Pulitzer-prize winner Anne Enright (born 1962) is famous for her novels, short stories, and essay collections about familial relationships, love, sex, and Ireland’s culture and the obstacles the country has overcome. Says Assistant Professor Claire Bracken, “Anne Enright is one of the most important Irish writers of the contemporary period, whose work is notable for its literary experimentation, wry humor, and piercing intellectual insight."
The Gathering
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The Gathering, perhaps her most famous novel, is about a woman name Veronica, who upon her alcoholic brother Liam’s suicide, attempts to look through her family’s troubled history in order to make sense of his death. It is a novel about love and disappointment, about how memories warp and secrets fester, and how fate is written in the body, not in the stars.
The Green Road
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Spanning thirty years, The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together or falling irreparably apart. As they grow up, Rosaleen's four children leave the west of Ireland for lives they could have never imagined in Dublin, New York, and Mali, West Africa. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold.
The Forgotten Waltz
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This novel’s beauty lies in Enright’s spare, poetic, off-kilter prose—at once heartbreaking and subversively funny. It’s built of startling little surprises and one fresh sentence after another. Enright captures the heady eroticism of an extramarital affair and the incendiary egomania that accompanies secret passion: For all their utter ordinariness, Sean and Gina feel like the greatest lovers who've ever lived.”—Elle
Abraham Stoker was a novelist and short story writer best known for his Gothic thriller, Dracula. It is amongst the best selling books of all time and had influenced over 1,000 vampire-based films throughout the world. The book’s Irish connection is undeniable. In Gaelic, the phrase “Droch Ola” (think: Dracula) means bad blood. Stoker spend years researching mythical stories of vampires before writing the novel in an epistolary style, as letters, diary entries, telegrams, ships’ logs, and newspaper clippings.
Dracula
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During a business visit to Count Dracula's castle in Transylvania, a young English solicitor finds himself at the center of a series of horrifying incidents. Jonathan Harker is attacked by three phantom women, observes the Count's transformation from human to bat form, and discovers puncture wounds on his own neck that seem to have been made by teeth. Harker returns home upon his escape from Dracula's grim fortress, but a friend's strange malady — involving sleepwalking, inexplicable blood loss, and mysterious throat wounds — initiates a frantic vampire hunt. The popularity of Bram Stoker's 1897 horror romance is as deathless as any vampire. Its supernatural appeal has spawned a host of film and stage adaptations, and more than a century after its initial publication, it continues to hold readers spellbound.
Brendan Behan was a Dublin-born poet, playwright, and novelist whose works were written in both Irish and English. In addition, Behan also volunteered for the IRA (Irish Republican Army), and his writing thereafter was greatly influenced by the subsequent crimes and prison sentences he was dealt. Upon reflecting about his experiences in the a Borstal (youth correctional) institution after being sent there for possessing explosives, he wrote his autobiography, entitled Borstal Boy. Later, he was sentenced to 14 more years in prison for the attempted murders of two detectives, which he wrote about in Confessions of an Irish Rebel.
Borstal Boy
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This miracle of autobiography and prison literature begins: "Friday, in the evening, the landlady shouted up the stairs: 'Oh God, oh Jesus, oh Sacred Heart, Boy, there's two gentlemen here to see you. The men were, of course, the police, who knew seventeen-year-old Behan for the anti-imperialist terrorist he was and arrested him. He spent three years as a prisoner in England, primarily in Borstal (reform school), and was then expelled to his homeland, a changed but hardly defeated rebel. Once banned in the Irish Republic, Borstal Boy is both a riveting self-portrait and a clear look into the problems, passions, and heartbreak of Ireland.
Confessions of an Irish Rebel
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Considered the ‘doyenne’ of Irish literature, Edna O'Brien is a greatly celebrated novelist, poet and playwright whose first work, ‘The Country Girls’, is recognised for its contribution to the development of discussions of sexuality, amongst other social issues, in a post-war period that was particularly repressive. ‘The Country Girls’ was indeed censored by the Irish authorities, however it remains today ‘a treasure, powerful, intelligent, ironic’ (The New York Times Book Review).
The Country Girls
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The story traces the journeys of school friends Kate and Baba as they come of age and discover life and love away from the sheltered country environment of their youth. O'Brien captures celebration of youthful innocence and her lamentation that with such innocence and idealism coexists an extraordinary vulnerability.
Country Girl
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Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but deteriorating house in Ireland, her story moves through convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, the wild parties of the '60s in London, and encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as a celebrated writer and the guest of Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton. Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have imprinted upon and enhanced one lifetime.
