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.
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.
HUBERT BUTLER
Butler’s essays do not just give insight into past events, but also into the past perceptions of those events. They are not just the story of one era, but of the self-perception of that era as well. His essays are a kind of time-capsule, and their moral attitude has an everlasting timeless quality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
MADDY TONGUE, with Michael and Sarah Longley & Chris Agee
Maddy Tongue’s heartfelt portrait of the dancer and teacher Helen Lewis, who survived Auschwitz to teach dance in Belfast.
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.
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.
JOHN F. DEANE & JAMES HARPUR
John F. Deane and James Harpur have devoted their lives to writing about the mysteries of existence and the divine. This selection of their poems displays how each poet has probed and described his journey in search of ultimate truth.
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.
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.
CHRIS AGEE
Caustically humorous and polemically compulsive, Trump Rant is a work of meticulous political portraiture: a deep-delving and epoch-spanning investigation into the nature of power in American life, made luminous by Chris Agee’s nuanced, exploratory understanding of authoritarian drift and thwarted democratic aspiration in a number of world-historical contexts, from Belfast to the Balkans to the formerly Confederate South. Free-roaming in its breadth of reference and tonal range, the Rant is at once viscerally personal and unsettlingly resonant, infused throughout with an almost hypnotic sense of scale, largesse, and historical moment.
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.”
