From “Guests of the Nation” to “The Mad Lomasneys” to “First Confession” to “My Oedipus Complex,” these tales of Ireland have touched generations of readers the world over and placed O'Connor alongside W. B. Yeats and James Joyce as the greatest of Irish authors.Analyzing a Robert Browning poem, O'Connor once wrote: “Since a whole lifetime must be crowded into a few minutes, those minutes must be carefully chosen indeed and lit by an unearthly glow.” Each of the sixty-seven stories gathered here achieves the same incredible feat of the imagination, laying bare entire lives and histories within the space of a few pages. Dublin schoolteacher Ned Keating waves good-bye to a charming girl and to any thoughts of returning to his village home in the lyrical and melancholy “Uprooted.” A boy on an important mission is waylaid by a green-eyed temptress and seeks forgiveness in his mother’s loving arms in “The Man of the House,” a tale that draws on O'Connor’s own difficult childhood. A series of awkward encounters and humorous misunderstandings perfectly encapsulates the complicated legacy of Irish immigration in “Ghosts,” the bittersweet account of an American family’s pilgrimage to the land of their forefathers.As a writer, critic, and teacher, O'Connor elevated the short story to astonishing new heights. This career-spanning anthology, epic in scope yet brimming with the small moments and intimate details that earned him a reputation as Ireland’s Chekhov, is a testament to Frank O’Connor's magnificent storytelling and a true pleasure to read from first page to last.

    I have always known...'Behind the gates of Temple Alice the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires.

    . . ‘a magnificient book. I cannot think of any venture in Irish publishing of recent years so high in its ideals and achievement, so deep in its scholarship and enthusiasm, so broad in its range and appeal.’ (Paul Muldoon, The Irish Times) . . . ‘a large and worthwhile undertaking, diligently and often triumphantly carried out . . . invaluable to every student of Irish literature; and, with its inclusion of so much unfamiliar material, instructive and absorbing to everyone else.’ (Patricia Craig, The New York Review of Books).The primary purpose of An Duanaire is to demonstrate the nature and quality of the Irish poetic tradition during the troubled centuries from the collapse of the Gaelic order to the emergence of English as the dominant vernacular of the Irish people. Thomas Kinsella’s English translations, all new, aim at a close fidelity to the content of the originals, while suggesting something of the poetic quality, and the basic rhythms, of the original Irish poems.Daoine a bhfuil Nua-Ghaeilge éigin acu is mó a bhainfidh leas as an saothar seo. Is é atá sna haistriúcháin ná téacsanna a léifí bonn ar bhonn leis na buntéacsanna, agus a bheadh ina gcabhair dóibh siúd ar mhaith leo tuiscint níos cruinne a fháil ar an dánta Gaeilge . . . ‘Mar ghníomh creidimh I bhfilíocht Ghaeilge na tréimhse sin ina bhfuil ár scoilteacha cultúir lonnaithe, agus i leanúnachas traidisiún na filíochta Gaeilge, is cloch mhíle an-tábhachtach An Duanaire.’ (Liam Ó Muirthile, Innti 6).‘An Duanaire is a re-education in our poetry, a recuperative event. The range is great, in time and substance . . . Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella have given a book of great worth and importance, one that could mark an epoch . . . a whole thing that is, as the best judges have always believed poetry should be, dulce et utile.’ (Seamus Heaney, The Sunday Tribune).

    * The Withering Branch * The Year 1912 * Tabu * Son of the Tax-King * The Road to Brightcity * The Gnarled and Stony Clods * Of Townland's Tip * The Hare-lip * Floodtide * Going on

    Consistent recognition of these hidden significances in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would require an encyclopedic knowledge of life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dublin such as few readers possess. Now this substantially revised and expanded edition of Don Gifford's Notes to Joyce: "Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" puts the requisite knowledge at the disposal of scholars, students, and general readers. An ample introductory essay supplies the historical, biographical, and geographical background for Dubliners and Portrait. The annotations that follow gloss place names, define slang terms, recount relevant gossip, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, explain religious nomenclature and practices, and illuminate cryptic allusions to literature, theology, philosophy, science and the arts. Professor Gifford's labors in gathering these data into a single volume have resulted in an invaluable source-book for all students of Joyce's art.

    In his introduction, Dr Harmon explores Yeats's legacy - a primary factor in the development of all Irish poets - and the influence of modernism on Irish poetry in general and on these seven poets in particular. By including for each poet a collection of poems, this book provides a sense of each poet's achievement.

    His life in Northern Ireland has contributed to the complexity of a poetic universe in which love, friendship and aesthetics contend with war, death and violance. There are no hard boundaries between Longley's love poetry, his nature poetry, his war poetry and his elegies. Longley looks to the poets of Greece and Rome, particularly Homer and Ovid, and to the poets of the two world wars. His great ability, perhaps, has been to distil the large and difficult themes into highly concentrated forms. This is Michael Longley's own selection from thirty years of writing; it reveals the strength and coherence of an extraordinary body of work.