October / November 2009

At Rainbow’s End: An Interview with Jim Norton

Tony-winning Irish actor Jim Norton has returned to Broadway in Finian’s Rainbow, a joyful big-budget revival of a golden-era classic that’s become that rare thing: an almost critic-proof...

The First Word: Look to the Rainbow

“I’ve an an elegant legacy / Waitin’ for ye, / ’Tis a rhyme for your lips / And a song for your heart, / To sing it whenever / The world falls apart!  Look, look / Look to the rainbow. /...

Remembering Frank McCourt

Why we loved him Tom Cahill, Colum McCann, Peter Quinn and others pay tribute to Frank McCourt I saw Frank a couple of weeks before he passed. It was at the Irish Repertory Theatre gala fundraiser in...

An Irish Welcome for the Champ

Thousands turned out to welcome Muhammad Ali, 67, to Ennis, County Clare, the birthplace of his great-grandfather, on August 30. The purpose of his and his wife Lonnie’s visit was to inspire...

The 2009 Wall Street 50 Awards

The annual Wall Street 50 event brought together national leaders from every sector of the financial world. Police commissioner Ray Kelly, Loretta Brennan Glucksman, Chairman of The American Ireland...

Remembering Ted Kennedy

To call you the greatest of all the Kennedys might strike some as lofty rhetoric. But it isn’t. You gave your life to your country, as surely as those patriots of old gave theirs for the United...

100th Anniversary of Celtic Cross at Grosse Île

“Children of the Gael died in the thousands on this island having fled from the laws of the foreign tyrants and an artificial famine in the years 1847-48. God’s loyal blessing upon them. Let...

William Kennedy Wins Eugene O’Neill Award

Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Kennedy will be presented with the inaugural 2009 Eugene O’Neill Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish American Writers and Artists, Inc. (IAW&A)...

Frank McCourt on How one Thing Led to Another

Frank, famed author of Angela’s Ashes, wrote this piece for Irish America’s 20th anniversary issue. We ran it again in July 2009 when Frank passed over into the great theater in the sky....

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Irish Eye on Hollywood

In the next couple of years, acclaimed Dublin-born director Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father, In America) is planning to tell gritty Irish-American stories about gangsters in Boston and New...

William Trevor:
A Sculptor of Words

Ireland’s foremost writer of fiction talks to Frank Shouldice. ℘℘℘ For writer William Trevor there comes a moment when it’s time to stop. Whether drafting a novel or a short story he...

1969: A Crazy Year for Irish America

It is fitting that the 1969 Nobel Prize for literature went to the Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett. After all, in works such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Beckett alternated between...

Andrew Strong: Life After The Commitments

It is difficult to think back to the Irish film The Commitments without remembering the stunning vocals by Andrew Strong playing the character Deco Cuff, the lead singer in the film’s eccentric...

The Legacy of Danny Cassidy

Our voices carry; and though slumber-bound, Some few half awake… Give tongue, proclaim their hidden name… W.B. Yeats At one point in Quinn’s Book, the fourth novel in William Kennedy’s...

J. Courtney Sullivan: Graduating from Chick Lit

J. Courtney Sullivan is, just like each of her engaging and multifaceted characters in Commencement, far from two-dimensional. In our conversation, she tells me stories about sending copies of works...

Review of Books

Recommended Leo Tolstoy famously said that all great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. William Trevor’s latest novel is thus great literature...

Sláinte: Rest in Peace Ted Kennedy

As my sophomore year of high school began in 1960, the country was buzzing with the coming election. An Irish American was running for president! My Irish relatives rallied to the call and even my...

The Last Word: What Ted Kennedy & John Sweeney Built On

The death of Ted Kennedy precedes by three weeks the end of John Sweeney’s 14-year tenure as president of the AFL-CIO. Together, these events signal the end of an epoch in American political...