The guide presents the major debates that surround these works as they develop, from Martin Esslin's early appropriation of the plays as examples of the Theatre of the Absurd, to recent poststructuralist and postcolonial readings by critics such as Steven Connor, Mary Bryden and Declan Kiberd. Throughout, Boxall clarifies and contextualizes critical responses to the plays, and considers the difficult relationship between Beckett and his critics.

    The combination of dazzling wit, subtle social criticism, sumptuous settings and the theme of a guilty secret proved a winner, both here and in his next three plays, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and his undisputed masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. This volume includes all Wilde's plays from his early tragedy Vera to the controversial Salome and the little known fragments, La Sainte Courtisane and A Florentine Tragedy. The edition affords a rare chance to see Wilde's best known work in the context of his entire dramatic output, and to appreciate plays which have hitherto received scant critical attention.

    The story of a lifetime.If you had to pick five people to sum up your life, who would they be? If you were to raise a glass to each of them, what would you say? And what would you learn about yourself, when all is said and done?This is the story of Maurice Hannigan, who, over the course of a Saturday night in June, orders five different drinks at the Rainford House Hotel. With each he toasts a person vital to him: his doomed older brother, his troubled sister-in-law, his daughter of fifteen minutes, his son far off in America, and his late, lamented wife. And through these people, the ones who left him behind, he tells the story of his own life, with all its regrets and feuds, loves and triumphs.Beautifully written, powerfully felt, When All Is Said promises to be the next great Irish novel.

    She has been brutually stabbed to death. For Dublin's police and politicians, the nightmare is just beginning. The dead girl is the daughter of a high-profile American surgeon who heads the Mercy Hospital's new Heart Foundation.When DS Jim Clarke and his team pick up the trail of a suspect, the pressure is on to close in quickly. America is baying for justice. But do they have the right man?At the Mercy Hospital Frank Clancy, consultant haematologist, is concerned about two unusual deaths. But when he decides to take a closer look he places his own life in danger...

    It embraces a wide range of social milieux, from the miseries of the tenements to the cultivated, bourgeois Bradshaws. It introduces a memorable cast of characters: the main protagonist, Fitz, a model of the hard-working, loyal and abused trade unionist; the isolated, well-meaning and ineffectual Fr O'Connor; the wretched and destitute Rashers Tierney. In the background hovers the enormous shadow of Jim Larkin, Plunkett's real-life hero.Strumpet City's popularity derives from its realism and its naturalistic presentation of traumatic historical events. There are clear heroes and villians. The book is informed by a sense of moral outrage at the treatment of the locked-out trade unionists, the indifference and evasion of the city's clergy and middle class and the squalor and degradation of the tenement slums.

    Nine-year-old Megan lives in a redbrick house in Dublin with her mother, a beautiful and lonely artist, and her grandmother; her father's whereabouts are a mystery that she often thinks about.When an American family moves in downstairs and Megan's mother begins a tentative affair with the father, everything that Megan is sure of starts to unravel.  From her friendship with the boy next door to the strange food that the new family cooks, from her relationship with the impossibly sophisticated Beth to the possibilities opened up by the temptation of swimming at night, it is a summer that will impact Megan in ways she could never predict.

    

    But he came from London's East End and settled in the north, a mean, dark, secretive man who was interested only in lining his pockets at the expense of those around him - most especially his wife and daughters. Ellen, his wife, bore with him for years, until she found her children threatened. Then she was prepared to fight like a tigress to protect the four girls, give them a chance of a new and better life, a chance to escape from the evil and oppressive legacy of Billy London. There was Abigail, clever, ambitious, and with an outer shell of steel that life had taught her was necessary if she was to survive. Tishy, overwhelmingly lovely, who lived in a world all her own. Marie, brisk, capable, and nearly strong enough to defy her father on her own. And Theresa, more wounded, more vulnerable, more damaged by Billy than any of them. As the sirens of 1939 heralded the advent of war, so Billy London's girls began their own battle for new, triumphant, and fulfilling lives.

