Welcome to the mystical world of Michael parkes, a leading painter, sculptor, and stone lithographer in the magical realism genre. Parke's renderiongs are meticulous and realistic, but his themes go beyond the everyday into a rich inner life that is both magical and otherworldly. Each month will bring you new delights from this rich tapestry of work.
Click calender for larger image
Illuminations by Michael Green
It is an often overlooked fact that Celtic art is iconic for two very different world views: primeval Christianity and pagan/new age. Celtic art and spirituality stand on an overlap between these two cultures, and act as connecting links between them. Both cultures can learn from their differences, ultimately supporting and nourishing the spiritual aspirations of each. Michael Green's Celtic Blessings 2010 wall calendar is a masterful marriage of these two worlds. Based on Celtic themes and early Irish Christian illuminated manuscripts, Mr. Green reinvisions these genres into a stunning modern look that is firmly rooted in the past.
12" x12" Wall calendar 100% Recycled paper Click calendar for larger image
Paintings by Kiunko Y. Craft
Kinuko Craft's breathtaking paintings for opera posters, book covers, magazine covers, and children's books have enchanted loyal fans for many years. She is widely praised for her meticulous research and attention to detail, and her artwork resonates with history, romance, and fantasy. Click image for larger view
12/2009 Softcover
Fodor’s helps you unleash the possibilities of travel by providing the insightful tools you need to experience the trips you want. Although you’re at the helm, Fodor’s offers the assurance of our expertise, the guarantee of selectivity, and the choice details that truly define a destination. It’s like having a friend in Ireland! •Updated annually, Fodor’s Ireland 2009 provides the most accurate and up-to-date information available in a guidebook. •Fodor’s Ireland 2009 features options for a variety of budgets, interests, and tastes, so you make the choices to plan your trip of a lifetime. •If it’s not worth your time, it’s not in this book. Fodor’s discriminating ratings, including our top tier Fodor’s Choice designations, ensure that you’ll know about the most interesting and enjoyable places in Ireland. •Experience Ireland like a local! Fodor’s Ireland 2009includes unique photo-features that impart the country's culture, covering the music scene, the history-rich Rock of Cashel, Dublin's famed pubs, and much more! •Indispensable, customized trip planning tools include “Top Reasons to Go,” “Word of Mouth” advice from other travelers, and tips to help save money, bypass lines, and avoid common travel pitfalls. •8-pg. color insert; full-color pullout map
637 pages ISBN:9781400007097
Explore every corner of this beautiful island (North and South) with the revised ninth edition. The full-colour introduction will inspire you on where to go and what to see, from the spectacular scenery of the west coast and the strange geometry of the Giant's Causeway to the wild Aran Islands and lively bars of Dublin. In addition, you’ll find full-colour sections throughout on: 'Irish Music', 'Under-rated Cuisine' and 'Lively Festivals' and now an additional insert on 'Gaelic Games'. The guide features listings for all the very best hotels and restaurants, plus information on all the top bars, shops and the best places to hear traditional Irish Music.
Take a detailed look at Ireland's history and culture with background on everything from the megalithic remains at Bru na Boinne to how to play the uilleann pipes. This updated edition includes contexts sections on history and traditional music and features a brand new literature section. The guide comes complete with maps and plans for the whole island with new maps of Wicklow mountains, Kinsale, Cashel, Dingle town, The Burren and Westport. Make sure your trip to the Emerald isle is one not to forget with this ultimate guide.
12/2008 softcover
Get to know Dublin on a musical pub crawl, explore the towering ruins of Trim Castle, or stand 650 feet above the Atlantic on the Cliffs of Moher—Rick Steves’ Ireland 2009 allows any traveler to experience all that the country has to offer—economically and hassle-free. Rick covers all of the well-known sites, from the Book of Kells to the Blarney Stone, but doesn’t leave out where to grab a pint and chat with a local. With Rick’s expert advice, historical knowledge, and humorous asides, Rick Steves’ Ireland 2009 is tour guide that fits in your pocket.
