Best of
Irish-Literature

2012

Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice


Mary Robinson - 2012
    Displaying a gift for storytelling and remembrance, Robinson reveals, in Everybody Matters, what lies behind the vision, strength, and determination that made her path to prominence as compelling as any of her achievements.Born in 1944 into a deeply Catholic family-the only girl among five childrenshe was poised to become a nun before finding her own true voice.Ever since, she has challenged convention in pursuit of fairness-whether in the Church, in government and politics, or in her own family.As an activist lawyer, she won landmark cases advancing the causes of women and marginalized people against the prejudices of the day, and in her twenty years in the Irish Senate she promoted progressive legislation, including the legalizing of contraception. She shocked the political system by winning election as Irelands first woman president in l990, redefining the role and putting Ireland firmly on the international stage. Her role as UN high commissioner for human rights, beginning in 1997, was to prove an even bigger challenge; she won acclaim for bringing attention to victims worldwide but was often frustrated both by the bureaucracy and by the willingness to compromise on principle, which reveal the deep and inherent barriers to changing the status quo. Now back in Ireland and heading her Mary Robinson Foundation-Climate Justice, she has found the independence she needs to work effectively on behalf of the millions of poor around the world most affected by climate change.Told with the same calm conviction and modest pride that has guided her life, Everybody Matters will inspire anyone who reads it with the belief that each of us can, in our own way, help to change the world for the better.

The Spinning Heart


Donal Ryan - 2012
    As violence flares, the characters face a battle between public persona and inner desires. Through a chorus of unique voices, each struggling to tell their own kind of truth, a single authentic tale unfolds. The Spinning Heart speaks for contemporary Ireland like no other novel. Wry, vulnerable, all-too human, it captures the language and spirit of rural Ireland and with uncanny perception articulates the words and thoughts of a generation. Technically daring and evocative of Patrick McCabe and J.M. Synge, this novel of small-town life is witty, dark and sweetly poignant.

Strange Epiphanies


Peter Bell - 2012
    The protagonists in Peter Bell's stories confront the awesome, the numinous, the uncanny, the lure of genius loci, and landscapes undergoing strange epiphanies.Contents:Introduction by Brian J. Showers.Resurrection.M. E. F.The Light of the World.An American Writer's Cottage.Inheritance.A Midsummer Ramble in the Carpathians—long-listed for Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year 2012!.Nostalgia, Death and Melancholy.Afterword: Marie Emily Fornario — A Historical Note.Acknowledgements.

The Complete Novels of James Joyce


James Joyce - 2012
    Dubliners, about Joyce's native city, is faithful to his country, seeing it unflinchingly and challenging every precedent and piety in Irish literature. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, struggling musicians, poets, patriots, and many more simply striving to get by.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man falls between the realism of Dubliners and the symbolism of Ulysses. The novel is a highly autobiographical account of the youth of Stephen Dedalus, who comes to realize that before he can become a true artist, he must rid himself of the stultifying effects of the religion, politics and essential bigotry of his life in late 19th century Ireland. Written with a light touch, it is perhaps the most accessible of Joyce's works.Ulysses is James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece. Scandalously frank, it tells of the events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during which Bloom's voluptuous wife, Molly, commits adultery. Initially deemed obscene in England and the USA, this richly-allusive novel, revolutionary in its modernistic experimentalism, was hailed as a work of genius by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway.Finnegans Wake is the book of Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle and their family - their book, but in a curious way the book of us all as well as all our books. Joyce's last great work, it is not comprised of many borrowed styles, like Ulysses, but, rather, formulated as one dense, tongue-twisting soundscape. It also remains the most hilarious, 'obscene', book of innuendos ever to be imagined.

Don't Go There


Colm Keegan - 2012
    A life and a mode of living and seeing that refuses to be marginalized are set against a backdrop of palpable geography. Rarely has a poet's voice, unfamiliar but true in its every utterance, been captured so well as it is in Keegan's first collection. Family, friends, children, and the urban sprawl he renders sparely yet lyrically, all are grist to the mill of his poetics.

Cave of Secrets


Morgan Llywelyn - 2012
    When Tom feels rejected by his father, he finds a secret second family among the group of smugglers who trade in and around Roaringwater Bay. Though Tom doesn't know it, his family in the big house is under huge pressure.

