Ireland has always been a nation of story-tellers. This magnificent anthology chronicles the development of a rich literary tradition, from the earliest folk-tales to James Joyce, Liam O'Flaherty, and the rising stars of the new generation.

Thirty four stories compromising all the author's earliest works, concerning the Irish troubles, the Irish character and Irish Catholicism.

Sean O'Faolain was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century Irish culture. A short-story writer of international repute, he was also a leading commentator and critic, and was editor of the landmark journal The Bell. O'Faolain's work was central to the evolution of post-independence Irish writing, and his voice was one of the most prominent, and eloquent, in the fight against censorship in Ireland. This book presents an innovative re-reading and vibrant study of O'Faolain's diversity and influence, engaging with his non-fiction, as well as his novels and short stories. From the conflicting biographies of Eamon de Valera to the controversies and debates of the 1940s, the importance of Sean O'Faolain's legacy and relevance to modern readers is teased out in accessible and original insights.

Her mother, who wrote vivid versions of old Irish folk tales, once said of the Irish Civil War: 'In those days... fear kept you from sleeping, but also from getting fat or bored.' Her father was Director of Publicity for the IRA during that savage conflict. He made bombs. A brilliant writer, his first book of stories was banned and he was summoned by his old IRA comrades to be court-martialled for writing it. He became one of Ireland's most celebrated writers and a radical dissident during the 1940s, challenging Church and State for their betrayal of the people's needs. His affairs with Elizabeth Bowen and many other women were betrayals of a more intimate kind. This was the backdrop to Julia O'Faolain's childhood. Her life is filled with great characters: Frank O'Connor, Paul Henry, Garret Fitzgerald, Hubert Butler, Patrick Kavanagh and Richard Ellman; and later, in their villas outside Florence, Harold Acton and Violet Trefusis, along with a cast of prim communists and raffish reactionary aristocrats. This is a book about being an outsider looking in, a trespasser in Ireland and in other countries - France, Italy in the late 1950s, the West Coast during the turbulent sixties - and also in other lives, the permanent temptation of the creative writer.

The Man Booker prize-winning author's selection of the best Irish short stories of the last sixty years, following Richard Ford's bestselling Granta Book of the American Short Story.