424 pages ISBN-13: 9781598801132
2006 paperback from 2005 hardcover-In 1972, Morgan Llywelyn tells the story of Ireland from 1950-1972 as seen through the eyes of young Barry Halloran, son and grandson of Irish revolutionaries. Northern Ireland has become a running sore, poisoning life on both sides of the Irish border. Following family tradition, at eighteen Barry joins the Irish Republican Army to help complete what he sees as 'the unfinished revolution'.
3/2009 Massmarket paperback
The Irish Century series is the story of the Irish people’s epic struggle for independence through the tumultuous course of the twentieth century. Morgan Llywelyn’s magisterial multi-novel chronicle of that story began with 1916, which was followed by 1921, 1949, and 1972. It now concludes with 1999: A Novel of the Celtic Tiger and the Search for Peace. 1999 brings the story from 1972 to the disarmament talks and beginnings of reconciliation among the Irish at the end of the twentieth century.
Barry Halloran, strong, clever, and passionately patriotic, who was the central character of 1972, remains central. Now a crippled photojournalist, he marries his beloved Barbara Kavanaugh, and steps back from the armed struggle. Through his work he documents the historic events that take us from the horrific aftermath of Bloody Sunday through the decades of The Troubles to the present. This is a noble conclusion to an historical mega-novel that will be read for years.
544 pages ISBN:9780812577990
1996 Massmarket paperback
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."
So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story.
Perhaps it is a story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner, and searching the pubs for his father, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.
Imbued with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion -- and movingly read in his own voice -- Angela's Ashes is a glorious audiobook that bears all the marks of a classic.
460 pages ISBN 0684841317
9/2005 Trade paperback
Including original stories by Neil Jordan, Gerard Donovan, Edna O'Brien, Roddy Doyle, Colum McCann, Claire Keegan, Colm Toibin, Niall Williams, and Mary Morrissy, this stunning collection of short stories illustrates the vibrancy and eclecticism of contemporary Irish writing. In Roddy Doyle's The Joke, a middle-aged man sits eavesdropping on his wife's conversation with a friend, at once bitter and sweetly yearning; in Sophia Hillan's The Cocktail Hour, a couple wander the night haunted and lost in a reverie of the Jazz Age; in Bernard MacLaverty's Matters of Life and Death, two young brothers spend the night at the house of the local doctor and his wife, and together the four of them end up in a revelrous late night dance. From Ireland to the United States, rural Peru to the mountains of the Himalayas, these pieces collectively and individually demonstrate the complexity of emotion and memory that is associated with the very finest short stories, and bears testimony to the fact that the form is still alive and flourishing.
8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches 336 pages ISBN-13: 978-0786716364
2009 This is a one volume selection of a book originally published in 1892 in two volumes
Celtic folklore overflows with vivid stories that fire the imagination. At the end of
his highly successful English Fairy Tales, Joseph Jacobs compiled Celtic Fairy Tales,
a book of 26 stories from around Wales and Ireland. While some of the themes
found in Celtic folklore are similar to those of contemporary fairy tales, other
stories in this collection are infused with a flavour that is uniquely Celtic.
In Jacobs’ own words, “The Celts went forth to battle, but they always fell. Yet the
captive Celt has enslaved his captor in the realm of imagination.”
Celtic Fairy Tales tells of horned women, breweries of eggshells, sprightly tailors,
gold and silver trees, King o’ Toole’s goose, sea maidens, and more.
Of particular interest is the 13th century legend of Beth Gellert, wherein the dog
of Llewelyn (I) the Great, Prince of Wales, protected the prince’s infant son from
a wolf attack. Seeing the blood Llewelyn assumed the dog had killed his son and
In turn he slew the dog only to find his son alive and well hidden under his
upturned cot. A memorial to the dog still stands today in the village of Beddgelert,
near Snowdon, Wales.
In an attempt to give a library of the Celts’ wealthy imagination to his readers,
Jacobs has attempted to begin the readers’ captivity with the earliest recordings
of these tales. And captivate he does—Celtic Fairy Tales not only preserves a
cultural history, but also is richly entertaining.
