Three wildly imaginative essays by Irish satirists Jonathan Swift, Liam O'Flaherty, and Tomas Mac Siomoin. Written in three different centuries, they propose grotesque and outrageous solutions to the social problems created by the established political order, especially unemployment and austerity. These essays entertain and shock while focusing attention on those very problems."

The first novel to be banned in Ireland, The House of Gold is a rare perspective on the Irish at a major turning point in their history. The House of Gold in a turbulent post-Civil War town in the West of Ireland where the old ascendancy has been replaced by a corrupt native elite headed by the avaricious Ramon Mor Costello and his clerical accomplices. His exotically beautiful wife is the catalyst for a series of violent events that lead to an unexpected climax. Greed, priestly lusts, sexual frustration, alcoholism, and murder are themes woven together in this compelling tale by Liam O'Flaherty, one of Ireland's most acclaimed writers.

From vicious rival brothers to desperate single mothers, frisky newlyweds to frigid life partners, Patrick McGinley covers all kinds of Irish (or simply human) relationship in this collection of short stories. In fourteen stories, some brief glimpses of an hour in the life, some longer explorations of years of growing animosity, McGinley explores the ties that bind us: the bond of family, unbreakable even when we wish it severed; the financial and emotional connections we make with our neighbours and colleagues; even the brief and tenuous link between a con artist and his prey. In turns hilarious and heart-wrenching, sweet and savage, Irish Portraits gives the reader a first-hand look at the lives of its characters, a handful of countrymen with one thing in common: their humanity.

Set in the turbulent Dublin during the years after the Irish civil war, this is a story of betrayals and secret feuds that portrays the Dublin underworld. Gypo Nolan, a hardened ex-terrorist, wanders the city streets without any money or a place to stay for the night. His luck seems to change when he gathers enough courage to betray a brother in arms and, with the reward money, begin a journey that will take him through the city's boardinghouses and brothels. His peace is threatened when the Revolutionary Organization to which both terrorists belonged decides to hunt him down and pass judgment on him in secret. "Ambientada en el convulso Dublin durante los anos posteriores a la guerra civil irlandesa, esta es una historia de traiciones y lucha clandestina que retrata el mundo de los bajos fondos dublineses. Gypo Nolan, un duro ex terrorista, deambula por la ciudad sin dinero ni un lugar donde pasar la noche. Su suerte parece cambiar cuando reune el coraje suficiente para delatar a un companero de armas y con la recompensa obtenida iniciar un periplo que le llevara por las pensiones y burdeles de la ciudad. Su tranquilidad se ve amenazada cuando la Organizacion Revolucionaria a la que pertenecian ambos terroristas decide darle caza para juzgarlo en secreto."

The Irish have always excelled at the short story, if we can judge by what survives of the old sagas. While all but one or two of the longer tales seem to the modern reader formless and quite unworthy of comparison with the Iliad and the Odyssey, many of the briefer prose narratives pack a whole gamut of emotions into two or three thousand words.

O'Flaherty (1896-1984), a young founder of the Irish Communist Party, was a member of the later generation of Irish renaissance writers. By his own admission he set out for Moscow on April 23, 1930, to collect material for a book on Bolshevism "to join the great horde of scoundrels, duffers and liars who have been flooding the book markets of the world for the last ten years with books about the Bolsheviks."