Known affectionately as "the Queen of Gaelic Storytellers," Peig Sayers here offers reminiscences of the daily events that made up her life (such as seal catching, collecting turf for roofs, preparing for a funeral wake) alongside the tragedies of drownings at sea, pilgrimages, and the news of the 1916 revolution in Dublin City. It is a unique record of an essential part of the oral Gaelic tradition.

On an Irish Island tells the remarkable story of a remote outpost nearly untouched by time in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the adventurous men and women who visited and were inspired by it. In a love letter to a vanished way of life, Robert Kanigel brings to life this wildly beautiful island, notable for the vivid communal life of its residents and the unadulterated Irish they spoke well into the twentieth century. With the Irish language rapidly disappearing, Great Blasket became a magnet for scholars, linguists, and writers during the Gaelic renaissance. As we follow these visitors—among them John Millington Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western World—we are captivated both by the tiny group of islanders who kept an entire country’s past alive and by their complex relationships with those who brought the island’s story to the larger world.

Peig Sayers was one of the most renowned storytellers in the Irish tradition. Born in 1873 in Baile an Bhiocáire, Dún Chaoin, County Kerry, Peig married into the Great Blasket where her fame as a storyteller began. Peig's recollections were never written down but dictated to others, and in the process often edited or shortened. As a result they often became the object of satire, such as Flann O'Brien's The Poor Mouth, and in the school book version that many generations of students were confronted with, Peig's recollections are often the cause of unhappy memories. Using original sound recordings from the BBC and RTÉ Archives, this book features transcriptions of Peig's own speech, annotated and translated by Professor Bo Almqvist and Dr Pádraig Ó Héalaí. Including a link to the original audio material, now we can listen to Peig's own voice as she tells us her stories and meet her in a way never possible before.

From patriots to pirates, warriors to writers, and mistresses to male impersonators, this book looks at the unorthodox lives of inspiring Irish women. In times when women were expected to marry and have children, they travelled the world and sought out adventures; in times when women were expected to be seen and not heard, they spoke out in loud voices against oppression; in times when women were expected to have no interest in politics, literature, art, or the world outside the home, they used every creative means available to give expression to their thoughts, ideas and beliefs. In a series of succinct and often amusing biographies, Marian Broderick tells the life stories of these exceptional Irish women.

Proverbs in Irish grants the reader a look into the vast and rich world of aphoristic Irish folk-wisdom, as vibrant today as they were then. Chosen on the basis of relevance in the modern context, universality, frequency of usage, and cultural relevance, the book is organised by an array of themes, from Anger, Beauty and Marriage to Foolishness, Silence and Treachery. A must have at home or abroad. Garry Bannister attended Trinity College Dublin where he studied Irish and Russian. On receiving a scholarship, he went to Moscow State University where he graduated with an MA in Russian language and literature and subsequently helped set up the first Department of Modern Irish. Bannister's main interest today is the Irish language and its literature. He has many publications in this area and teaches at St Columba's College, Dublin. He is an acknowledged expert of 20th Century Irish and the editor of Tesaras Gearr Gailge-Bearla and the English-Irish Learner's Dictionary. Kiss my... A Dictionary of Irish-English Slang (97818480405202) was published by New Island in paperback in March 2016.

In early April of 1888, sixteen-year-old Mary Ann Donovan stood alone on the quays of Queenstown in county Cork waiting to board a ship for Boston in far-off America. She was but one of almost 700,000 young, usually unmarried women, traveling alone, who left their homes in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a move unprecedented in the annals of European emigration. Using a wide variety of sources—many of which appear here for the first time—including personal reminiscences, interviews, oral histories, letter, and autobiographies as well as data from Irish and American census and emigration repots, Janet Nolan makes a sustained analysis of this migration of a generation of young women that puts a new light on Irish social and economic history. By the late nineteenth century changes in Irish life combined to make many young women unneeded in their households and communities; rather than accept a marginal existence, they elected to seek a better life in a new world, often with the encouragement and help of a female relative who had already emigrated. Mary Ann Donovan's journey was representative of thousands of journeys made by Irish women who could truly claim that they had seized control over their lives, by themselves, alone. This book tells their story.

Building on the notion of fiction as communicative act, this collection brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to examine the evolving relationship between authors and readers in fictional works from 18th-century English novels through to contemporary digital fiction. The book showcases a diverse range of contributions from scholars in stylistics, rhetoric, pragmatics, and literary studies to offer new ways of looking at the "author–reader channel," drawing on work from Roger Sell, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, and James Phelan. The volume traces the evolution of its form across historical periods, genres, and media, from its origins in the conversational mode of direct address in 18th-century English novels to the use of second-person narratives in the 20th century through to 21st-century digital fiction with its implicit requirement for reader participation. The book engages in questions of how the author–reader channel is shaped by different forms, and how this continues to evolve in emerging contemporary genres and of shifting ethics of author and reader involvement. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in the intersection of pragmatics, stylistics, and literary studies.