308 pages ISBN 9781907256059
2/2009 Hardcover A Long Walk in Search of a Country, a Pint and the Next Tee
In his thirties, married, and staring down impending fatherhood, Tom Coyne was well familiar with the last refuge of the adult male: the golfing trip. Intent on designing a golf trip to end all others, Coyne looked to Ireland, the place where his father had taught him to love the game years before. As he studied a map of the island and plotted his itinerary, it dawned on Coyne that Ireland was ringed with golf holes. The country began to look like one giant round of golf, so Coyne packed up his clubs and set off to play all of it. And since Irish golfers didn’t take golf carts, neither would he. He would walk the entire way.
A Course Called Ireland is the story of a walking- averse golfer who treks his way around an entire country, spending sixteen weeks playing every seaside hole in Ireland and often battling through all four seasons in one Irish afternoon. Coyne plays everything from the top-ranked links in the world to nine-hole courses crowded with livestock. Along the way, he searches out his family’s roots, discovers that a once-poor country has been transformed by an economic boom, and finds that the only thing tougher to escape than Irish sand traps are Irish pubs. By turns hilarious and poetic, A Course Called Ireland is a magnificent tour of a vibrant land and a paean to the world’s greatest game.
The History, Literature, Art, Music, People, and Places of Ireland from A-Z
12/2006 Trade size paperback by Lelia Ruckenstein & James O'Mally
Here, in one complete volume, is the depth and breadth of the great island nation and its people represented in an easily browsed, friendly format. From the Abbey Theatre to the Dublin storyteller Zozimus; from the origin of the Troubles to the origin of the limerick; from the stunning beauty of Connemara to the shattering tragedy of Bloody Sunday; from the greatest writers of the English language to the “confrontational television” of Gay Byrne’s The Late Late Show–every aspect of Irish culture, geography, and history is collected and annotated in more than 900 entries from A to Z. Readers will encounter heroes and terrorists, poets and politicians, all of Ireland’s counties, ancient myths, and pivotal events–all expertly and succinctly described and explained.
461 pages 9.5 x 7.7 x 1.4 inches
Treasures from Ireland
2008 Hardcover
A bevy of classic Celtic wisdom that reveals the authentic core of Celtic spirituality is gathered in this inspirational anthology. A background on the history of Ireland as well as St. Patrick, Brigid, and the Twelve Apostles of Erin is provided along with sayings, stories, prayers, and proverbs that reveal the traditions and customs of Celtic prayer and learning. Beautifully illustrated with evocative images of Ireland, this is an intimate guide to putting the ancient wisdom of the Celts into practice.
96 pages ISBN-13: 9780745953250
5th edition By Peter Neville
A Traveller’s History of Ireland gives a full and accurate portrait of Ireland from its prehistory right up to the present. The story opens with mysterious, early Celtic Ireland where no Roman stood, through Saint Patrick’s mission to Ireland which began the process of making it “an island of saints,” to the legendary high King Brian Boru and his struggle with Viking and Irish enemies alike.
It moves on through the arrival of the Norman “Strongbow” in the twelfth century, and the beginnings of the difficult and tragic Anglo-Irish relationship. Great historical figures like Hugh O’Neill, Oliver Cromwell, and Jonathan Swift figure, as well as ordinary people like the Londonderry “apprentice boys” who helped change the course of Irish history. The book then moves into modern times with the great revolts of 1798, the horrors of the potato famine, and the careers of the leading constitutional nationalists, Daniel O’Connell and Charles Parnell. The book ends with a description of modern Ireland, and of its two separate Catholic Nationalist and Protestant Unionist traditions.
5" x 7 3/4" • 288 pages-maps and line drawings
2002 Hardcover Illustrated by Mandy Pritty WAS $12.95
Funny, touching and true, this beautifully illustrated volume collects more than 100 Irish folk sayings celebrating the bond between parent and child. 35 color illustrations.
5.25 X 7.25 X .5 inches 79 pages ISBN: 9780811831123
3/2005-The newest delightful collection of 19 hilarious and heartwarming stories about love, friendship, and family from the most popular Irish women authors writing today, including Cecelia Ahern, Patricia Scanlan, Gemma O'Connor, and Sarah Webb.
1999 Hardcover
Pages of black-and-white photos that will bring the real Ireland so close that you'll hear Celtic music and feel a brogue coming on.
9.7 x 6.6 x 1 inches 160 pages ISBN-13: 978-3908161691
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