Emma Donoghue reads an excerpt of 'Room' at the Irish Arts Center

A few nights ago I attended a reading at the Irish Arts Center that completely blew me away. Irish author Emma Donoghue, well-established for her literary and historical fiction. 'Room,' which made the cover of the New York Times Book Review, is a profoundly disturbing and uplifting book, told from the perspective of a five-year-old boy, Jack, who lives in an 12 x 12 foot room with his Ma. The facts of their existence reveal themselves to us only as they enter Jack's understanding, which at the opening of the book does not include a world outside the womb-like space where he and he mother play, learn, read, eat, talk, and sleep, always together.

Donoghue's discussion of her new novel was as fascinating as the book itself, which I devoured in one sitting. The surreal setting and rambling, pervasive voice she has created for Jack are truly stand-out accomplishments in a highlight of recent postmodern fiction.

Look for an interview with Emma Donoghue in an upcoming issue of Irish America magazine.

Stephen Colbert testifies before Congress on the plight of migrant workers

In American media, the split between news and entertainment has never been clear-cut. It seems obviously arbitrary that Glenn Beck's show appears on FOX News, while Jon Stewart's The Daily Show is relegated to Comedy Central. The absurdly ignorant remarks of politicians in press conferences, or the temper tantrums of senators remixed into YouTube hits, remind us daily that the individuals we elect to public office, and the public personas that they enact, are not necessarily as serious as the issues they are charged with rectifying. But sometimes, the results of this cultural blurring can be surprising, and the media attention garnered can

Stephen Colbert, who testified in Congress on Friday regarding an immigration bill, is well-known for his satirically conservative persona on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. He arrived in Congress, fully in character, to testify about a day he spent (on camera, for his show) working alongside migrant laborers in a bean field.

While he spent much of his testimony on the same kinds of one-liners he's known for on Comedy Central (“I certainly hope that my star power can pump this hearing all the way up to C-Span 1,” he said, before asserting that the “obvious answer is for all of us to stop eating fruits and vegetables — and if you look at the recent obesity statistics you’ll see that many Americans have already started,”) Colbert turned serious by the end of the hearing in response to a question from Democratic Representative Judy Chu on why he had chosen to spend time with this cause.

“I like talking about people who don’t have any power, and it seems like one of the least powerful people in the United States are migrant workers who come and do our work but don’t have any rights themselves,” he said. “Migrant workers suffer and have no rights.”

Five Books to Read This Fall

One of the best parts of my gig as assistant editor of Irish America magazine is writing book reviews. Every press copy that turns up in my office in a fresh beige envelope, new and smelling like all the public libraries I've loved, is a promise of a latest favorite, a gem to discover and recommend and lend out to everyone I know. This fall's crop boasts an impressive selection of fare, from fiction to history to political memoir to cookbooks (I think I adore Jamie Oliver more fervently than some people love their firstborn children.) Here are some standout selections:

• Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad: I couldn't recommend this book any more highly. Unchronologically spanning almost half a century in a collection of linked stories that comprise a whole greater than the sum of their parts, it's the book most writers of my generation wish they'd written: stylistically daring without being trendy, post-postmodern with the marks of classically satisfying narrative. It opens on 20-something kleptomaniac Sasha and her boss, music producer Bennie, then spirals out to the voices of Bennie and his friends as 80's Bay Area punks before diving into an anthropological take on a wealthy man going on an African safari with his young grad student girlfriend and his two adolescent children. For me, however, the most stellar part of Egan's epic of cultural evolution and individual decay was a flash-forward into an uncannily believable and terrifying near-future.
• Tana French, Faithful Place: French's epic mysteries, which have become known as the 'Dublin Murder Squad' trilogy, are not my usual fare, but I was sucked in when I read her last novel, The Likeness, over the course of a few days. Faithful Place takes as its protagonist Detective Frank Mackey, who is drawn back to the childhood neighborhood he's avoided for twenty-two years by new evidence on a case long closed: the disappearance of Frank's teenage love, Rosie Daly.
• Mona Simpson, My Hollywood: Told from the alternate points of view of Claire, an upper-class mother of a young boy named William and also a struggling composer, and her Filipina nanny, Lola, Simpson's smart, clever and wholehearted observation of the parallel universes they inhabit. Satirical but never judgmental, My Hollywood is a fully inhabited picture of a world that is wholly familiar but never resorts to stereotype. This is an absolutely fantastic read.
• Thomas Cahill, How The Irish Saved Civilization: This may be cheating, as Cahill's first volume of the Hinges of History series, which had an impressive run on the New York Times best seller list, was actually published a full fifteen years ago. But, having never read it, I was exposed to it for the first time in preparation for an interview with Mr. Cahill in our October/November issue. I experienced for the first time his surprisingly accessible thesis on how the Irish people's passion for literacy and disinterest in censorship rescued civilization during and after the fall of the Roman Empire. If you've never read it, do. If you have, you'll be amazed at how well it's held up over the last decade and a half.
• John Toomey, Sleepwalker: I'm actually only halfway through John Toomey's debut novel, about an attractive young guy, Stuart Byrne, who becomes suddenly sickened by his own shallowness and spiritual decay and dives headfirst into some dark attempts to fill the void. But I can tell already that Toomey has a strong literary voice, hilarious and also heartbreaking, and I can see why Colum McCann has hailed Sleepwalker as "funny, smart, and intuitive."