14 posts tagged Anne Enright
“Usually, it takes me three years to write a book, but that’s no problem: I can make babies, for heaven’s sake, novels are a doddle.”
FIRST LINES FROM NEW BOOKS OUT THIS WEEK
“Having gathered, battle-hungry
on virtue’s field, the field of Kuru,
what did they do then, Sanjaya,
my sons and the sons of Pandu?”
The Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation translated by Gavin Flood and Charles Martin
“Growing up in Ireland, we didn’t need aliens—we already had a race of higher beings to gaze deep into our eyes and force us to have babies against our will: we called them priests.”
Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood by Anne Enright
“I met him in my sister’s garden in Enniskerry. That is where I saw him first. There was nothing fated about it, though I add in the late summer light and the view.”
The Forgotten Waltz: A Novel by Anne Enright
“Jesus Christ is the great invisible poet of the world. Like the Old Testament prophets, he communicates in wisdom poetry—in short maxims, in narrative parable, and always in memorable metaphor.”
The Poems of Jesus Christ translated by Willis Barnstone
“Trailing plastic tubes, Paul made his way across the room, steeped in twilight, and I was struck by how the body sometimes looks like the sea creature it is, a jellyfish with long tentacles, not really a fish at all but a gelatinous animal full of hidden symmetries, as well as lagoons and sewers, and lots of spongy and stringy bits.”
One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir by Diane Ackerman
“Of the vastness of clouds
We knew nothing;
We slept in houses underground.”
The Iron Key: Poems by James Longenbach
“Imagine half the world ends and the other half continues
in a city made holy by pilgrims who wander to it.”
Our Lady of the Ruins: Poems by Traci Brimhall
“In the late summer of 1932, my father, Arno Harden, hopped a boxcar in Great Falls, Montana. He was twenty-one, alone, fresh out of work, and heading west.”
A River Lost: The Life and Death of The Columbia by Blaine Harden
ANNE ENRIGHT IS COMING TO NEW YORK CITY
April 19 - McNally Jackson - 7PM (in conversation with Meghan O’Rourke)
April 20 - KGB Bar - 7PM
Anne Enright is the author of two volumes of stories and four novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, and The Forgotten Waltz. Her most recent book is Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.
(Photo by Derek Speirs for the New York Times)
“There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.”
Anne Enright
Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz is on the longlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
“I walk through the Christmas city lights, not a taxi in sight and the town going crazy all around me, and I think how kissing is such an extravagance of nature. Like birdsong; heartfelt and lovely beyond any possible usefulness.”
“Writers have a lot of emotions about their work, and about themselves in relation to the work. None of them matter that much. It’s just a way of making you get to the desk a bit more, with more intensity. But yeah, writers always think their work is no good and they have no confidence and yada, yada, yada.”
I loved Conor then. I really did love him, and all the versions of him I had invented, in those houses, in my head, I loved them all. And I loved some essential thing too; the sense of him I carried around with me, which was confirmed each time I saw him, or a few strange seconds later. We knew each other. Our real life was in some shared head space; our bodies were just the place we used to play. Maybe that’s the way lovers should be - not these besotted fuck-witted strangers that are myself and Seán, these actors in a bare room.
-Anne Enright, The Forgotten Waltz
“I walk through the Christmas city lights, not a taxi in sight and the town going crazy all around me, and I think how kissing is such an extravagance of nature. Like birdsong; heartfelt and lovely beyond any possible usefulness.”
“The reader has a choice of three books: one is about a woman who falls in love; the second is about a woman who falls in love catastrophically because that is what love is; and then the third is about an adulteress and a liar and a home-wrecker and a man-stealer.”
