stories, Tóibín has channeled not just complicated Irish women like Eilis and Nora, but the novelists Henry James and Thomas Mann, the mythological Greek queen Clytemnestra, and even the Virgin Mary. The Master, a fictional account of James’s inner life, won the International Dublin Literary Award and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Brooklyn was also short-listed for the Booker, as was his novel The Blackwater Lightship, about three generations of an estranged Irish family, which the Chicago Tribune called “a genuine work of art.”

It’s been less than two years since Tóibín published his most recent book, Long Island (an Oprah’s Book Club pick, with an audio version narrated by Oscar winner Jessie Buckley!), but it’s felt like an eternity. We’re therefore thrilled that this week he releases his first short story collection in fifteen years. Set in Ireland, Spain, and America, The News from Dublin explores classic Tóibín themes: complex family dynamics, the longing for home, the quiet moments that define our lives. We look forward to reading and perhaps crying over it, and to discussing it with Tóibín at the Festival in May.

Community News

• Congratulations to Santa Fe author and historian Garrett Peck on the publication of his new book, The Bright Edges of the World, about how Willa Cather’s travels in the Southwest influenced her fiction, in particular her classic novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. A longtime Festival friend, Peck has led several of our literary outings and day trips in the Santa Fe area. Tickets are still available for his guided tour of the D. H. Lawrence Ranch and other Lawrence sites in and around Taos on May 14. Click here for details.

• Join us at Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Organic Farm on April 17 for a literary luncheon with Kyle Paoletta, author of American Oasis, about the future of cities in the water-starved Southwest. The $85 ticket includes an author talk, a three-course lunch, and a paperback copy of the book.

• Library Stories: Books on the Backroads is a film about rural libraries in New Mexico’s villages and pueblos. Please join us for a free screening and Q&A with the film’s directors on April 24 at the Southside branch of the Santa Fe Public Library. Click here to register.

Board of Directors
Edward Gale, Chair

Janet Bailey | Juliet Erickson

Andrea Fellows Fineberg | Jenny Kimball

James McGrath Morris | Carmella Padilla

Jenna Scanlan | Mary Sloane

Maria Gale, Ex Officio

Founders
Clare Hertel | Carmella Padilla | Mark Bryant