The Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction


Book Description

Collects forty-six contemporary Irish short stories featuring contributions by notables including Mary Leland, William Trevor, Mary Dorcey, Patrick McCabe, and Brian Moore.




Irish Writing


Book Description

'Can we not build up a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language?' W. B. YeatsThis anthology traces the history of modern Irish literature from the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century to the early years of political independence. From Charlotte Brooke and Edmund Burke to Elizabeth Bowen and Louis MacNeice, the anthology shows how, in forging a tradition of theirown, Irish writers have continually challenged and renewed the ways in which Ireland is imagined and defined. The anthology includes a wide-ranging and generous selection of fiction, poetry, and drama. Three plays by W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, and J. M. Synge are printed in their entirety, along with the opening episode of James Joyce's Ulysses. The volume also includes letters, speeches, songs,memoirs, essays, and travel writings, many of which are difficult to obtain elsewhere.'Stephen Regan's anthology vividly and valiantly presents a nation, and a national literature, coming into being.' Paul Muldoon




The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories


Book Description

Ireland has always been a nation of story-tellers. This magnificent anthology chronicles the development of a rich literary tradition, from the earliest folk-tales to James Joyce, Liam O'Flaherty, and the rising stars of the new generation.




The Forgotten Waltz: A Novel


Book Description

Winner of the 2012 Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in Fiction "A tour de force."—Francine Prose, New York Times Book Review "A new, unapologetic kind of adultery novel. Narrated by the proverbial other woman—Gina Moynihan, a sharp, sexy, darkly funny thirtysomething IT worker—The Forgotten Waltz charts an extramarital affair from first encounter to arranged, settled, everyday domesticity…This novel’s beauty lies in Enright’s spare, poetic, off-kilter prose—at once heartbreaking and subversively funny. It’s built of starling little surprises and one fresh sentence after another. Enright captures the heady eroticism of an extramarital affair and the incendiary egomania that accompanies secret passion: For all their utter ordinariness, Sean and Gina feel like the greatest lovers who’ve ever lived." —Elle




Ireland's Most Wanted™


Book Description

Irish is more than a nationality—it’s a state of being. What other cultural background allows you to demand a kiss, celebrate the wearing of a color, toast the wee folk, and take pride in one’s readiness to fight? What other land is celebrated by parades and parties and allows even the non-blessed to declare themselves countrymen for one day? From sports to poetry, and from rock ‘n’ roll to Wilde and Shaw, Ireland’s Most Wanted™: The Top 10 Book of Celtic Pride, Fantastic Folklore, and Oddities of the Emerald Isle gives you loads of delightful tidbits and trivia from the homeland of saints, sinners, and the greatest beverage ever brewed, Guinness. Brian M. Thomsen provides an irreverent but fact-filled look at Ireland and the Irish, leaving no stone—Blarney or otherwise—unturned in bringing her gifts to you. With a bushel full of top-ten lists on all things Irish, Thomsen takes you on a journey through the greenest of lands and provides tales and anecdotes on everything from Irish pubs, Irish castles, leprechauns and banshees, heroes and kings, and the influence of the Irish on culture. Whatever their nationality, everyone has a wee bit of the Irish in them. Ireland’s Most Wanted™ is a true pot of gold!




The Green Road: A Novel


Book Description

One of the Guardian's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century "With language so vibrant it practically has a pulse, Enright makes an exquisitely drawn case for the possibility of growth, love and transformation at any age." —People From internationally acclaimed author Anne Enright comes a shattering novel set in a small town on Ireland's Atlantic coast. The Green Road is a tale of family and fracture, compassion and selfishness—a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we strive to fill them. Spanning thirty years, The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together or falling irreparably apart. As they grow up, Rosaleen's four children leave the west of Ireland for lives they could have never imagined in Dublin, New York, and Mali, West Africa. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold. A profoundly moving work about a family's desperate attempt to recover the relationships they've lost and forge the ones they never had, The Green Road is Enright's most mature, accomplished, and unforgettable novel to date.




Who's Irish?


Book Description

In this dazzling collection of short stories, the award-winning author of the acclaimed novels Thank You, Mr. Nixon and Mona in the Promised Land—presents a "sparkling ... gently satiric look at the American Dream and its fallout on those who pursue it" (The New York Times). The stories in Who's Irish? show us the children of immigrants looking wonderingly at their parents' efforts to assimilate, while the older generation asks how so much selfless hard work on their part can have yielded them offspring who'd sooner drop out of life than succeed at it. With dazzling wit and compassion, Gish Jen looks at ambition and compromise at century's end and finds that much of the action is as familiar—and as strange—as the things we know to be most deeply true about ourselves.




The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature


Book Description

In recent years American readers have been thrilling to the work of such Indian writers as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. Now this extravagant and wonderfully discerning anthology unfurls the full diversity of Indian literature from the 1850s to the present, presenting today’s brightest talents in the company of their distinguished forbearers and likely heirs. The thirty-eight authors collected by novelist Amit Chaudhuri write not only in English but also in Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu. They include Rabindranath Tagore, arguably the first international literary celebrity, chronicling the wistful relationship between a village postal inspector and a servant girl, and Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee, represented by an excerpt from his classic novel about an impoverished Bengali childhood, Pather Panchali. Here, too, are selections from Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, R. K. Narayan’s The English Teacher, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children alongside a high-spirited nonsense tale, a drily funny account of a pre-Partition Muslim girlhood, and a Bombay policier as gripping as anything by Ed McBain. Never before has so much of the subcontinent’s writing been made available in a single volume.




Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction


Book Description

Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction offers a comprehensive examination of Irish short stories written over the last eighty years that have treated the Troubles, Ireland's intractable conflict that arose out of its relationship to England.




The Irish Short Story at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century


Book Description

In the mid-1990s, Ireland was experiencing the "best of times". The Celtic Tiger seemed to instil in the national consciousness that poverty was a problem of the past. The impressive economic performance ensured that the Republic occupied one of the top positions among the world’s economic powers. During the boom, dissident voices continuously criticised what they considered to be a mirage, identifying the precariousness of its structures and foretelling its eventual crash. The 2008 recession proved them right. Throughout this time, the Irish contemporary short story expressed distrust. Enabled by its capacity to reflect change with immediacy and dexterity, the short story saw through the smokescreen created by the Celtic Tiger discourse of well-being. It reinterpreted and captured the worst and the best of the country and became a bridge connecting tradition and modernity. The major objective of this book is to analyse the interactions between fiction and reality during this period in Ireland by studying the short stories written by old and emergent voices published between the birth of the Celtic Tiger in 1995 up to its immediate aftermath in 2013.