Bookshop

The 2025 Irish Pages Literary Diary

$25.00

 

A week-to-view diary, this elegant and practical publication gathers extracts from twenty years of outstanding writing from Irish Pages (the island’s premier literary journal) and The Irish Pages Press. With an array of distinguished Irish and international authors, The 2025 Irish Pages Literary Diary is an essential holiday gift for readers, writers, and anyone interested in the life of the mind and the state of the world.

 

The Diary features classic texts by celebrated authors such as Kathleen Jamie, Susan Sontag, Patricia Craig, Slavenka Drakulić, Julia Kristeva and Chinua Achebe, as well as the remarkable work of emerging writers living in Ireland. The Diary includes quotations in English, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Irish, highlighting the linguistic range across Ireland and Britain.

Dear Orson Welles & Other Essays

$36.00

MARK COUSINS

In this wide-ranging, stylish and iconoclastic book, Cousins reflects on his prolific career in filmmaking, meditating on the actors, directors, films, writers and philosophers that have influenced him, as well as on other adventures in filmland and on creativity in general.

Theory of Sorrow

$32.00

SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ

 

It is 1914, the eve of the First World War. Mileva Einstein has just arrived in Berlin with her two young sons to join her husband, the most celebrated scientist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein. He has finally found a university position worthy of his talents.

And then Mileva then receives a letter from him outlining “Conditions” he expects her to uphold in order to continue their relationship, and her already difficult life is completely upended.

Daddy Issues

$34.00

DINO PEŠUT

 

Croatia’s Groundbreaking Gay Novel.

 

“I receive the news of my father’s grave illness with almost complete indifference. I’m finding it mildly annoying, like road construction… He called me just briefly; he doesn’t want to bother me too much. I’m at work right now. I hang up. I’m furious at my father’s potentially terminal illness. I work at the reception desk of an okay hotel… My job is not demanding—often it’s boring, but it keeps my curiosity alive. I especially like working the evening shifts and figuring out who is sleeping with whom. At night, I get to read a lot. Secretly, I write poetry.”

The Story of a Man Who Collapsed Into His Notebook

$32.00

IVANA SAJKO

 

The Story of a Man Who Collapsed Into His Notebook is about departures, childhood, the end of a relationship and the vanishing possibility in today’s world of fleeing to a better place. Written in the first person, each chapter a single sentence, the novel is an internal soliloquy of self-examination, an excavation of a life punctuated by upheaval and loss, hope and disillusionment, ambition and failure.

Unterstadt – A Novel

$36.00

IVANA ŠOJAT

 

The novel Unterstadt tells the story of an urban family of German origin living in Osijek from the end of the nineteenth till the end of the twentieth century. It is narrated through the portrayal of the destinies of four generations of women – a great grandmother, a grandmother, mother, and a daughter – their shattered illusions, the education of their children, the historical events that brutally lash out at them.

Irish Pages: The Classic Heaney Issue

$36.00

A hardback reprint of the classic Irish Pages issue on Seamus Heaney to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his death on 30 August 2013. “So many people in Ireland and overseas read, admired, and watched him. The extraordinary degree to which Heaney was a creative and ethical exemplar, shaper, mentor, influence, and generous friend for his fellow poets and writers comes through especially powerfully in this book, with its 54 contributors from Ireland, Britain, the United States and further afield…” Includes four last poems by Seamus Heaney.

Errigal: Sacred Mountain

$36.00

CATHAL Ó SEARCAIGH

 

In Errigal: Sacred Mountain, Ó Searcaigh (one of Ireland’s most celebrated poets, in both Irish and English) goes on a pilgrim path around Errigal and – in the active meditation of walking – summons up the spirit of this revered mountain, the largest in Ireland. In his “Passages of Light” as he calls them, we get a vivid and an insightful word-journey around a mountain that has shaped the thinking of one of the most eminent poets in the Irish language.

Old Istanbul & Other Essays

$30.00

GERARD McCARTHY

 

This is the first book of essays by a major new Irish non-fiction writer from the West of Ireland, comparable to the celebrated Kilkenny essayist Hubert Butler first published by The Lilliput Press and subsequently widely acclaimed. McCarthy’s writing is no less distinguished than Butler’s.

Aa Cled Wi Clouds She Cam

$30.00

60 LYRICS FRAE THE CHINESE:Translations in Scots and English

BRIAN HOLTON

Brian Holton is unique in that he can translate directly into Scots from the Chinese. This anthology consists of translations into Scots and English of the first sixty poems of the standard anthology Song Ci Sanbaishou (“300 Sòng Dynasty Song Lyrics”), edited by Zhu Zumou (1924), with a Translator’s Afterword/Owresetter’s Eftirword.

Gatherings of Irish Harpers 1780 – 1840

$15.00

DAVID BYERS

In 1792 the Harpers’ Meeting in Belfast was indeed an important event in the history and life of the town. Belfast’s reformers and radicals desired a better future, but they also shared an interest in the past. Through their support for the few surviving harpers, they hoped future generations might benefit from the survival of a tradition and an instrument, music, language, and practises that were all fast disappearing.

Invisible Woman and Other Stories

$32.00

SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ

 

Invisible Woman and Other Stories takes us on an intimate journey of ageing, from the shock of catching a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror as others see us to the actual slipping away of the self. The stories speak of reckonings: with the illness and death of a parent, with the emotional baggage that must be cleared out along with the material remains, with memories and missed opportunities, and with the waning of desire.

 

Shortlisted for the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development Literature Prize 2023. 

Sappho: Songs and Poems

$30.00

Translated from the Greek

CHRIS PREDDLE

 

Here are Sappho’s songs and poems as English poems, all her famous pieces, all the fragments that can make connected sense, and all the discoveries of 2004 and 2014. These translations set out to be good English poetry first and foremost, and succeed well beyond other current versions. They have been made directly from Sappho’s Greek, by a poet with three collections to his credit, and are relatively close to the Greek. Each piece has a concise footnote that explains references and allusions, and suggests critical appreciation. A substantial Afterword says much more about Sappho’s themes, her art and style, and her historical setting.

Phantom Gang

$30.00

CIARÁN O’ROURKE

 

Longlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize 2023

 

With lyric grace and meditative clarity, Phantom Gang offers a daring dissection of civilizational violence in a variety of contexts – from the intimate atavisms and inequalities of Irish history to the insidious growth of the global Big Tech economy in the present day – alongside deep, sensually delicate explorations of broken love and salvaged memories.