Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Pornographer

The Pornographer

McGahern, John
Enright, Anne

Paperback

General Fiction

Publisher Price: $17.95

ISBN10: 1681378809
ISBN13: 9781681378800
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Sep 17 2024
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.00 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
By arguably the most important Irish writer since Samuel Beckett (The Guardian), a character study of a young resident of Dublin who pens erotica for a living, making his money through fantasy while denying the realities of love and sex in his life.

The Pornographer is the story of a writer down on his luck, not a Dubliner but a resident of Dublin penning far from erotic tales to make ends meet. These tales--revolving around the delicious, unending revel of Colonel Grimshaw and the typist Mavis Carmichael--form a mordant counterpoint to his own, much more complicated existence.

Thirty years old, befogged by alcohol, sensitive yet indifferent to all emotional weather, he meets the slightly older Josephine, a clever, cautiously optimistic magazine editor who soon confesses her love, and though the feeling isn't mutual (as he makes painfully clear) the affair goes on; Josephine becomes pregnant; and, this being Ireland in the seventies, the piper must be paid.

Not cruel but callous, the pornographer reels through his days, paying regular visits to a beloved aunt from the country who now lies dying in Dublin, and to his publisher, a citified and cynical Polonius who advises him to be careful not to let life in. As the days turn into months, he begins to wonder what letting life in might look like. What would it mean, and where would it lead, to do right by others?

First published in 1979, John McGahern's fourth novel is a character study of rare and unsparing insight. In rhythmic, lyrical prose, McGahern gives voice to the longing and self-loathing of a soul caught between a traditional world he believes he has rejected and a brave new world of advertised freedoms, sexual and otherwise, which offers no guarantee of love.

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