Water is a liar. If you tell a story with water it cannot be trusted and it will wash away in the first hard rain or in the tears of a long good cry. And stories told in blood and stone stick longer by far. Finbar Tanner is telling a story to his son, Isaac. It is a story of love, desire and sacrifice. It is a story of blood and water and stones. It is a story of the deeper currents that flow within a man's heart. It is a story of the sea.
The United States imprisons more than two million men and women in federal prisons and city, county, and state jails. More than 150,000 individuals are incarcerated in each of the states of California and Texas. Calling attention to the flaws in the justice system, The Mysterious Story of Gitano Cervantes tells the stories of five men housed in Swest state units. Author Finbar Manghan, who has served as a volunteer chaplain in the prisons, looks at the cases of the five men who have been prison residents for a combined period of seventy years. Two are white, two are black, and one is Hispanic. Three of them claim to be innocent, while two admit their guilt; the sentences of the latter are such that they will almost certainly die in prison. One is innocent beyond any reasonable doubt. The experiences of all of them have been tragic. The Mysterious Story of Gitano Cervantes addresses a host of issues related to the men's stories, including false imprisonment, medical mistreatment, misrepresentation of self due to life's humiliations, mental harassment, medical bungling, and betrayal. Manghan reviews the court and prison experiences of these men and explores the need for reform throughout the criminal justice system in America.
Each story stands alone but also makes up the vivid picture of life in Dublin's newly refurbished Finbar's Hotel . . . funny and poignant' Sunday Mirror 'Finbar's Hotel is back, this time with a stellar cast of women writers and a lick of paint . . . But what's it all about? Well, it would be all too easy to give the game away, so let's just say that there's a hilarious reworking of the old immaculate conception theme, a bittersweet confrontation between a daughter and her loopy father, a poignant encounter involving a long-married couple, and a cracking finish . . . it doesn't matter who wrote what: together they've produced a playful, light, highly entertaining book' Irish Times 'Beneath the humour, whimsy and outright craziness, Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel hits at the shallowness of current social pretensions and offers a cautious optimism about women's lives today' Times Literary Supplement
Let's face it... About seventy-five percent of the world is covered in water - and of that water nearly ninety-seven percent of it can be found in the sea. Maritimers will tell you that there is a story for every wave that has ever washed upon the shoreline. Here are seven of them. "In the Dark and the Deep" offers a very haunting yarn of World War 2 convoy duty and a sailor who made and kept a terrible bargain. "Harry's Mermaid" introduces you to a group of homeless men who catch something that MIGHT be a mermaid. If that doesn't tell you enough about this story just try and imagine what Steinbeck's CANNERY ROW would read like if it had been written by HP Lovecraft. "I Know Why The Waters of the Sea Taste of Salt" is a tale of an Okinawa-based Japanese Air Force suicide pilot and his encounter with a sea monster - of sorts. "Finbar's Story" is a dark fantasy tale of the deeper currents that eddy and flow within the deep quiet currents of a man's cold heart. "The Woman Who Lost Her Tooth From Laughing Too Loudly At The Sea" is a quiet little fable of salt water, tears and regret. "Between You-Know-Who and the Deep Dark Blue" is a story of the last bargain on earth. This collection begins with a bargain and ends with a bargain - which sounds like a heck of a bargain to me.
In 1981, six children in the small village of Medjugorje claimed that Our Lady had appeared to them. Since then millions of pilgrims have traveled from across the world to pray in this special place. In conversation with Finbar O'Leary, Vicka, one of the six, tells of her special relationship with Our Lady and relays many of the messages which she says the `Queen of Peace' has given to her. Vicka also discusses her own sufferings and the journeys on which Our Lady has brought her.
Irish Theatre in the Twenty-First Century is the first in-depth study of the subject. It analyses the ways in which theatre in Ireland has developed since the 1990s when emerging playwrights Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, and Enda Walsh turned against the tradition of lyrical eloquence with a harsh and broken dramatic language. Companies such as Blue Raincoat, the Corn Exchange, and Pan Pan pioneered an avant-garde dramaturgy that no longer privileged the playwright. This led to new styles of production of classic Irish works, including the plays of Synge, mounted in their entirety by Druid. The changed environment led to a re-imagining of past Irish history in the work of Rough Magic and ANU, plays by Owen McCafferty, Stacey Gregg, and David Ireland, dramatizing the legacy of the Troubles, and adaptations of Greek tragedy by Marina Carr and others reflecting the conditions of modern Ireland. From 2015, the movement #WakingTheFeminists led to a sharpened awareness of gender. While male playwrights showed a toxic masculinity on the stage, a generation of female dramatists including Carr, Gregg, and Nancy Harris gave voice to the experiences of women long suppressed in conservative Ireland. For three separate periods, 2006, 2016, 2020-2, the author served as one of the judges for the Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards, attending all new productions across the island of Ireland. This allowed him to provide the detailed overview of the 'state of play' of Irish theatre in each of those times which punctuate the book as one of its most innovative features. Drawing also on interviews with Ireland's leading theatre makers, Grene provides readers with a close-up understanding of Irish theatre in a period when Ireland became for the first time a fully modernized, secular, and multi-ethnic society.
