The Easter Rising is perhaps the definitive moment that led to Ireland as it exists today—but the event itself was something of a debacle. Professor Conner walks you through the complex events leading up to the Rising, sketches the details of the week of battles and skirmishes, and reflects on the aftermath—both political and artistic.
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland....
A multigenerational tale about the passionate loves and losses of women in a family of firefighters traces their experiences spanning from famine-era Ireland to Brooklyn a decade after the September 11 attacks.
"Billy Lynch's family and friends have gathered to comfort his widow, and to pay their respects to one of the last great romantics. As they trade tales of his famous humor, immense charm, and consuming sorrow, a complex portrait emerges of an enigmatic man, a loyal friend, a beloved husband, an incurable alcoholic. Alice McDermott's striking novel, Charming Billy, is a study of the lies that bind and the weight of familial love, of the way good intentions...
The journalist and author recreates the hard-drinking Brooklyn-Irish lifestyle that informed every aspect of his childhood and early career, and eventually destroyed his marriage.
"For the centennial of its original publication, an irresistible Graphic Deluxe Edition of one of the most beloved books of the 20th century Perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language, James Joyce's Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of "dear dirty Dublin" at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as "Araby," "Grace," and "The Dead," delve into the heart of the...
Pulitzer Prize winning humanitarian Samantha Power offers an urgent response to the question "What can one person do?" In this memoir, Power transports us from her childhood in Dublin to the streets of war-torn Bosnia to the White House Situation Room and the world of high-stakes diplomacy. In 2005, her critiques of U.S. foreign policy caught the eye of newly elected senator Barack Obama, who invited her to work with him on Capitol Hill and then on...
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A book in the best tradition of popular history—the untold story of Ireland's role in maintaining Western culture while the Dark Ages settled on Europe. • The perfect St. Patrick's Day gift!
Every year millions of Americans celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but they may not be aware of how great an influence St. Patrick was on the subsequent history of civilization. Not only did he bring Christianity...
"From the National Book Award-winning and best-selling author Timothy Egan comes the epic story of one of the most fascinating and colorful Irishman in nineteenth-century America. The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against...
"Wilde's 'trivial play for serious people', a sparkling comedy of manners, is the epitome of wit and style. This brilliantly constructed satire with its celebrated characters and much-quoted dialogue turns accepted ideas inside out and is generally regarded as Wilde's masterpiece. This Methuen Drama Student Edition of the play includes commentary and notes by Lucie Sutherland, Assistant Professor in Drama at the University of Nottingham, UK, which...
When he was twelve years old, Adam went playing in the woods one sunny day with his two best friends. He never saw them again. Their bodies were never found and Adam himself was discovered with his back pressed agains an oak tree and his shoes filled with blood.
Based on the William Kennedy novel of the same name, IRONWEED is set in the waning years of the Depression. Jack Nicholson plays Francis Phelan, a washed-up baseball player who deserted his family back in the 1910s when he accidentally killed his infant son by dropping him. Since that time, Phelan has been a shabby barfly, living from drink to drink; spending his days palling around with Rudy (Tom Waits). Wandering into his hometown of Albany, New...
A rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. A radical young Irish monk struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gathers in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life...
Life as seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old Irish boy, Patrick Clarke, is a poignant voyage through a bewildering, ever-changing world of family, friends, dreams, and growing up.
Nearly a decade ago Frank McCourt became an unlikely star when, at the age of 66, he burst onto the literary scene with Angela's Ashes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of his childhood in Limerick, Ireland. Then came 'Tis, his glorious account of his early years in New York. Now here at last, is McCourt's long-awaited audio book about how his thirty-year teaching career shaped his second act as a writer. Teacher Man is also an urgent tribute to...
"'Tis is the story of Frank's American journey from impoverished immigrant to brilliant teacher and raconteur. Frank lands in New York at age nineteen, in the company of a priest he meets on the boat. He gets a job at the Biltmore Hotel, where he immediately encounters the vivid hierarchies of this "classless country," and then is drafted into the army and is sent to Germany to train dogs and type reports." "When Frank returns to America in 1953,...
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound, but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it; especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer. Late in the afternoon the sun slanted down into the mossy yard belonging to Francie Nolan's house,...
"The remarkable story of the mission that inspired a nation to donate massive relief to Ireland during the potato famine and began America's tradition of providing humanitarian aid around the world More than 5,000 ships left Ireland during the great potato famine in the late 1840s, transporting the starving and the destitute away from their stricken homeland. The first vessel to sail in the other direction, to help the millions unable to escape, was...
