"A Guest at the Feast" reveals the points where politics meets the poetic, where life and literature overlap, where we can be inside the writing and simultaneously outside of it. From the melancholy and entertainment in the works of the author John McGahern to a remarkable essay regarding his own cancer diagnosis, Tóibín captures the fate and the peculiar nature of life, as well as its richness and complexity. As he reveals the nuances of light and dark in a tourist-free Venice and the streets of Buenos Aires filled with disappearances, we examine the law and religion in Ireland, as well as the complexities in the literature of Marilynne Robinson. The imprint of the written word on private life is, as Tóibín observes, remarkably powerful. In this collection, this power lives impressively, illuminating history and literature, politics and power, family and self.