Staring at Lakes: A Memoir of Love, Melancholy and Magical Thinking

Author: Michael Harding
Publisher: Hachette Ireland
ISBN: 1444743511
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
Throughout his life, Michael Harding has lived with a sense of emptiness - through faith, marriage, fatherhood and his career as a writer, a pervading sense of darkness and unease remained. When he was fifty-eight, he became physically ill and found himself in the grip of a deep melancholy. Here, in this beautifully written memoir, he talks with openness and honesty about his journey: leaving the priesthood when he was in his thirties, settling in Leitrim with his artist wife, the depression that eventually overwhelmed him, and how, ultimately, he found a way out of the dark, by accepting the fragility of love and the importance of now. Staring at Lakes started out as a book about depression. And then became a story about growing old, the essence of love and marriage - and sitting in cars, staring at lakes.

Staring at Lakes

Author: Michael Harding
Publisher: Yellow Kite
ISBN: 9781473627314
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
'I was fifty-two, and I was desperate to leave. To get away. And it was all because of the dishwasher. She would fill it to the brim. She would squash the dishes in so tight that they got damaged. They chipped around the edges. She said it wasn't the dishwasher that chipped the plates. They got chipped because I didn't put them in correctly.

A History of Irish Autobiography

Author: Liam Harte
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108547354
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 719

Book Description
A History of Irish Autobiography is the first ever critical survey of autobiographical self-representation in Ireland from its recoverable beginnings to the twenty-first century. The book draws on a wealth of original scholarship by leading experts to provide an authoritative examination of autobiographical writing in the English and Irish languages. Beginning with a comprehensive overview of autobiography theory and criticism in Ireland, the History guides the reader through seventeen centuries of Irish achievement in autobiography, a category that incorporates diverse literary forms, from religious tracts and travelogues to letters, diaries, and online journals. This ambitious book is rich in insight. Chapters are structured around key subgenres, themes, texts, and practitioners, each featuring a guide to recommended further reading. The volume's extensive coverage is complemented by a detailed chronology of Irish autobiography from the fifth century to the contemporary era, the first of its kind to be published.

Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies

Author: Renée Fox
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000333159
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 654

Book Description
Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies begins with the reversal in Irish fortunes after the 2008 global economic crash. The chapters included address not only changes in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland but also changes in disciplinary approaches to Irish Studies that the last decade of political, economic, and cultural unrest have stimulated. Since 2008, Irish Studies has been directly and indirectly influenced by the crash and its reverberations through the economy, political landscape, and social framework of Ireland and beyond. Approaching Irish pasts, presents, and futures through interdisciplinary and theoretically capacious lenses, the chapters in this volume reflect the myriad ways Irish Studies has responded to the economic precarity in the Republic, renewed instability in the North, the complex European politics of Brexit, global climate and pandemic crises, and the intense social change in Ireland catalyzed by all of these. Just as Irish society has had to dramatically reconceive its economic and global identity after the crash, Irish Studies has had to shift its theoretical modes and its objects of analysis in order to keep pace with these changes and upheavals. This book captures the dynamic ways the discipline has evolved since 2008, exploring how the age of austerity and renewal has transformed both Ireland and scholarly approaches to understanding Ireland. It will appeal to students and scholars of Irish studies, sociology, cultural studies, history, literature, economics, and political science. Chapter 3, 5 and 15 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The Theatre of Brian Friel

Author: Christopher Murray
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408154501
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
Brian Friel is Ireland's foremost living playwright, whose work spans fifty years and has won numerous awards, including three Tonys and a Lifetime Achievement Arts Award. Author of twenty-five plays, and whose work is studied at GCSE and A level (UK), and the Leaving Certificate (Ire), besides at undergraduate level, he is regarded as a classic in contemporary drama studies. Christopher Murray's Critical Companion is the definitive guide to Friel's work, offering both a detailed study of individual plays and an exploration of Friel's dual commitment to tradition and modernity across his oeuvre. Beginning with Friel's 1964 work Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Christopher Murray follows a broadly chronological route through the principal plays, including Aristocrats, Faith Healer, Translations, Dancing at Lughnasa, Molly Sweeney and The Home Place. Along the way it considers themes of exile, politics, fathers and sons, belief and ritual, history, memory, gender inequality, and loss, all set against the dialectic of tradition and modernity. It is supplemented by essays from Shaun Richards, David Krause and Csilla Bertha providing varying critical perspectives on the playwright's work.

Town and Country

Author: Kevin Barry
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571297056
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
Edited by award winning novelist and short story writer Kevin Barry, this volume will once again mix established names with previously unpublished authors, and will seek to offer fresh renditions to the Irish story - new angles, new approaches, new modes of attack.Published in 2011, New Irish Short Stories, edited by Joseph O'Connor, has sold over 10,000 copies to date and featured Kevin Barry's 'Beer Trip to Llandudno' - winner of the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize - as well as stories by William Trevor, Dermot Bolger and Roddy Doyle which went on to be Afternoon Readings on BBC Radio 4.

Walt Disney

Author: Neal Gabler
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679757473
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 914

Book Description
The definitive portrait of one of the most important cultural figures in American history: Walt Disney. Walt Disney was a true visionary whose desire for escape, iron determination and obsessive perfectionism transformed animation from a novelty to an art form, first with Mickey Mouse and then with his feature films–most notably Snow White, Fantasia, and Bambi. In his superb biography, Neal Gabler shows us how, over the course of two decades, Disney revolutionized the entertainment industry. In a way that was unprecedented and later widely imitated, he built a synergistic empire that combined film, television, theme parks, music, book publishing, and merchandise. Walt Disney is a revelation of both the work and the man–of both the remarkable accomplishment and the hidden life. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography USA Today Biography of the Year

A Cloud Where the Birds Rise

Author: Michael Harding
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1529382963
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
In this stunning collaboration, bestselling writer Michael Harding's most memorable musings on the human condition are brought to life by illustrator Jacob Stack. In these pages, the reader is held in moments of belonging, solitude, love and healing as we witness the beauty of falling snow, the pain and love of goodbyes, and the shared lives and deaths of neighbours amid the sweeping landscape of Ireland. A Cloud Where the Birds Rise is a beautifully illustrated collection of observations and stories from one of Ireland's best-loved writers - a celebration of finding beauty and hope in the ordinary.

The Northern Lights

Author: Howard Norman
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312283377
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
A young boy must make a new life in Toronto after the death of his mother and cousin. An original, entertaining account of a boy's coming of age, and a National Book Award nominee.

On Tuesdays I'm a Buddhist

Author: Michael Harding
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781473623514
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
One day in the summer of 2016, Michael Harding's wife brought an unusual gift home from Warsaw. All of a sudden, he found himself falling back into the old religious devotions of an earlier time. The meaning he had found through years of engagement with therapy began to dissolve. Here, in On Tuesdays I'm a Buddhist, Harding examines the search for meaning in life which keeps him fastened to the idea of god. After many therapy sessions focused on an effort to uncover personal truth, and long solitary months on the road with a one man show, Harding is finally led to an artists' retreat in the shadow of Skellig Michael. Mixing stories from the road with dispatches from his Irish Times columns, On Tuesdays I'm a Buddhist is a spell-binding and powerful book about the human condition, the narratives we weave around the self, and the ultimate bliss of living in the present moment. 'What happens between one story and the next? That's the really interesting part. That's the space where we find bliss; where we float sometimes, suspended, and only for a brief moment. Perhaps only for a few scarce moments in an entire life.'