This work attempts to provide a portrait of Joyce from many viewpoints, aiming at selecting those interviews and recollections that have not been reprinted as well as those that are not readily accessible. James Joyce was a self-centred man. Unlike Wilde and Behan, who were too busy living to write, Joyce, like O'Casey and Yeats, gave the totality of his life to his art. He did not find his diversion in his friends because of the exigencies of his work. However, he was not unsociable - he was capable of strong friendships and the number of people who knew him was enormous, as this collection tries to reflect.

The childhood world of Hugo Hamilton is a confused place: His father, a brutal Irish nationalist, demands his children speak Gaelic at home whilst his mother, a softly spoken German emigrant who escaped Nazi Germany at the beginning of the war, encourages them to speak German. All Hugo wants to do is speak English. English is, after all, what the other children in Dublin speak. English is what they use when they hunt down Hugo (or 'Eichmann' as they dub him) in the streets of Dublin, and English is what they use when they bring him to trial and execute him at a mock seaside court. Out of this fear and confusion Hugo tries to build a balanced view of the world, to turn the twisted logic of what he is told into truth. It is a journey that ends in liberation but not before this little boy has uncovered the dark and long-buried secrets that lie at the bottom of his parents' wardrobe.In one of the finest books to have emerged from Ireland since Patrick McCabe's THE BUTCHER BOY and Seamus Deane's READING IN THE DARK, acclaimed novelist Hugo Hamilton has finally written his own story.

In 1979 in Ireland, J.G. Farrell drowned while fishing from the rocks near his home. He was 43, and it had only been 6 years since he had won the Booker Prize for his novel The Siege of Krishnapur. A man who elevated privacy to a high art, Farrell's leagcy would be the "Empire Trilogy," now hailed as a classic of the 20th century, as well as a lingering mystery. Farrell had always been a man who baffled even those closest to him. Based on her access to J.G. Farrell's family and friends, as well as his notebooks and personal correspondence, Lavinia Greacen's biography disentangles not only the full circumstances of the novelist's death, but the story of his life and how it informed everything he wrote.

Product Description: Forrest Reid's books were never commercial successes, and many have fallen out of print. Yet he has been called 'the first Ulster novelist of European status', and he continues to attract a small and loyal audience. Apart from three years at Cambridge, he lived in Belfast from his birth in 1875 till his death in 1947...read more

Combining literary analysis and medical detection, a study traces Joyce's medical history to reveal a controversial diagnosis of syphilis, and postulates that the disease is the subject of his writing, with its prevalent themes of sin, guilt, and retribution. UP.

The award-winning German-Irish author of The Speckled People recounts his young adulthood desire to escape the legacies of his German mother and cousin, entanglement in a bitter dispute between Catholic and Protestant neighbors, and exposure to forbidden cultural elements. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Product Description: Definitive, concise, and very interesting... From William Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, the Very Interesting People series provides authoritative bite-sized biographies of Britain's most fascinating historical figures - people whose influence and importance have stood the test of time...read more

A biography of the acclaimed Anglo-Irish novelist follows the formation of her character and the growth of her art from her childhood in a great ancestral manor in Ireland to her discovery of America and international fame. Reprint.

Product Description: The biography of author John Broderick, whose powerful Balzacian novels of life in the Irish midlands, were banned for their depictions of Irish sexuality and Catholicism.

This is the story of John McGahern's childhood; of his mother's death, his father's anger and bafflement, and his own discovery of literature and his ambition to become a writer. At the heart of the book is an unembarrassed homage by a loving son to a woman who protected him and his sisters from his father's unpredictable moods.

Product Description: "A bloody marvelous book." Harold Pinter

Product Description: In The Riddle of the Sands, a gripping spy story set amongst the shoals and mists of the North Sea coast in the years before the First World War, Erskine Childers fathered the modern genre of spy adventures, as well as writing a great yachting classic...read more

The Irish novelist recalls his difficult relationship with his writer father, who died of Alzheimer's in 1998.

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Rare photographs, sketches, and illustrations by the great twentieth-century novelist are revealed in this collection of images from the life and literary work of James Joyce. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The Family Business is many things: journal of a frustrated young writer and lover; portrait of bohemian social life in Dublin and a vivid snapshot of a generation of writers emerging from the wreckage left by Behan and others; intimate history of the rising Catholic middle-class and of a family (and its business-shoes) in flux...read more

Product Description: In 1904, having known each other for only three months, a young woman named Nora Barnacle and a not yet famous writer named James Joyce left Ireland together for Europe -- unwed. So began a deep and complex partnership, and eventually a marriage, which endured for thirty-seven years...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Since the publication of Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce in 1959, Joyce has received remarkably little biographical attention. Scholars have chipped away at various aspects of Ellmann’s impressive edifice but have failed to construct anything that might stand alongside it...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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One of Ireland's most beloved modern authors focuses on her country's most celebrated writer, tracing his life from restive young Jesuit student, through his relationship with the fetching Nora Barnacle, to his exile to Trieste. 22,500 first printing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: In 1979, in a remote corner of West Cork in Ireland, J.G. Farrell was drowned while fishing from the rocks near his home. He was 43, and it had only been six years since he had won the Booker Prize for his novel "The Siege of Krishnapur"...read more