A literary anthology that charts Ireland's cultural and social development through the world of poets, novelists, historians, and commentators: the Troubles, the great Famine, emigration, the decline of the language, the beauty of the landscape, the great cities, and the inhabitants are all brought together to capture the character of Ireland.
Northern Ireland may have shaped Brian Moore, as he grew up one of nine children in a Catholic doctor's Belfast household, but World War II took him to Africa and war-ravaged Europe, and Canada freed him to become a writer. This biography pieces together the colourful life that lay behind the novels.
Exploring the author's experiences in both Belfast and London, this third volume delves into the complexities of her upbringing and the challenges of adapting to life in a new city. Through personal anecdotes and reflections, it captures the essence of identity, belonging, and the impact of cultural shifts. The narrative offers a poignant look at the intersections of place and memory, making it a compelling continuation of her trilogy.
Travel--long associated with marvels and adventure, excitement and mystery--has always proved an irresistible literary subject. Now, in The Oxford Book of Travel Stories, Patricia Craig brings together thirty-two fascinating travel stories, each one illustrating in its own way what travel has to do with stimulus, enrichment, and a sense of achievement. Here is some of the best short fiction representing the most exhilarating subjects from writers as diverse as Ring Lardner, Anthony Trollope, Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, John Updike, David Malouf, Rebecca West, Rachel Ingalls, Evelyn Waugh, Alice Adams, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. From Jack Kerouac's Big Trip to Europe, of 1960, which encapsulates the late 1950s fecklessness and the soft-drug related styles of indolence abroad to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's Show Mr. and Mrs. F to Number ____, a mood-piece about exotic hotel life in the 1920s, to Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, a high-spirited, productively unsettling jaunt, The Oxford Book of Travel Stories brilliantly encompasses the travel story genre. A superb collection that captures the freedoms and excitements of travel as it celebrates a great literary style, it will delight both readers and travelers for which travel provides a means of escape.