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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the West of Ireland where the old ascendancy has been replaced by a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."
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