Featuring nine in-depth interviews with Mike Murphy and three round-table discussions with fellow Irish writers and critics, Reading the Future creates a unique freeze-frame portrait of Ireland's literary culture at the turn of the century - and provides fascinating insights into the shaping influences on the lives, creative minds and working methods of twelve great writers. Including a challenging introduction by Declan Kiberd, consulting editor to the series and chairman of the selection panel, Reading the Future is an indispensable source for any serious reader of Irish literature.

To celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ulysses, the most important literary work of the twentieth century, eighteen artists, writers and thinkers respond to an episode each of the great modernist text. Each essayist is an expert in one of the subjects treated in the novel, but what brings them together is a common love of Ulysses. Joseph O'Connor considers the music-saturated Sirens episode and David McWilliams writes about the bigotry and violence of nationalism on display in Cyclops. Irish obstetrician Rhona Mahony responds to Oxen and the Sun, set in a maternity hospital, journalist Lara Marlowe examines the Aeolus episode, which takes place in a newspaper office, and Irish philosopher Richard Kearney reflects on the erudite musings of Stephen Dedalus as he walks along Sandymount strand. The Book About Everything counters the perception of Ulysses as the sole preserve of academics and instead showcases readers' responses to the book. It is a vivid, even eccentric collection, filled with life and Joycean spirit.

The Irish Writer and the World is a major new book by one of Ireland's most prominent scholars and cultural commentators. Declan Kiberd, author of the award-winning Irish Classics and Inventing Ireland, here synthesises the themes that have occupied him throughout his career as the leading critic of Irish literature and culture. Kiberd argues that political conflict between Ireland and England ultimately resulted in cultural confluence and that writing in the Irish language was hugely influenced by the English literary tradition. He continues his exploration of the role of Irish politics and culture in a decolonising world, and covers Anglo-Irish literature, the fate of the Irish language and the Celtic Tiger. This fascinating collection of Kiberd's work over twenty-five years demonstrates the extraordinary range, astuteness and wit that have made him a defining voice in Irish studies and beyond, and will bring his work to new audiences across the world.

The greatest novel of the twentieth century, now in a beautiful Clothbound Classics centenary edition Following the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th of June 1904, and what happens to the characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, Ulysses is a monument to the human condition. It has survived censorship, controversy and legal action, and even been deemed blasphemous, but remains an undisputed modernist classic: ceaselessly inventive, garrulous, funny, sorrowful, vulgar, lyrical and ultimately redemptive. It confirms Joyce's belief that literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'.

In Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd argues that James Joyce's Ulysses offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. As much a guide to contemporary life as it is virtuoso work of literary criticism, Ulysses and Us offers revolutionary insights to the scholar and the first-time reader alike. Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the hero of James Joyce's Ulysses, teaches the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the city streets, and in his apparently banal way sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of the literature upon which Joyce drew in writing Ulysses, such as Homer, Dante and the Bible. 'Declan Kiberd's brilliantly informed and highly entertaining advocacy liberates Joyce's greatest book from the dungeon of unreadable masterpieces.' Joseph O'Connor

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Literature, as Joyce tells us through the character of Stephen Dedalus, 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, Ulysses has survived bowderlization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishingly wide-ranging allusions confirm its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his introduction Ulysses is 'An endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin on 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.'

This edition is the standard Random House/Bodley Head text that first appeared in 1960.

At the funeral, several priests remarked how appropriate it was that Father Conroy should have returned on his last day to Rosnagree, the parish in which he was born. Father Tom Conroy - a spiky, difficult man - dies at a reunion of his seminary colleagues. As this masterly novel unfolds, we are taken through the years that formed this troublesome priest, who knew his life had been a failure. The Hungry Grass is a sharply witty and moving novel of a world on the cusp of change.

The Irish Writer and the World is a major new book by one of Ireland's most prominent scholars and cultural commentators. Declan Kiberd, author of the award-winning Irish Classics and Inventing Ireland, here synthesises the themes that have occupied him throughout his career as the leading critic of Irish literature and culture. Kiberd argues that political conflict between Ireland and England ultimately resulted in cultural confluence and that writing in the Irish language was hugely influenced by the English literary tradition. He continues his exploration of the role of Irish politics and culture in a decolonising world, and covers Anglo-Irish literature, the fate of the Irish language and the Celtic Tiger. This fascinating collection of Kiberd's work over twenty-five years demonstrates the extraordinary range, astuteness and wit that have made him a defining voice in Irish studies and beyond, and will bring his work to new audiences across the world.

To celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ulysses, the most important literary work of the twentieth century, eighteen artists, writers and thinkers respond to an episode each of the great modernist text. Each essayist is an expert in one of the subjects treated in the novel, but what brings them together is a common love of Ulysses. Joseph O'Connor considers the music-saturated Sirens episode and David McWilliams writes about the bigotry and violence of nationalism on display in Cyclops. Irish obstetrician Rhona Mahony responds to Oxen and the Sun, set in a maternity hospital, journalist Lara Marlowe examines the Aeolus episode, which takes place in a newspaper office, and Irish philosopher Richard Kearney reflects on the erudite musings of Stephen Dedalus as he walks along Sandymount strand. The Book About Everything counters the perception of Ulysses as the sole preserve of academics and instead showcases readers' responses to the book. It is a vivid, even eccentric collection, filled with life and Joycean spirit.

For Joyce, literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written between 1914 and 1921, Ulysses has survived bowdlerization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishing wide-ranging allusions confirms its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his introduction that Ulysses is 'an endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin on 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.' This Annotated Student Edition has full explanatory notes and line numbers for critical reference.

