Bohumil hrabal biography of barack obama
WHY I WRITE?
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pr Riley This is the President Vaclav Havel interview as a part of the Clinton Presidential History Project. I’d like to begin if I may by asking a question not about President Clinton but about his predecessor. In your book To the Castle and Back, you indicate that George H. W. Bush was a friend of yours. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your relationship with the first President Bush. Havel About one month after the revolutionary change in this country, about one month after I became the President, I visited the United States of America and it was the first time I met with President Bush. We had many discussions, we had many talks when I visited him there. He organized a luncheon for me and for the delegation as well. That was quite a fundamental thing because I was the first non-Communist head of state from the Communist bloc whom he met with. President Bush was very interested in the prospect of the future development, of future liaisons between the United States and this part of the region. Of course he was looking to forge the relations between the U.S. and between the dynamic development and the dynamic situation that was here. Then I held quite a significant speech in the Congress as well and that was the time when our friendship began. Subsequently I visited him at his private residence in Maine. I was a private guest there and we met many times since. I would really describe our relationship as friendly. Riley One of the press accounts that I’ve read in preparation for the interview indicated President Bush played an instrumental role in bringing you to the idea that Czechoslovakia ought to be a member of NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation], and in reading your own account of your sense of that question there is some ambiguity to me about your thought process. There are those who have said that you at one point held the opinion that NATO ought to be dissolved along A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends! Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pro Biography
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Václav Havel Oral History
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