This chart-topping 2014 album release from Lana Del Rey is presented in piano/vocal/guitar arrangements for all 11 songs: Brooklyn Baby * Cruel World * Money Power Glory * Old Money * The Other Woman * Pretty When You Cry * Sad Girl * Ultraviolence * West Coast * and more.

    Each year, on his birthday - the 8th of December, Feast of the Immaculate Conception - he and his mother would journey by train to the capital city, passing frosted pink fields at dawn, to arrive at Westland Row and the beginning of a day's adventures that included much-anticipated trips to Clery's and the Palm Beach ice-cream parlour. The aspiring writer first came to live in the city when he was eighteen. In a once grand but now dilapidated flat in Upper Mount Street, he wrote and dreamed and hoped. It was a cold time, for society and for the individual - one the writer would later explore through the famed Benjamin Black protagonist Quirke - but underneath the seeming permafrost a thaw was setting in, and Ireland was beginning to change.Alternating between vignettes of Banville's own past, and present-day historical explorations of the city, Time Pieces is a vivid evocation of childhood and memory - that 'bright abyss' in which 'time's alchemy works' - and a tender and powerful ode to a formative time and place for the artist as a young man. Accompanied by images of the city by photographer Paul Joyce.

    Robert, her cellist husband, has always felt stifled by The Mai's ideals of perfection. After seventeen years he leaves her, whereupon she sets about building a dream house in the hope that he will one day return to her. From her fairytale castle, The Mai waits by the window for her dark-haired prince to return. Set in the inspiring surrounds of the West of Ireland, on the banks of the legendary Owl Lake, we enter this world on the day of Robert's return after an absence of four years. In the midst of Mai's and Robert's troubled reunion are the idiosyncratic characters that comprise the family. Irreverent and unapologetic, the opium-smoking one-hundred-year-old matriarch, Grandma Fraochlan, presides over all. The "Spanish Beauty," as she is known, with her "ancient and fantastical memory" and mythical presence, reminds us that the past is looming ever present. Her daughters, Agnes and Julie, meddle in the affairs of their three nieces, with comical tenacity. Deeply theatrical and profoundly intense, THE MAI is an epic tale of love and loss, of elusive dreams shattered by vulgar but inescapable reality.

    Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

    As John Banville writes in his introduction to The Love Object, Edna O'Brien "is, simply, one of the finest writers of our time." The thirty-one stories collected in this volume provide, among other things, a cumulative portrait of Ireland, seen from within and without. Coming of age, the impact of class, and familial and romantic love are the prevalent motifs, along with the instinct toward escape and subsequent nostalgia for home. Some of the stories are linked and some carry O'Brien's distinct sense of the comical. In "A Rose in the Heart of New York," the single-mindedness of love dramatically derails the relationship between a girl and her mother, while in "Sister Imelda" and "The Creature" the strong ties between teacher and student and mother and son are ultimately broken. "The Love Object" recounts a passionate affair between the narrator and her older lover. The magnificent, mid-career title story from Lantern Slides portrays a Dublin dinner party that takes on the lives and loves of all the guests. More recent stories include "Shovel Kings" -- "a masterpiece of compression, distilling the pain of a lost, exiled generation" (Sunday Times) -- and "Old Wounds," which follows the revival and demise of the friendship between two elderly cousins. In 2011, Edna O'Brien's gifts were acknowledged with the most prestigious international award for the story, the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. The Love Object illustrates a career's worth of shimmering, potent prose from a writer of great courage, vision, and heart. "The most striking aspect of Edna O'Brien's short stories, aside from the consistent mastery with which they are executed, is their diversity."-John Banville

    One of the most influential poets of his age, W.B. Yeats eluded the grasp of many who sought to explain him. His life was complex in both its outer and inner events. Yeats's mystical concerns, such as his involvement with spiritualism and construction of a transcendental world system in A Vision, coexisted and occasionally clashed with his active involvement in public affairs. In this classic critical examination of the poet, Richard Ellmann strips away the masks of his subject: occultist, senator of the Irish Free State, libidinous old man, and Nobel Prize winner.

    It tells the story of a great cattle-raid, the invasion of Ulster by the armies of Medb and Ailill, queen and king of Connacht, and their allies, seeking to carry off the great Brown Bull of Cúailnge. The hero of the tale is Cúchulainn, the Hound of Ulster, who resists the invaders single-handed, while Ulster's warriors lie sick.Thomas Kinsella's presents a complete and living version of the story. His translation is based on the partial texts in two medieval manuscripts, with elements from other version, and adds a group of related stories which prepare for the action of the Táin. Illustrated with brush drawings by Louis le Brocquy, this edition provides a combination of medieval epic and modern art.

