Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: An Evening with Colm Toibin

Novelist Colm Tóibín is the award-winning author of the novels The Master and Brooklyn (which became the 2015 movie starring Saoirse Ronan). His latest book, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce, is an illuminating, intimate study of Irish culture, history, and literature, as told through the lives and work of three unusual men—William Wilde, John Butler Yeats, and John Stanislaus Joyce—and the complicated, influential relationships they had with their writer sons.

The New York Times Book Review calls this new volume “an evocative, engaging portrait not only of ‘three prodigal fathers,’ as he calls them, but of Dublin in the 19th and early 20th centuries as ‘a place of isolated individuals, its aura shapeless in some way, a place hidden from itself, mysterious and melancholy.’” Toibin is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.