Initially published in 1984, Dermot Healy's stunning first novel, Fighting with Shadows, returns to print after almost thirty years. Largely set in the border village of Fanacross, Co. Fermanagh, as Ireland stumbles clumsily toward modernity, the Allen family negotiate a bitter and troubled terrain. Fighting with Shadows offers extraordinary and poetic glimpses of the compelling lives of ordinary people. The novel's landscape is of borderlands, of in-between spaces; it tells of violently sundered geographical borders, of maddening religious differences, of the anguished gaps between people as they struggle to find each other, and of how the dead reside among its inhabitants long after they've passed. At once realist account and nightmarish magic realist fable, Fighting with Shadows occupies a truly important position in the history of modern Irish fiction.

Writing the Sky: Observations and Essays on Dermot Healy is a comprehensive collection of critical essays, memoirs, poetry, and other writerly responses devoted to the life and work of the late Dermot Healy (1947– 2014). Healy was an accomplished poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and editor, and so these essays and observations address the entire range of his eclectic and exciting oeuvre. While paying due tribute to the memory of the man himself, the collection primarily seeks to establish a series of important critical perspec- tives through which Healy’s writings can be properly viewed and assessed. Contemporary writers and poets— including Colm Tóibín, Neil Jordan, Aidan Higgins, Alannah Hopkin, Kevin Barry, Annie Proulx, Michael Longley, Roddy Doyle, Tess Gallagher, Timothy O’Grady, Glenn Patterson, Patrick McCabe, and many others—of- fer creative reflections on Healy’s work, while literary critics provide a wide-ranging foundation for future Healy scholarship. In total, over forty contributors from more than a dozen countries provide insight into one of Ireland’s most powerful and unique literary voices. This collection is absolutely crucial for everyone interested in the work of Dermot Healy and for all devotees of Irish literature.

* Lucid and accessible style makes the series appealing to the general reader* Liberally illustrated throughout with stills from the film under discussion.* Collaboration between Cork University Press and the Film Institute of Ireland.Between the premi re of Brian Friel 's stage play "Dancing at Lughnasa" in 1990 and Pat O Connor 's cinematic adaptation in 1998, Ireland experienced seismic economic and social changes, as well as "Riverdance," "Angela 's Ashes" and an international vogue for all things Irish. Set in 1936, "Dancing at Lughnasa," as both film and play, imagines an anachronistic past in which the loss of joyous communal ritual is symptomatic of the cultural malaise so often associated with Ireland in the 1930s. Drawing upon unpublished material from the Friel archive at the National Library of Ireland, Joan FitzPatrick Dean contrasts the expressly theatrical elements of Friel 's play and their cinematic counterparts

Flann O Brien s "The Third Policeman," completed in 1940, was initially rejected by his publishers for being "too fantastic," and only appeared posthumously in 1967. Since then O Brien has achieved cult status, although critical appraisal of his work has focused almost exclusively on his first novel, "At Swim Two Birds" (1939). By 1940 O Brien was confronted with two towering traditions: the jaded legacy of Yeats s "Celtic Twilight" and the problematic complexities of Joyce s modernism. With "The Third Policeman," O Brien forges a powerful synthesis between these two traditions, and the paraliterary path he chooses marks the historical transition from modernism to post-modernism. This groundbreaking study, first published in 1995 and now substantially revised, reconfigures O Brien as a highly subversive writer within a rich and fertile literary landscape: indisputably Irish yet distinctly post-modern. It identifies "The Third Policeman" as a subversive intellectual satire, in the cutting-edge tradition of Swift and Sterne, and situates it as one of the earliest and most exciting examples of post-modernist fiction."