    ?Shortlisted for the 2021 An Post Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year...A darkly funny, gripping and profoundly moving novel about a life spinning out of control, a life live without the bedrock of familial love, and the corruption of material wealth that tears at the soul. ‘It was my father’s arrest that brought me here, although you could certainly say that I took the scenic route.’Here is rehab, where Ben – the only son of a rich South Dublin banker – is piecing together the shattered remains of his life. Abruptly cut off, at the age of 27, from a life of heedless privilege, Ben flounders through a world of drugs and dead-end jobs, his self-esteem at rock bottom. Even his once-adoring girlfriend, Clio, is at the end of her tether.  Then Ben runs into an old school friend who wants to cut him in on a scam: a shady property deal in the Balkans. The deal will make Ben rich and, at one fell swoop, will deliver him from all his troubles: his addictions, his father’s very public disgrace, and his own self-loathing and regret. Problems solved. But something is amiss. For one thing, the Serbian partners don’t exactly look like fools. (In fact they look like gangsters.) And, for another, Ben is being followed everywhere he goes. Someone is being taken for a ride. But who?

    

    Leaving home is a way to escape her sorrow and despair following the death of her boyfriend and a testy relationship with her mother, Verity. In Scotland she encounters love and excitement but when a series of unexpected events turn her new found life on its head, she is forced to make a life-changing decision, one that will stay with her for her whole life. The Closet of Savage Mementos is drawn directly from the author's own experiences and explores heartbreak, loss, motherhood and adoption in a gripping narrative and the same expressive, emotive and exciting prose we have come to expect of Nuala Ní Chonchúir. Reviews: 'Her finest novel yet.' - The Sunday Times Ní Chonchúir manages to strike a delicate balance between passion and poetry…The Closet of Savage Mementos is a book that will appeal to, and deserves, a wide audience.’ -- Sunday Business Post 'It is raw, beautiful and compelling, a 'must read'.' - Sunday Independent mpelling and deeply accomplished, The Closet of Savage Mementos is the product of a powerful literary talent. - Cork Evening Echo About the Author: Nuala Ní Chonchúir was born in Dublin in 1970; she lives in East Galway with her husband and three children. Her fourth short story collection Mother America was published by New Island in 2012; The Irish Times said of it: ‘Ní Chonchúir’s precisely made but deliciously sensual stories mark her as a carrier of Edna O’Brien’s flame.’ Her début novel You (New Island, 2010) was called ‘a gem’ by the Irish Examiner and ‘a heart-warmer’ by The Irish Times. A chapbook of flash fiction, Of Dublin and Other Fictions, is just out from Tower Press in the US. Nuala has won many writing awards including RTÉ radio’s Francis MacManus Award, the Cúirt New Writing Prize, the Jane Geske Award (USA), the inaugural Jonathan Swift Award, the Dublin Review of Books flash fiction prize and the Cecil Day Lewis Award. She was shortlisted for the European Prize for Literature and most recently won the Gladstone’s Library Flash Fiction Prize (UK).www.nualanichonchuir.com

    They are 300 times more effective than an ordinary patrol... If we are going to have murderers and terrorists roaming the towns, then we have to have somebody who is able to go out and find them.” Contemporary press report Some think it stood for ‘Military Reconnaissance Force’, others ‘Mobile Reconnaissance Force’. Many people thought it didn’t exist at all and was made up, a figment of the press’s imagination. To the members of the group that was just fine. It added to the illusion, and the speculation about the unit’s name and mission only added to the uncertainty amongst their targets — terrorists — members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the IRA, the provos. For decades there has been argument in the media and amongst politicians about the possible existence and extent of a shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland. MRF Shadow Troop confirms there was such an agenda in the early, chaotic days of British military intervention across the Irish Sea. Amongst the mountain of speculation there is little of any accuracy or authority relating to this period. Simon Cursey was recruited into the Military Reaction Force — the unit’s true name — in 1972. This book is his personal account of his time with the group and in it he reveals the truth about their operations — the briefings, missions, political wrangling, and government-sanctioned law-bending. With documents and photographs to corroborate all his revelations, MRF Shadow Troop is a fascinating, exciting but above all accurate historical text about the pioneers of counter-terrorism.

    In this book, she has written a few poems, where she has described herself in some complex and in simple words. Most of the poems are about her black and white memories and few are on generic topics. In this book, the reader will see her describing a relationship between mother nature and human nature in a poetic way.

    Emerging from the hospital, he has lost an arm and a leg, and his face has been disfigured. He becomes a sideshow freak to support himself, traveling around England and even back to Galway, but he eventually returns to London, where he dies, down and out, in one of the city's parks.

    Rich with magic and achingly beautiful, they speak of a land of heroic battles, intense love and warrior ideals, in which the otherworld is explored and men mingle freely with the gods. From the vivid adventures of the great Celtic hero Cu Chulaind, to the stunning 'Exile of the Sons of Uisliu' - a tale of treachery, honour and romance - these are masterpieces of passion and vitality, and form the foundation for the Irish literary tradition: a mythic legacy that was a powerful influence on the work of Yeats, Synge and Joyce.

    Starting with the first prehistoric inhabitants of the island, the book takes us right up to the present day, covering the Great Famine, Home Rule, the Good Friday Agreement, and beyond. Clear and lucid, Coohill’s writing paints an engaging picture of a people for whom history is a key part of present-day reality. Reviewing differing historical interpretations, Coohill allows the reader to come to their own conclusions. Highly accessible, yet demonstrating a sophisticated level of analysis, this book will continue to provide a valuable resource to tourists, students and all those wishing to acquaint themselves further with the complex identity of the Irish people.