DruidMurphy: Plays by Tom Murphy


Tom Murphy - 2012
    Together, they tell the story of Irish emigration - of those who went and those who were left behind. Crossing oceans and spanning decades, Murphy's three plays cover the period from the Great Hunger of the nineteenth century to the 'new' Ireland of the 1970s, exploring what we mean when we call a place 'home'.Conversations on a Homecoming: County Galway, 1970s. Even the humblest of small-town pubs can be a magnet for dreamers. Michael, after a ten-year absence, suddenly returns from New York and has a reunion with old friends, in that same pub 'The White House'.A Whistle in the Dark: Coventry, 1960Irish emigrants, the uprooted Carney family, adapt aggressively to life in an English city.Famine: County Mayo, 1846In Glanconnor village in the west of Ireland, the second crop of potatoes fails. The community now faces the real prospect of starvation.With an introduction by Dr Patrick Lonergan, NUI GalwayDruidMurphy, presented by Druid in a co-production with Quinnipiac University Connecticut, NUI Galway, Lincoln Center Festival and Galway Arts Festival, marks a major celebration of one of Ireland's most respected living dramatists and toured Ireland, London and the US in 2012.

The Casting


Joyce Shor Johnson - 2012
    Ireland Twelve-year-old Robyn must decide her future at the coming of age ceremony, but choosing the right path is a challenge. Most girls in Robyn's village will choose traditional roles of healing, midwifery or farming. Others will choose to be warriors or go into Brehon law. None of these choices appeal to Robyn. Instead, she yearns for the red-hot crucibles full of molten bronze and the roaring fire of her father's foundry. But her future brother-in-law, Gilhey, her most ardent challenger at the foundry, has other plans. Will Robyn find the courage to stand up to Gilhey and become the bronze caster she longs to be?

The Sister Fidelma Mysteries: Essays on the Historical Novels of Peter Tremayne


Edward J. Rielly - 2012
    The novels, set mainly in 7th century Ireland, also include a great deal of history, which is not surprising given that the author is actually Peter Berresford Ellis, a noted Celtic historian. Some of the essays analyze aspects of the novels, focusing especially on the protagonist and her partner in detection and, ultimately, husband, Brother Eadulf. Other essays place Fidelma and the novels within the tradition of detective fiction. Still others explore the historical, intellectual, spiritual and geographical contexts for her labors. Also included are accounts of the author's career, the International Sister Fidelma Society, and the biennial Sister Fidelma conferences held in Cashel, Ireland.

Abandoned Darlings


Moya Cannon - 2012
    They are Megan Barr, Laura Caffrey, John Duffy, Fiona Farrelly, Trish Finnan, Eric Hanley, Robert Higgins, Helena Kilty, Paul McCarrick, Ruth Quinlan, Mark Ryan, Olivia Snider, and Christian Wallace. It is a rich collection of work, as diverse as its individual contributors. The writing takes us from the dust bowls, urban landscapes, and lakeshores of North America, across the searing cold of the Russian winter and the treacherous roads of South America to the wind-lashed Atlantic coast and boggy midlands of Ireland; from the darker aspects of what drives us to the start emptiness of loss and the enduring strength of family bonds. Within these poems and stories lies not only immediate satisfaction for the reader, but also a tantalising glimpse of future promise.

The China Factory


Mary Costello - 2012
    And in the title story a teenage girl strikes up an unlikely friendship with a lonely bachelor.Love, loss, betrayal. Grief, guilt, longing. The act of grace or forgiveness that can suddenly transform and redeem lives. In these twelve haunting stories Mary Costello carefully examines the passions and perils of everyday life and relationships and, with startling insight, casts a light on the darkest corners of the human heart.What emerges is a compassionate exploration of how ordinary men and women endure the trials and complexities of marriage, memory, adultery, death, and the ripples of disquiet that lie just beneath the surface. With a calm intensity and an undertow of sadness, she reveals the secret fears and yearnings of her characters, and those isolated moments when a few words or a small deed can change everything, with stark and sometimes brutal consequences.

This Is Just This. This Isn't Real. It's Money - The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Irish Plays


Thomas ConwayUna McKevitt - 2012
    Here, the enterprise of playwriting itself is being re-imagined. Here, above all else, is a commitment to becoming in the theatre.For all that, each play is concerned with what is unfinished business in Ireland. How astonishing, then, that these plays should revolve for the most part around identity and, in particular, sexual identity. How identity comes into play, how we open up the field of play, how we raise into collective experience the exercise of that play – the urgency in the playwriting would appear to lie precisely here.We can read from the historical moment – from a narrative emphasizing an economic bubble and its hangover – into these plays. Or we can take these playwrights at their word and observe lives lived at the contour of identities in the making. It is for us as readers, just as we have as theatre-goers – frequently scandalized, enthralled, shamed, appalled, unburdened, tickled pink – to decide.

The Dark Earth and the Light Sky


Nick Dear - 2012
    In 1913 he meets American poet Robert Frost and everything changes. As their friendship blossoms Edward writes, emerging from his cocoon of self-doubt into one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. But he makes the drastic decision to enlist, confounding his friends and family.The Dark Earth and the Light Sky, which premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London, in November 2012, delves into the life of this enigmatic and complex character in an era of change and destruction.