The reluctance of contemporary Irish playwright Brian Friel to speak with the press is legendary. Fortunately, his willingness on occasion to grant interviews has fortuitously coincided with the productions of his pivotal works, including the highly celebrated Dancing at Lughnasa, recently released as a motion picture starring Meryl Streep. In this comprehensive volume, theater critic and scholar Paul Delaney gathers an amazingly broad and consistently engaging range of Friel's conversations with interviewers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Friel talks with disarming openness about...

Every four or five years Britain's most prominent dramatist pulls out all the stops and writes a major stage play of his own. Between plays, Stoppard the craftsman does translations, screenplays, light entertainments, and work for hire. Delaney's book is the first to focus on the major plays. Spanning Stoppard's career from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967) to Hapgood (1988), this study shows the figure which Stoppard from the first has been weaving in his theatrical tapestry. That there is development in Stoppard is clear but - as Delaney demonstrates - the development is from...

William Trevor: Revaluations offers a comprehensive examination of the oeuvre of one of the most accomplished and celebrated practitioners writing in the English language: the author of fifteen novels, three novellas and eleven volumes of short stories, as well as plays, radio and TV adaptations and film screenplays.

Drawing on the talents of a team of distinguished international scholars, this volume shines a critical light on Trevor's core concerns with individuality and the family, and cultural and national identity, extending significantly the scope of current scholarship. Essays...

William Trevor: Revaluations offers a comprehensive examination of the oeuvre of one of the most accomplished and celebrated practitioners writing in the English language, an author who has produced fifteen novels, three novellas and eleven volumes of short stories, as well as plays, radio and TV adaptations and film screenplays. Since the publication of his first novel in 1964, Trevor has either been a nominee for or a recipient of almost every major fiction prize. In many respects, he is that rare thing: a 'writer's writer', acclaimed by reviewers, and loved by generations of readers....