Irish Biography

Born in a Dublin tenement in the middle of the 20th century, this dead-poor, curious Irish girl escaped to Paris when she was 17 with the help of a nun, a Hollywood actor, and a kind stranger. There she was accepted into the emigre community blacklisted in the McCarthy era. She met James Baldwin and Ring Lardner, Jr.; Ruth Gordon gave her a fur coat. Still restless and full of dreams she spent years working her way around the world. On a ship bound for Egypt with her year-old daughter Aisling she fell in love with a radical longshoreman from San Francisco.

Twenty essays on Irish women, historical and contemporary, who have defied cultural norms around femininity and achieved great things. The subjects include Irish women from Queen Medb to Eileen Gray, from Constance Markievicz to Sonia O’Sullivan, covering stateswomen, artists, writers, activists and rebels of all kinds. Written by multi-award-winning author and first Laureate na nÓg (Irish Children’s Laureate) Siobhán Parkinson. Perfect for use in schools as well as for leisure listening, this collection celebrates the role of women in Ireland’s changing society.

Yeats is widely regarded as one of the most important English-language writers of the 20th century. A hero of the pen rather than the sword. A Nobel Prize winner for Literature and a two-term senator of the Irish Free State, Yeats lived a full, active life that combined poetry and politics.

On 1 November 1920, eighteen-year-old UCD medical student Kevin Barry was hanged in Dublin’s Mountjoy Jail for his role in a bungled IRA operation in which three British soldiers were killed. To this day, he remains a vibrant and celebrated icon of patriotic, idealistic death, his name synonymous with youthful republican sacrifice. His life was short, but Kevin was more than a hapless teen swept away in the revolutionary maelstrom of the time. Here, Professor Eunan O’Halpin, a grand-nephew of Barry, accesses exclusive family records and other archives to explore Kevin’s republicanism ...

What can we learn from an ordinary life observed with extraordinary skill? In The Irish Goodbye, Beth Ann Fennelly writes of the small moments that shape a life, whether moving or perplexing or troubling or gladdening, in the process dignifying the diminutive through the act of attention. Fennelly explores her roles as a friend, wife, mother, and daughter, documenting a brush with an old flame or the devastating death of her sister in crystalline, precise sentences.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NOW AN FX LIMITED SERIES STREAMING ON HULU NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER From the author of Empire of Pain—a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions. One of The New York...

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 British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York - the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.

With green eyes and an easy smile, Frank McCabe stole me away from the nightmares that awaited me at home. But the son of the Irish Mob would never be mine. I belonged to the Italians. And the moment my mother sold me to the head of the Italian Mafia, I became the one the people of Boston were warned about. The only person more feared than me in our city is the Irish Ghost. When I finally flee my marital prison with my sons and my sister in tow, I unwittingly run straight into the ghost of the Irishman who died in a fiery explosion years ago.

Most readers have heard of Ulysses. Few have actually read it. This edition is for both. Published in Paris in 1922, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom through a single day in Dublin — June 16, 1904 — and in doing so dismantles every assumption about what a novel can be and do. Stream of consciousness, interior monologue, parody, myth, obscenity, tenderness, comedy: Joyce deploys them all simultaneously, not as technique but as necessity. He was not being difficult. He was being honest about the way a mind actually works. Ulysses — One day. One city. One man buying a kidney for breakfast, ...

Every technique that defines modern literary fiction was invented in this novel. Stream of consciousness, the epiphany as aesthetic form, free indirect style pushed to its outermost limit, prose that changes register and syntax as a character's mind changes — none of these existed in literature before James Joyce sat down, between 1904 and 1914, to write the story of a boy named Stephen Dedalus growing up in Catholic Ireland. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is not merely a great novel. It is the instrument by which the novel became something it had never been before. ...

The fullest, most textural, most accurate—most human—account of Oscar Wilde's unique and dazzling life—based on extensive new research and newly discovered materials, from Wilde's personal letters and transcripts of his first trial to newly uncovered papers of his early romantic (and...

For decades the FBI let James ''Whitey'' Bulger get away with murder, allowing him continued control of his criminal enterprise in exchange for information. He went on the lam in 1995, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, 2011 followed top-ranked Osama bin Laden on the FBI'''s Ten Most Wanted List, and then was captured in Santa Monica, California weeks after Bin Laden's demise.

Ireland's patron saint has long been shrouded in legend: he drove the snakes out of Ireland; he triumphed over Druids and their super-natural powers; he used a shamrock to explain the Christian mystery of the Trinity. But his true story is more fascinating than the myths.

One sunlit evening, May 6, 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were funded by American supporters of Irish independence and carried out by the Invincibles, a militant faction of republicans.

"The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War" (The New York Times Book Review); an instant classic straight from the front lines. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of...

The autobiographical account of how the Irish writer Felicity Hayes-McCoy and her English husband, opera director Wilf Judd, chose to divide their life between inner-city London and a remote house on Ireland's Dingle Peninsula, a place Felicity fell in love with at the age of 17.

1975: A young Irish-American man joins an elite US Marine unit to get the most intensive military training possible—then joins the Irish Republican Army, during the days of some of the bloodiest fighting ever in the Irish-British conflict. It is a story that will see him running guns with American mobster—and secret IRA fundraiser—Whitey Bulger; running from safe house to safe house in the Irish countryside, one step ahead of British troops; fending off a recruitment offer from the CIA; and being one of the masterminds behind a campaign to take out London's electrical system.

"I Am I Am I Am is a gripping and glorious investigation of death that leaves the reader feeling breathless, grateful, and fully alive. Maggie O’Farrell is a miracle in every sense. I will never forget this book." —Ann Patchett An extraordinary memoir—told entirely in near-death...

Did you know that a poet named William Drennan was the first to name Ireland the “Emerald Island”? He was referring to the green hills of Ireland’s countryside in his poem “When Erin first rose”. The countryside is what defines Ireland probably the best since, for a long time, it played a major role in the economy and culture of the nation.

Grace O'Malley, daughter of a clan chief in the far west of Ireland, went from marriage at fifteen to piracy on the high seas. She soon had a fleet of galleys under her commander, but her three decades of plundering, kidnapping, murder and mayhem came to a close in 1586, when she was captured and sentenced to hang. Saved from the scaffold by none other than Queen Elizabeth herself—another powerful woman in a man's world—Grace's life took another extraordinary turn, when it was rumored she had become intelligencer for the queen's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham.