" A] brilliant and altogether engaging new translation" ("Los Angeles Times") of the greatest epic in Irish literature
Dating from the eighth century, "The Tain" is the oldest Irish epic, a mythic tale on par with "Beowulf" and "The Aeneid." Following legendary warrior Cu Chulainn into his battle against the invading army of Connacht, "The Tain" is the story of the emergence of a hero, a paean to the Irish landscape, and a bawdy and contentious marital farce. In its first translation in forty years, Ciaran Carson brings this seminal work of Irish literature fully to life, capturing all of its visceral power in what acclaimed poets Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon individually called one of the best books of the year.

'I write to try to see you as you were, or what you have become. You left no forwarding address: that was part of your intention. For when we wrote those letters to each other all those years ago, we wrote as much for ourselves as for each other.' More than twenty years after the end of their love affair, Gabriel receives a cryptic postcard from old flame Nina. It is the first of thirteen cards from her, each one provoking a series of reveries about their life together in 1980s Belfast. The Pen Friend is, however, much more than a love story. As Gabriel teases out the significance of the cards, his reveries develop into richly textured meditations on writing, memory, spiritualism and surveillance. The result is an intricate web of fact and fiction - moving easily between such varied subjects as the Troubles, Esperanto and John Lavery - a strange and wonderful novel by one of our finest Irish writers. If you enjoyed The Pen Friend, you might also enjoy Ciaran Carson's Exchange Place, a brilliant thriller set in Paris and Belfast.

Last Night’s Fun is a sparkling celebration of music and life that is itself a literary performance of the highest order. Ciaran Carson’s inspired jumble of recording history, poetry, tall tales, and polemic captures the sound and vigor of a ruthlessly unsentimental music. Last Night’s Fun is remarkable for its liveliness, honesty, scholarship, and spontaneous joy; certainly there has never been a book about Irish music like this one, and few books ever written anywhere about the experience of music can compare with it..

This wildly imaginative commentary on human folly floats on or submerges in the ideal republic or the Otherworld promised in fairy stories, aislings, the land of Cockaigne, lines of cocaine, drunkenness, the land of the green rose, poppy-day imperialism, Loyalist and Fenian ballad -- all realms of or tickets to Utopia.