James Joyce, is considered to be one of the most influential writes of the early 20th century. He is best know for Ulysses, and is, according to Bracken, an “incredible literary work that manages to incorporate a myriad of styles in such a way that createsthe most original piece of writing ever produced.” The novel took him seven years to write, and is noted for its steam of consciousness technique, amongst countless others. Joyce also authored Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories that depicted middle class Irish life in the early 1900’s.
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. A KĂĽnstlerroman in a modernist style, it traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and an allusion to Daedalus, the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe.
Dubliners
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James Joyce’s Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of “dear dirty Dublin” at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as “Araby,” “Grace,” and “The Dead,” delve into the heart of the city of Joyce’s birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners’ speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and most profound, and this edition is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s original wishes.
Ulysses
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Ulysses chronicles the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic poem Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels between the poem and the novel, with structural correspondences between the characters and experiences of Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus, in addition to events and themes of the early twentieth century context of modernism, Dublin, and Ireland's relationship to Britain. The novel imitates registers of centuries of English literature and is highly allusive.
Swift wrote in a very particular, satirist manner; every word Swift picked was chosen to express the opinionated sarcasm in his works. “His own style was colloquial, bold, terse, intense, often concealing rage and indignation beneath mild-sounding irony, fiercely comic, yet subtle, at times crude and obscene, lyrical, playful, and liable at any moment to launch into flights of self-consciously mad hyperbole,” explains Prof. Peter Heinegg.
A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works
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These selections from Swift's greatest writings include some of his best-known pieces against organized religion and the English oppression of Ireland: "A Tale of a Tub"; "A Tritical Essay"; "A Meditation upon a Broomstick"; "Thoughts on Various Subjects"; "An Argument against Abolishing Christianity in England"; "A Discourse concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit"; Drapier letters nos. 1 and 4; "On Political Lying"; "A Character, Panegyric, and Description of the Legion Club"; and "A Modest Proposal."
Gulliver's Travels
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Gulliver’s Travels, the story for which he is best known for, tells the story of a shipwrecked man who encounters different species of people every place he goes to. Each group of people represent a part of society that Swift didn’t like: politicians, religious fanatics, etc.
Wilde’s short stories, plays, and poems truly embody a "rich and dramatic portrayals of the human condition." After he met his wife and had a family, his creativity peaked and he published most of his most famous works, along with various other children’s stories. Although still married, Oscar met Lord Alfred “Bosie Douglas” and the two became lovers for four years until Wilde was arrested and convicted of gross indecency. He was sentences to two years of hard labor and fully recovered. After publishing “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” describing his agonizing prison experiences, Wilde lost his creative spark and died in 1900 from meningitis.
An Ideal Husband
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An Ideal Husband revolves around a blackmail scheme that forces a married couple to reexamine their moral standards — providing, along the way, a wry commentary on the rarity of politicians who can claim to be ethically pure. A supporting cast of young lovers, society matrons, an overbearing father, and a formidable femme fatale continually exchange sparkling repartee, keeping the play moving at a lively pace.
The Picture of Dorian Gray and Selected Stories
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Combining elements of the Gothic horror novel and decadent French fiction, the book centers on a striking premise: As Dorian Gray sinks into a life of crime and gross sensuality, his body retains perfect youth and vigor while his recently painted portrait grows day by day into a hideous record of evil, which he must keep hidden from the world. For over a century, this mesmerizing tale of horror and suspense has enjoyed wide popularity. It ranks as one of Wilde's most important creations and among the classic achievements of its kind.
Samuel Barclay Beckett is considered to be one of the most influential playwrights, poets, and novelists of the 20th century. Writing in both English and French, his writing is known to express a bleak outlook on human life and culture while incorporating gallows humor and black comedy, meaning that he managed to bring out humor in situations that are hopeless and problematic. Due to his lifetime of achievements, he was elected Saoi of Aosdána, an Irish association of artists created by writers.
Watt
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In prose possessed of the radically stripped-down beauty and ferocious wit that characterize his work, this early novel by Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett recounts the grotesque and improbable adventures of a fantastically logical Irish servant and his master. Watt is a beautifully executed black comedy that, at its core, is rooted in the powerful and terrifying vision that made Beckett one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
Three Novels
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Few works of contemporary literature are so universally acclaimed as central to our understanding of the human experience as Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s famous trilogy. Molloy, the first of these masterpieces, appeared in French in 1951. It was followed seven months later by Malone Dies and two years later by The Unnamable. All three have been rendered into English by the author.
Waiting for Godot
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The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.
Information retrieved from "From James Joyce to Oscar Wilde, top ten Irish novelists in history".
Books description retrieved from Amazon.com
Images retrieved from Google Images at
Anne Enright