Brief Encounters: Meetings with Remarkable People

Brief Encounters is an extraordinary memoir from Bill Long of his serendipitous meetings with a host of kindred sprirts, including some of the most famour writers of our time. In this collection of superbly written essays, Long recounts how he crossed paths with T. H. White as a child, swapped childhood memories of Waterford with Raymond Chandler in 1960s London, shared a Kentucky Christmas with Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, drank with Noebl author John Steinbeck in his Long Island shcak, and chanced upon Katherine Anne Porter in a midnight New York City snowstorm.

With rich humour, and unabashed affection for those he briefly befriended, Long describes the uncanny connections between these chance meetings, amounting to a richly entertaining and personal portrait gallery of these remarkable people and their remarkable lives.

Interviews include:

1. Raymond Chandler (American novelist and screenwriter)
2. Thomas Merton (Anglo-American Catholic writer)
3. David Niven (British actor and novelist)
4. Aeron Thomas (daughter of poet Dylan Thomas)
5. John Steinbeck (Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature author)
6. Robert Frost (American poet)
7. Katherine Anne Porter (Pulitzer Prise wining journalist, essayist, novelist, and political activist)
8. Seamus Heaney (T S Eliot Prize and Nobel Prize in Literature writer, poet and lecturer)
9. Dr Noel Browne (Irish politician--TD--and doctor)
10. T H White (English author)