Allen Foster lives in on a farm in Enfield, Co Meath. When not tending to his cattle or walking his beloved dogs he finds the time to be a freelance journalist and researcher. He is the author of eight other books, including Foster’s Irish Oddities, Foster’s Even Odder Irish Oddities and Around the World with Citizen Train: The Sensational Adventures of the Real Phileas Fogg.

'What would you be if you weren't Irish?' asked the barman. Pat replied, 'Ashamed!' There are two types of people in this world: the Irish, and those who wish they were. But wherever you're from, The Little Book of Irish Jokes is packed with grand gags and Celtic wisecracks that will give you the gift of the gab and a belly full of laughs.

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s irresistible and infamous novel The Dirty Dust is consistently ranked as the most important prose work in modern Irish, yet no translation for English-language readers has ever before been published. Alan Titley’s vigorous new translation, full of the brio and guts of Ó Cadhain’s original, at last brings the pleasures of this great satiric novel to the far wider audience it deserves. In The Dirty Dust all characters lie dead in their graves. This, however, does not impair their banter or their appetite for news of aboveground happenings from the recently arrived. Told entirely in dialogue, Ó Cadhain’s daring novel listens in on the gossip, rumors, backbiting, complaining, and obsessing of the local community. In the afterlife, it seems, the same old life goes on beneath the sod. Only nothing can be done about it—apart from talk. In this merciless yet comical portrayal of a closely bound community, Ó Cadhain remains keenly attuned to the absurdity of human behavior, the lilt of Irish gab, and the nasty, deceptive magic of human connection.