AN INTRODUCTION TO IRISH, SCOTS GAELIC AND SCOTS IN ULSTER AND SCOTLAND
Funded by generous Irish-British grants from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Foras na Gaeilge, the Ulster-Scots Agency, Comcille, Bord na Gàidhlig and the Gaelic Books Council in Scotland, The Other Tongues is a beautifully-produced, ground-breaking and major anthology in a coffee-table-book format, aimed at the general reader in English as well as in Irish, Scots Gaelic and Scots.
CHRIS AGEE
A decade after Next to Nothing, Chris Agee’s critically acclaimed and achingly powerful collection of poems in memory of his daughter Miriam, Blue Sandbar Moon explores with delicate precision the emotional and spiritual landscape of a life sustained in “the aftermath of aftermath.” Consisting mainly of 174 untitled, interconnected short poems, the collection evolves with technical grace and meditative clarity to present a holistic and searching vision of worlds in motion – both public and private, natural and imagined, the seen and the sensed.
CATHAL Ó SEARCAIGH
Crann na Teanga/The Language Tree is a collection that enriches our understanding of the turbulent times we live in. In this long “life in poetry” (books from 1975 to the present), Ó Searcaigh is lifted emotionally and imaginatively beyond his own life into the life of all, into our common cosmic existence.
PATRICIA CRAIG
This long-awaited selection of essays and reviews from one of Ireland’s leading critics brings together a wealth of reflection, observation and astute literary comment. It ranges in time from William Carleton to Edna O’Brien, and in subject matter from recent Irish poetry to ghosts, children’s books and MI5.
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.”
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.
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.
NEBOJŠA LUJANOVIĆ
When a fire at Zagreb’s Three Palms café tragically takes the life of the owner’s son, everyone joins the search for a culprit. And there can only be one: the young Roma man – Enis – employed as a waiter at the café.
LUKA BEKAVAC
August After Midnight is a Croatian novel about memory, trauma and transcommunication: a triptych of different voices, weaving together historiography, speculative fiction and highly stylized prose.
IGOR ŠTIKS
Igor Štiks’ fourth novel, mysteriously titled with only one letter, W, is his most elaborate so far – and definitely his most exciting – a feat of storytelling in which historic tragedies are woven through with humour and erotic passion.
EDITED BY H.L. HIX
The first major anthology of contemporary American poetry ever to be published in Ireland, New Voices brings together thirty distinguished younger poets (born between 1966 and 1982) in a selection of work characterized by an unusual range and depth of thematic concerns, stylistic procedures and authorial identities.
GARRY MACKENZIE
The author, Garry MacKenzie, writes of this book:
“My book-length poem draws on the work of an eighteenth-century Gaelic poem by Duncan Bàn MacIntyre, rendering it into English. Where it does so, this is not to present MacIntyre’s poetry per se to an English-language reader, as is customary with a translation or version. Instead, the sections of Ben Dorain which draw upon MacIntyre’s poem incorporate that earlier work into a whole which is completely new. MacIntyre’s work is always in conversation with (and frequently contradicted by) lines which do not derive from him and which bring in contemporary ideas about ecology, land use, environmentalism, music, mythology, queer theory, and diverse cultural histories not to be found in the Gaelic poem. MacIntyre’s lines are never unfiltered by contemporary thought or commentary. My approach was to create a new, multifaceted, ecological poem, rather than simply to render a Gaelic poem into English so that it is available to a wider readership. For that reason I describe the poem not as a translation or version, but as a creative conversation.”
