Hamnet

Hamnet author Maggie O'Farrell on her new novel on the Irish famine and keeping her Bafta in the basement

Hamnet author Maggie O'Farrell on her new novel on the Irish famine and keeping her Bafta in the basement

The Art of the Joyful Tearjerker

Last fall, while leaving a critic’s screening of the film Hamnet, I was confronted just outside the door by the production company’s chirpy PR handler. she asked, as if the rivers of mascara streaming down my cheeks weren’t a clear enough signal. “Oh God,” I blurted out, before turning heel toward the bathroom.

Land by Maggie O’Farrell review – an ambitious story of mapmaking in Ireland

Set in the aftermath of the famine, the Hamnet author’s family saga folds in myth and folklore‘His father was ever a man of few words,” begins Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, a lengthy and ambitious story set in the aftermath of the Irish famine. Land opens in 1865 on a rainswept Irish peninsula and takes us to Dublin, Rome, Quebec and Kerala as it tells the story of two generations and gestures backwards and forwards at two more. The opening line came to O’Farrell on a train journey from...

The J6 Rioter Now Working at the Pentagon

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. On January 6, 2021, 19-year-old Elias Irizarry was among the members of a violent mob that broke into the U.S. Capitol and attempted to overturn the recent presidential election. He was convicted of trespassing on government grounds, and videos from that day show him entering through a window with a metal pole in his...

A Man Who Reads Books for a Living (One Every Two Days)

The Man Who Reads Books For a Living (One Every Two Days) You Have Clarke Speicher to Thank (Or Blame) For the Recent Train Dreams Adaptation When Clarke Speicher (spike-er) asked how I liked the screen adaptation of Train Dreams, Denis Johnson’s novella following the solitary logger Robert Granier in the early 20th-century American West, he was actually asking whether it measured up to its source material.