An Evening With Roddy Doyle & Roger Rosenblatt

Roger Rosenblatt is the author of five New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and three Times bestsellers. He has written seven off-Broadway plays and his essays for TIME magazine and the PBS NewsHour have won two George Polk Awards, the Peabody, and the Emmy, among others. In 2015, he won the Kenyon Review Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. He held the Briggs-Copeland appointment in the teaching of writing at Harvard. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Writing at SUNY Stony Brook/Southampton. 

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of ten acclaimed novels, including The Commitments, The Van (a finalist for the Booker Prize), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (winner of the Booker Prize), The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, A Star Called Henry, The Guts and, most recently, Smile.  Doyle has also written several collections of stories, as well as Two Pints, Two More Pints, and Two for the Road, and several works for children and young adults including the Rover novels. In Roddy Doyle’s novel Love (Viking), two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant one summer’s evening. They were drinking pals back in their youth, now married and with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he needs to tell Davy, and Davy has a sorrow he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be. As Joe’s story unfolds across Dublin, so too do the memories of what eventually drove Davy from Ireland. As the two friends try to reconcile their versions of the past over the course of one night, Love offers a delightfully comic yet moving portrait of the many forms love can take throughout our lives. The Tampa Bay Times called Love “[A] funny, poignant, profane, unpredictable conversation about friendship, marriage, parenthood, aging, Dublin pubs and the eternal mystery of the title.”