The Irish Writer and the World is a major new book by one of Ireland's most prominent scholars and cultural commentators. Declan Kiberd, author of the award-winning Irish Classics and Inventing Ireland, here synthesises the themes that have occupied him throughout his career as a leading critic of Irish literature and culture. Kiberd argues that political conflict between Ireland and England ultimately resulted in cultural confluence and that writing in the Irish language was hugely influenced by the English literary tradition. He continues his exploration of the role of Irish politics and culture in a decolonising world, and covers Anglo-Irish literature, the fate of the Irish language and the Celtic Tiger. This fascinating collection of Kiberd's work demonstrates the extraordinary range, astuteness and wit that have made him a defining voice in Irish studies and beyond, and will bring his work to new audiences across the world.

'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

"Drawing on sources such as the land, the Church, the past, changing politics, and literary styles, Irish writers ranging from W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Augusta Gregory to Roddy Doyle, Kate O'Brien, Colm Toibin, John Banville, and Seamus Heaney explore what it means to be a writer in Ireland"--Provided by publisher.

From the best-selling author of 'Desperadoes' and 'Cowboys and Indians', comes a humorous view of contemporary Irish life. 'The Secret World of the Irish Male' is a headlong, lovestruck tour of the frustrations and contradictions of being Irish in the 1990s.

Few countries have been as dramatically transformed in recent years as Ireland. Once a culturally repressed land shadowed by terrorism and on the brink of economic collapse, Ireland finally emerged in the late 1990s as the fastest-growing country in Europe, with the typical citizen enjoying a higher standard of living than the average Brit. Just a few years after celebrating their newly-won status among the world's richest societies, the Irish are now saddled with a wounded, shrinking economy, soaring unemployment, and ruined public finances. After so many centuries of impoverishment, how did the Irish finally get rich, and how did they then fritter away so much so quickly? Veteran journalist David J. Lynch offers an insightful, character-driven narrative of how the Irish boom came to be and how it went bust. He opens our eyes to a nation's downfall through the lived experience of individual citizens: the people responsible for the current crisis as well as the ordinary men and women enduring it.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST and REAL SIMPLE A profound and enchanting new novel from Booker Prize-longlisted author Niall Williams about the loves of our lives and the joys of reminiscing. You don't see rain stop, but you sense it. You sense something has changed in the frequency you've been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you, which at first is only: something has changed. The rain is stopping. Nobody in the small, forgotten village of Faha remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard was a condition of living. Now--just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of electricity--it is stopping. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is standing outside his grandparents' house shortly after the rain has stopped when he encounters Christy for the first time. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed. This is the story of all that was to follow: Christy's long-lost love and why he had come to Faha, Noel's own experiences falling in and out of love, and the endlessly postponed arrival of electricity--a development that, once complete, would leave behind a world that had not changed for centuries. Niall Williams' latest novel is an intricately observed portrait of a community, its idiosyncrasies and its traditions, its paradoxes and its inanities, its failures and its triumphs. Luminous and otherworldly, and yet anchored with deep-running roots into the earthy and the everyday, This Is Happiness is about stories as the very stuff of life: the ways they make the texture and matter of our world, and the ways they write and rewrite us.

Here Ireland's premier economic historian and one of the leading authorities on the Great Irish Famine examines the most lethal natural disaster to strike Europe in the nineteenth century. Between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the food source that we still call the Irish potato had allowed the fastest population growth in the whole of Western Europe. As vividly described in Ó Gráda's new work, the advent of the blight phytophthora infestans transformed the potato from an emblem of utility to a symbol of death by starvation. The Irish famine peaked in Black '47, but it brought misery and increased mortality to Ireland for several years. Central to Irish and British history, European demography, the world history of famines, and the story of American immigration, the Great Irish Famine is presented here from a variety of new perspectives. Moving away from the traditional narrative historical approach to the catastrophe, Ó Gráda concentrates instead on fresh insights available through interdisciplinary and comparative methods. He highlights several economic and sociological features of the famine previously neglected in the literature, such as the part played by traders and markets, by medical science, and by migration. Other topics include how the Irish climate, usually hospitable to the potato, exacerbated the failure of the crops in 1845-1847, and the controversial issue of Britain's failure to provide adequate relief to the dying Irish. Ó Gráda also examines the impact on urban Dublin of what was mainly a rural disaster and offers a critical analysis of the famine as represented in folk memory and tradition. The broad scope of this book is matched by its remarkable range of sources, published and archival. The book will be the starting point for all future research into the Irish famine.