A Night of Irish Storytelling with Colm Tóibín

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Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT April 21, 2026

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

In-person tickets are sold out. Register above to view the livestream.

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.

We offer two in-person ticket options: the $10 Standard Ticket and the $40+ Supporter Ticket. Both provide the same access, but if you’re able, we kindly suggest registering for the Supporter Ticket to help sustain our programs.

Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah’s Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster, winner of the Hawthornden Prize, as well as three story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and was named the 2022–2024 Laureate for Irish Fiction by the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2021, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

Photo Credit: Emanuele Spina
Mary Lavin

Mary Lavin

Mary Lavin was born in Massachusetts in 1912 but moved to Ireland as a child. Her first collection of short stories, Tales from Bective Bridge, published in 1942, was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and launched her acclaimed career in this genre. Her stories appeared in the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, among other magazines. Her novels, including The House in Clewe Street, were also widely celebrated. She won several awards, including the Guggenheim fellowship and the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and she was President of the Irish PEN and Aosdána, the Irish Academy of Letters. She died in 1996.

Featured Books

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The News from Dublin

By Colm Tóibín

Published by Scribner

PURCHASE

Celebrated as “his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” (Los Angeles Times), Colm Tóibín is a master of short fiction as well as the novel, able to summon an extraordinary intensity of emotion in a brief tale. The eleven stories transport readers across continents and eras.

In “The Journey to Galway,” a mother who has learned of the death of her son, a fighter pilot in World War I, travels to Galway to inform his wife and their three now fatherless children. “Sleep,” originally published in the New Yorker, explores the rift between two lovers as one of them cannot reckon with his grief and fear after the death of his brother. Death, again, is a central character in the title story, “The News from Dublin,” as Maurice Webster travels to Dublin to try to save his younger brother who is dying of tuberculosis. Maurice must petition the health minister for access to a new experimental drug, and this is the only hope.

Tóibín’s stories are rich with the complexities of family dynamics, the haunting pull of the past, and the quiet revelations that define our lives. His characters, whether navigating the aftermath of war, or forbidden love, or the desires of a girl in Catalan, or the quiet struggles mundane life, are rendered with illuminating, unforgettable empathy and insight.

The News from Dublin is an exquisite introduction to Tóibín’s short fiction for new readers who may have discovered Tóibín with the publication of Long Island, and a glorious new collection for longtime fans of this “achingly beautiful writer…with infinite compassion” (The Miami Herald).
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An Arrow in Flight

By Mary Lavin

Published by Scribner

PURCHASE

During her lifetime, Irish American writer Mary Lavin was a prominent literary figure. Throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, her stories were frequently featured in the New Yorker, compared to the works of Chekhov, James, and Wharton, and celebrated in major publications, ranging from the New York Times to the Irish Times. Lavin won prestigious awards, such as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and her influence extends to many of today’s great fiction writers. Yet, despite her incredible success, Lavin’s once acclaimed body of work has largely fallen out of print, lost and erased from the canon.

Now, An Arrow in Flight brings together sixteen of Lavin’s most powerful stories, selected and introduced by Colm Tóibín. In witty and sharp prose, these tales explore familial tensions, relationships between men and women, and the social mores and biases of 20th-century Irish society, from the streets of Dublin to the fields of County Meath. Essential for any fan of contemporary Irish literature, An Arrow in Flight shines a much-needed light on “a master of the genre” (Los Angeles Times) who has, for too long, remained in the shadows.

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