The Irish Revival of 1891 to 1922 was an extraordinary era that generated not only a remarkable crop of poets and writers but also a range of innovative political thinkers and activists. The contributors to this period exchanged ideas and opinions about what Ireland was and could become, yet much of this discourse remains out of print, some of these voices almost forgotten. Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891–1922 collects for the first time many of the essays, articles, and letters by renowned figures such as James Joyce, Maud Gonne, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O'Casey, and J. M. Synge, among others. The anthology also contains pieces by lesser-known individuals such as Stopford A. Brooke, Mary Colum, and Helena Molony. Many of the lesser-known texts contextualize the social, political, and cultural lives, values, and aspirations of those involved in and on the periphery of the Revivalist movement. The introduction and commentary by Declan Kiberd and P. J. Mathews convey the ideas of a brilliant generation that, in spite of difficulty and demoralization, audaciously shaped a modern Ireland. Divided into sixteen sections covering issues as diverse as literature, religion, drama, education, women’s rights, and the 1916 Rising, this is the ultimate reference book for anyone with an interest in Irish literature and history.

Declan Kiberd, a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at the University College Dublin, offers an audacious new take on Joyce's classic novel. Ulysses, he argues, is a work written for and about the common person, offering a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life in the modern world. In this passionate corrective to the widespread view of Ulysses as an esoteric tome for the scholarly few, Kiberd dispells the aura of academic mystique that has attached itself to the novel, opening our eyes to Ulysses as a celebration of the everyday and a model for living well in an unpredictable world.

The Irish Revival of 1891 to 1922 was an extraordinary era that generated not only a remarkable crop of poets and writers but also a range of innovative political thinkers and activists. The contributors to this period exchanged ideas and opinions about what Ireland was and could become, yet much of this discourse remains out of print, some of these voices almost forgotten. Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891–1922 collects for the first time many of the essays, articles, and letters by renowned figures such as James Joyce, Maud Gonne, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O'Casey, and J. M. Synge, among others. The anthology also contains pieces by lesser-known individuals such as Stopford A. Brooke, Mary Colum, and Helena Molony. Many of the lesser-known texts contextualize the social, political, and cultural lives, values, and aspirations of those involved in and on the periphery of the Revivalist movement. The introduction and commentary by Declan Kiberd and P. J. Mathews convey the ideas of a brilliant generation that, in spite of difficulty and demoralization, audaciously shaped a modern Ireland. Divided into sixteen sections covering issues as diverse as literature, religion, drama, education, women’s rights, and the 1916 Rising, this is the ultimate reference book for anyone with an interest in Irish literature and history.

The constant theme running through this collection of short stories, the first collection by A.S. Byatt, is that of repetition, taking the form of family patterns recurring across generations, the return of the past in the form of ghosts and the disruptive force of family stories.

Just as Ireland has produced many brilliant writers in the past century, so these writers have produced a new Ireland. In a book unprecedented in its scope and approach, Declan Kiberd offers a vivid account of the personalities and texts, English and Irish alike, that reinvented the country after centuries of colonialism. The result is a major literary history of modern Ireland, combining detailed and daring interpretations of literary masterpieces with assessments of the wider role of language, sport, clothing, politics, and philosophy in the Irish revival. In dazzling comparisons with the experience of other postcolonial peoples, the author makes many overdue connections. Rejecting the notion that artists such as Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett became modern to the extent that they made themselves "European," he contends that the Irish experience was a dramatic instance of experimental modernity and shows how the country's artists blazed a trail that led directly to the magic realism of a Garcia Marquez or a Rushdie. Along the way, he reveals the vital importance of Protestant values and the immense contributions of women to the enterprise. Kiberd's analysis of the culture is interwoven with sketches of the political background, bringing the course of modern Irish literature into sharp relief against a tragic history of conflict, stagnation, and change. Inventing Ireland restores to the Irish past a sense of openness that it once had and that has since been obscured by narrow-gauge nationalists and their polemical revisionist critics. In closing, Kiberd outlines an agenda for Irish Studies in the next century and detects the signs of a second renaissance in the work of a new generation of authors and playwrights, from Brian Friel to the younger Dublin writers.

A celebration of the tenacious life of the enduring Irish classics, this book by one of Irish writing's most eloquent readers offers a brilliant and accessible survey of the greatest works since 1600 in Gaelic and English, which together have shaped one of the world's most original literary cultures.

In the course of his discussion of the great seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gaelic poems of dispossession, and of later work in that language that refuses to die, Declan Kiberd provides vivid and idiomatic translations that bring the Irish texts alive for the English-speaking reader.

Extending from the Irish poets who confronted modernity as a cataclysm, and who responded by using traditional forms in novel and radical ways, to the great modern practitioners of such paradoxically conservative and revolutionary writing, Kiberd's work embraces three sorts of Irish classics: those of awesome beauty and internal rigor, such as works by the Gaelic bards, Yeats, Synge, Beckett, and Joyce; those that generate a myth so powerful as to obscure the individual writer and unleash an almost superhuman force, such as the "Cuchulain" story, the lament for Art O'Laoghaire, and even "Dracula"; and those whose power exerts a palpable influence on the course of human action, such as Swift's "Drapier's Letters," the speeches of Edmund Burke, or the autobiography of Wolfe Tone. The book closes with a moving and daring coda on the Anglo-Irish agreement, claiming that the seeds of such a settlement were sown in the works of Irish literature.

A delight to read throughout, "Irish Classics" is a fitting tribute to the works it reads so well and inspires us to read, and read again.