Irish Voices from the Great War


Book Description

This pioneering study, first published in 1995, retains its rank as one of the most powerful histories ever written about Irish involvement in World War 1. This year, the centenary of the war, sees its timely re-publication as the Irishmen who fought in that war re-enter the national memory after decades of indifference and hostility. The gradual softening of attitudes over the last twenty years amid great historic change on the island of Ireland, is due in no small part to the efforts of historians, such as Myles Dungan, to tell thousands of forgotten stories. Drawing on the diaries, letters, literary works and oral accounts of soldiers, Myles Dungan tells some of the personal stories of what Irishmen, unionist and nationalist, went through during the Great War and how many of them drew closer together during that horror than at any time since. This volume deals with a selection of the most important battles and campaigns in which the three Irish Divisions participated.




Great Irish Voices


Book Description

This compilation brings together a selection of speeches, sermons and addresses from some of Ireland's greatest statesmen and women over the last 1,000 years. They are arranged in chronological order, with an introduction giving the background to each one.




Irish Women's Speeches


Book Description




A Ghost in the Throat


Book Description

An Post Irish Book Awards Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Guardian Best Book of 2020 • Shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize • Longlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize • Winner of the James Tait Black Biography Prize • A New York Times New & Noteworthy Title • Longlisted for the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize • A Buzzfeed Recommended Summer Read • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2021 • A Book Riot Best Book of 2022 • An NPR Best Book of 2021 • A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2021 • A Globe and Mail Book of the Year • A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 • An Entropy Magazine Best of the Year • A LitHub Best Book of 2021 • A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries. On discovering her murdered husband’s body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlín Dubh’s life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet’s girlhood and old age; her unique rages, joys, sorrows, and desires; the shape of her days and site of her final place of rest. What follows is an adventure in which Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to discover Eibhlín Dubh’s erased life—and in doing so, discovers her own. Moving fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and those who make it, A Ghost in the Throat is a shapeshifting book: a record of literary obsession; a narrative about the erasure of a people, of a language, of women; a meditation on motherhood and on translation; and an unforgettable story about finding your voice by freeing another’s.




Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier


Book Description

Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier is a bilingual compilation of stories by Eoin Ua Cathail, an Irish emigrant, based loosely on his experiences in the West and Midwest. The author draws on the popular American Dime Novel genre throughout to offer unique reflections on nineteenth-century American life. As a member of a government mule train accompanying the U.S. military during the Plains Indian Wars, Ua Cathail depicts fierce encounters with Native American tribes, while also subtly commenting on the hypocrisy of many famine-era Irish immigrants who failed to recognize the parallels between their own plight and that of dispossessed Native peoples. These views are further challenged by his stories set in the upper Midwest. His writings are marked by the eccentricities and bloated claims characteristic of much American Western literature of the time, while also offering valuable transnational insights into Irish myth, history, and the Gaelic Revival movement. This bilingual volume, with facing Irish-English pages, marks the first publication of Ua Cathail’s work in both the original Irish and in translation. It also includes a foreword from historian Richard White, a comprehensive introduction by Mahoney, and a host of previously unpublished historical images. “Ua Cathail’s Irish-language tales anticipate Twain and Hemingway in a multicultural world of settlers, shysters, and simple idealists still confronted by the challenge of Native Americans.”—Declan Kiberd, author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation




Young Skins


Book Description

A blockbuster collection from one of Ireland’s most exciting young voices: “Sharp and lively . . . a rough, charged, and surprisingly fun read” (Interview). A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree * Winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award * Winner of the Guardian First Book Award * Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature Enter the small, rural town of Glanbeigh, a place whose fate took a downturn with the Celtic Tiger, a desolate spot where buffoonery and tension simmer and erupt, and booze-sodden boredom fills the corners of every pub and nightclub. Here, and in the towns beyond, the young live hard and wear the scars. Amongst them, there’s jilted Jimmy, whose best friend Tug is the terror of the town and Jimmy’s sole company in his search for the missing Clancy kid; Bat, a lovesick soul with a face like “a bowl of mashed up spuds” even before Nubbin Tansey’s boot kicked it in; and Arm, a young and desperate criminal whose destiny is shaped when he and his partner, Dympna, fail to carry out a job. In each story, a local voice delineates the grittiness of post boom Irish society. These are unforgettable characters rendered through silence, humor, and violence. “Lyrical and tough and smart . . . What seems to be about sorrow and foreboding turns into an adventure, instead, in the tender art of the unexpected.” —Anne Enright, Man Booker Prize Award–winning author “Sometimes comic, sometimes melancholy, Young Skins touches the heart, as well as the mind.” —Irish American Post




Hitler's Irish Voices


Book Description

Tells for the first time the history of German,Radio's wartime Irish service from 1939-1945. As,well as desrcibing in details the radio station's,on air operations from Nazi Germany, it also,provides in-depth profiles of those involved and,the service and what became of them after the,war. It reveals details long forgotten in both,Ireland and Germany, for example, the involvement,a permanent member of the Irish civil Service who,ran the service whilst on leave of abscence from,the National Museum of Dublin.




The 32


Book Description

We read because we want to experience lives and emotions beyond our own, to learn, to see with others’ eyes. The 32 is a celebration of working-class voices from the island of Ireland. Edited by award-winning novelist Paul McVeigh, this intimate and illuminating collection features memoir and essays from established and emerging Irish voices including Kevin Barry, Dermot Bolger, Roddy Doyle, Lisa McInerney, Lyra McKee and many more. Too often, working-class writers find that the hurdles they come up against are higher and harder to leap over than those faced by writers from more affluent backgrounds. As in Common People – an anthology of working-class writers edited by Kit de Waal and the inspiration behind this collection – The 32 sees writers who have made that leap reach back to give a helping hand to those coming up behind. Without these working-class voices, without the vital reflection of real lives or role models for working-class readers and writers, literature will be poorer. We will all be poorer.




Handbook of the Irish Revival


Book Description

Handbook of the Irish Revival collects for the first time many of the essays, articles, and letters written during the Revival.




Voices from the Grave


Book Description

A candid and brutal account of murder, abduction, and violence during the Troubles in Northern Ireland-from two men on opposite sides of the conflict. After 'the long war' in Ireland came to an end, very few paramilitary leaders on either side spoke openly about their role in that bloody conflict, but in Voices from the Grave, two leading figures from opposing sides reveal their involvement in bombings, shootings and killings on one condition: that their stories were kept secret until after their deaths. In extensive interviews given to researchers from Boston College, Brendan Hughes and David Ervine spoke with astonishing openness about their turbulent, violent lives. Hughes was a legend in the Republican movement. An 'operator', a gun-runner and mastermind of some of the most savage IRA violence of the Troubles, he was a friend and close ally of Gerry Adams and was by his side during the most brutal years of the conflict. David Ervine was the most substantial political figure to emerge from the world of Loyalist paramilitaries. A former Ulster Volunteer Force bomber and confidante of its long-time leader Gusty Spence, Ervine helped steer Loyalism's gunmen towards peace, persuading the UVF's leaders to target IRA and Sinn Fein activists and push them down the road to a ceasefire. Now their stories have been woven into a vivid narrative which provides compelling insight into a secret world and events long hidden from history.




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