A “mordantly funny” novel set in a Dublin educational institution known as the Brothers of Godly Coercion School for Young Boys of Meager Means (Publishers Weekly). Combining the spirit of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim with a bawdy evisceration of hypocrisy in old-school Catholic education, The Brothers' Lot is a comic satire that tells the story of the Brothers of Godly Coercion School for Young Boys of Meager Means, a dilapidated Dickensian institution run by an assemblage of eccentric, insane, and often nasty celibate Brothers. The school is in decline and the Brothers hunger for a miracle to move their founder, the Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly, along the path to Sainthood. When a possible miracle presents itself, the Brothers fervently seize on it with the help of the ethically pliant Diocesan Investigator, himself hungry for a miracle to boost his career. But the school simultaneously comes under threat from strange outside forces. The harder the Brothers try to defend the school, the worse things seem to get. It takes an outsider, Finbar Sullivan, a young student newly arrived at the school, to see that the source of the threat may in fact lie inside the school itself. As the miracle unravels, the Brothers’ efforts to preserve it unleash a disastrous chain of events. Tackling a serious subject through satire, The Brothers' Lot explores the culture that allowed abuses within church-run institutions in Ireland to go unchecked for decades. “Potently conveys the anarchic spirit of schoolboy warfare.”—The Irish Times “A memorable, skillfully wrought, and evocative satire of an Ireland that has collapsed under the weight of its contradictions.”—Joseph O’Connor “Witty, brilliant, devastating.”—Times Literary Supplement
Daughter of the Forest is a testimony to an incredible author's talent, a first novel and the beginning of a trilogy like no other: a mixture of history and fantasy, myth and magic, legend and love. Lord Colum of Sevenwaters is blessed with six sons: Liam, a natural leader; Diarmid, with his passion for adventure; twins Cormack and Conor, each with a different calling; rebellious Finbar, grown old before his time by his gift of the Sight; and the young, compassionate Padriac. But it is Sorcha, the seventh child and only daughter, who alone is destined to defend her family and protect her land from the Britons and the clan known as Northwoods. For her father has been bewitched, and her brothers bound by a spell that only Sorcha can lift. To reclaim the lives of her brothers, Sorcha leaves the only safe place she has ever known, and embarks on a journey filled with pain, loss, and terror. When she is kidnapped by enemy forces and taken to a foreign land, it seems that there will be no way for her to break the spell that condemns all that she loves. But magic knows no boundaries, and Sorcha will have to choose between the life she has always known and a love that comes only once. Juliet Marillier is a rare talent, a writer who can imbue her characters and her story with such warmth, such heart, that no reader can come away from her work untouched. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Half-Gypsy, Carnival carries his dead Poppa inside him as a perpetual adviser as he works as fortune-teller and occult troubleshooter, banishing demons and succubi with a carefree confidence born only of youth. His life journey takes a distinctly different turn when he meets Maya, an alluring female vampire. This novel details a dark version of the modern world, in which demons appear unbidden and where having a talent and using it successfully can mean either life or death. GYPSY BLOOD is a fast-paced, dark, funny and terrifying novel - like nothing that you have ever read before. The whole thing rolls like an avalanche of skateboards building to a climactic battle royal e between Carnival, a two-timing lady vampire, a she-demon with a mother complex, a social-climbing blood god, the collective spirit of the city and a mercenary mariachi band in a rickshaw. This is a fantasy for those folks who HATE fantasy! "If you have got a taste for over-the-top stories in the campy mode of the EVIL DEAD movies, then this is definitely a book that you should look into." - The Goreletter "If Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch had a three-way sex romp in a hot tub and then a team of scientists came in and filtered out the water and mixed the leftover DNA into a test tube, the resulting genetic experiment would most likely grow up into Steve Vernon." - BOOKGASM "Gypsy Blood is for fans of dark fantasy who think they've seen it all. Where else are you going to find a novel that opens with life and death battle with a succubus, rolls into a vampire's palm reading session, which segues into a bathtub summoning ceremony and climaxes with a non-stop showdown between a blood demon, a city incarnate, and a mercenary band of mariachi armed with a homemade propane-powered kamikaze rickshaw and assorted armaments?" - Hellnotes "True originality is rare but you will find it every time that Steve Vernon puts his fingers on the keyboard." - Jeff Strand (author of PRESSURE)
