An evocative play about Virginia Woolf's life and relationships with her husband, Leonard, and her lover, Vita Sackville-West.

In these selections from twenty years of her best short fiction, Edna O'Brien's A Fanatic Heart pulls the reader into a woman's experience. Her stories portray a young Irish girl's view of obsessive love and its often wrenching pain, while tales of contemporary life show women who open themselves to sexuality, to disappointment, to madness. Throughout, there is always O'Brien's voice--wondrous, despairing, moving--examining passionate subjects that lay bare the desire and needs that can be hidden in a woman's heart.

Edna O'Brien's classic novel NIGHT takes us through one long, sleepless night with Mary Hooligan. From the center of her bed, a four poster no less, Mary recalls her fertile past, from her childhood in the Irish countryside to the love affairs she has confronted since leaving for English shores. Wistful, wanton, this erotic reverie shows O'Brien to be one of the foremost heirs to modernism. Very few writers use language as richly and sensuously . . . There are passages here worthy of Joyce (Library Journal).

Edna O'Brien's critically acclaimed adaptation of the Euripides play dramatises the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter to the cause of his campaign to win back Helen of Troy.

With her inimitable gift for describing the workings of the heart and mind, O'Brien introduces a vivid new cast of restless, searching people who--whether in the Irish countryside or London or New York--remind readers of their own humanity.

"Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life."--National Public Radio
When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and contemplation.
Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but...

A fiercely beautiful novel about one woman's struggle to reclaim a life shattered by betrayal, from one of the greatest storytellers of our time

One night, in the dead of winter, a mysterious stranger arrives in the small Irish town of Cloonoila. Broodingly handsome, worldly, and charismatic, Dr. Vladimir Dragan is a poet, a self-proclaimed holistic healer, and a welcome disruption to the monotony of village life. Before long, the beautiful black-haired Fidelma McBride falls under his spell and, defying the shackles of wedlock and convention, turns to him to cure...

Collected here for the first time are stories spanning five decades of writing by the "short story master." (Harold Bloom)
As John Banville writes in his introduction to THE LOVE OBJECT, Edna O'Brien "is, simply, one of the finest writers of our time." Illustrating a career's worth of shimmering, potent prose from a writer of great courage, vision, and heart, the thirty-one stories collected in this volume provide, among other things, a cumulative portrait of Ireland, seen from within and without.
Coming of age, the impact of class, and familial and romantic love are...