    Uh uh. No.This can’t be happening.Griffin Keith is absolutely not sitting behind my boss’s desk.He’s certainly not looking at me like he’s just won a decade-old rivalry.And I definitely don’t find him just as unbelievably sexy as I did back in our college days.…I guess today must be Opposite Day.So this is what I get for company loyalty, huh?Working my butt off for eight years, I've made it all the way to vice president.But now the business is going under and look who’s stepped in to pick up the pieces.Yeah, that’s right.The cockiest billionaire in Manhattan real estate.The one guy in this city who can get under my skin with a single smirk.The tyrannical, egotistical hunk I spent all of college in hateful lust with.Just. My. Luck.I know Griffin’s only keeping me around to get his kicks in.Once he’s bored playing with me, I’ll be fired faster than you can say "Hate you very much".What’s my plan? Well, I don’t have one… yet.But you’d better believe that I’m not taking this — or anything! — lying down.College may be far in the past, but Griffin is obviously ready to pick up right where we left off.And I say bring it! Bring everything you got!Just, um, don’t bring up our little mistake during Welcome Week. That can stay in the dorm room closet where we left it.Like smart, feisty heroines and hunky, alpha heroes clashing (then kissing) in an office setting? Then look no further! Every book in Hunky Bossy Billionaires can be read as a standalone. No cheating, no cliffhangers, and, of course, HEA all day, every day!

    Some of them were entirely lost…a great chastening is upon them unlike any the ancient Christian world has ever seen.” - Alcuin of York, Letter to Arno King Horic is dead. The oaths that once bonded the Danes and Northmen in the islands of Aquitaine have broken. Hasting's new land is imperiled by fearsome challengers and old foes alike. A rumor from the continent will shatter the brittle veneer of his strength and expose his deepest wound from the past. His greatest trial will not be fought with a sword, ax, or shield, but with his heart. A supposed son of Ragnar Lodbrok, and referred to in the Gesta Normannorum as the Scourge of the Somme and Loire, his life exemplified the qualities of the ideal Viking. Join author and historian C.J. Adrien on an adventure that explores the early life and adventures of the Viking Hasting and his crew.

    Sparrow's dream is the World Lightweight Championship. But when he finally has it in his grasp he can't deliver the finishing punch. Sparrow's life falls apart, and fifteen years later he's a bum, a loser. Then something happens that convinces him that there are still things worth fighting for ...

    But when her sister Claire inherits the family home she discovers her sister's secret diary, which tells a very different story.

    Costello's spellbinding novel, The Rag Tree, breathes dark, vivid life into Ireland's passionate legends. Crisp and sharp-witted, Costello's tale probes a modern Ireland torn between letting go of time-honored dreams and embracing the promises of a prosperous New Ireland. Even as they struggle against one another, the Irish Special Branch, the British Army, Scotland Yard, and the I.R.A. find themselves forced to ally against a common foe: The Rag Man. Mattie Joe Treacy is the Rag Man. Engrossed in a desperate quest to find his missing father, Mattie Joe is cursed-by the playboy's life of drink and carousing, by his family's staunch adherence to Ireland's old folk ways, and by a family curse hurled at his clan generations ago. The Curse of the O'Neills, invoked by an angry cleric against Mattie Joe's great-grandfather, declares that, "the eldest son will not survive the father." No Treacy son has since outlived his father, and Mattie Joe is next in line to die. Or is he?

    It is a portrait of a ghetto saint - an ordinary man selected by the universe to bring enlightenment to poor belittled people.

    In the characters and their circumstances details of Joyce's life are evident. The main character, Richard Rowan, the moody, tormented writer who is at odds with both his wife and the parochial Irish society around him, is clearly a portrait of Joyce himself. The character of Rowan's wife, Bertha, is certainly influenced by Joyce's lover and later wife, Nora Barnacle, with whom he left Ireland and lived a seminomadic existence in Zurich, Rome, Trieste, and Paris. As in real life, the play depicts the couple with a young son and, like Joyce, Rowan has returned to Ireland because of his mother's illness and subsequent death.One can also detect hints of Joyce's interest in Nietzsche in Rowan's flawed pursuit of total individual freedom despite the stifling morals of Irish society. Though wrestling with guilt over his own infidelities, Rowan insists on this personal liberty, not only for himself but for his wife as well, who he knows is tempted by his cousin's amorous overtures.Joyce's decision to express himself in the form of a play no doubt reflects his long admiration of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. In the tense dialogue, the largely interior drama focused on the characters' relationships, the undertones of guilt, and the longing for freedom one sees similarities with Ibsen's themes. Also the spare, understated writing style - so unlike Joyce's exuberant, playful, and experimental use of language in his novels - shows the influence of Ibsen's "naked drama" (as Joyce described Ibsen's style in a published review). Above all, Joyce emulated the Scandinavian master in making the central issue of his drama the conflict between individual freedom and a demanding, judgmental society. In Exiles the protagonists struggle with the choice between living in defiance of the rigid conventions of Irish society or exile from their homeland.Though lesser-known, Exiles, written after Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and while Joyce was working on Ulysses, provides interesting insights into the development of the creative gifts of a literary genius.