Plays.

Sarah Casey, determined to be made an honest woman, convinces reluctant local Tinker, Michael Byrne, to marry her. After harassing the local priest into officiating their wedding for half the price, Sarah’s dreams might be about to come true. That is until Michael’s scornful Mother intervenes and steals the priest’s money. Refusing to wed the couple until his money is returned, the hopeless priest unleashes the fury of the Tinkers. J.M. Synge’s ‘The Tinker’s Wedding’ (1909) is a classic two-act play of comedic genius that pokes fun at Irish country folk. An incredibly controversial play when it was first staged due to its treatment of the priest, ‘The Tinker’s Wedding’ is an excellent ode to failed and farcical matrimony and is perfect for anyone who enjoys weddings-gone-wrong comedies like ‘Bridesmaids’ or the British classic ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. Edmund John Millington Synge (1871 – 1909) was an Irish poet, playwright, and defining figure of the Irish Literary Revival. Born in County Dublin to upper-middle-class Protestants, Synge suffered from Hodgkin’s disease which led to his home-schooling. Soon after graduating from Trinity College Dublin, Synge became a renowned poet and playwright, but his success was short-lived as he passed away from cancer at 37. He is best remembered for his play ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, an incredibly controversial work at the time of its publication and performance. Regarded by Yeats as ‘the greatest dramatic genius of Ireland’, Synge has held a lasting legacy, being a key influence for acclaimed Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and the subject of Joseph O’Connor’s novel ‘Ghost Light’ (2010).

Sarah Casey convinces the reluctant Michael Byrne to marry her by threatening to run off with another man. She accosts a local priest, and convinces him to wed them for ten shillings and a tin can. Michael's mother shows up drunk and harasses the priest, then steals the can to exchange it for more drink. The next morning Sarah and Michael go to the chapel to be wed, but when the priest finds that the can is missing he refuses to perform the ceremony. Sarah protests and a fight breaks out that ends with the priest tied up in a sack. The tinkers free him after he swears not to set the police after them and he curses them in God's name as they flee in mock terror.

The history of Irish Travellers is not analogous to that of the 'tinker', a Europe-wide underworld fantasy created by sixteenth-century British and continental Rogue Literature that came to be seen as an Irish character alone as English became dominant in Ireland. By the Revival, the tinker represented bohemian, pre-Celtic aboriginality, functioning as the cultural nationalist counter to the Victorian Gypsy mania. Long misunderstood as a portrayal of actual Travellers, J.M. Synge's influential The Tinker's Wedding was pivotal to this 'Irishing' of the tinker, even as it acknowledged that figure's cosmopolitan textual roots. Synge's empathetic depiction is closely examined, as are the many subsequent representations that looked to him as a model to subvert or emulate. In contrast to their Revival-era romanticization, post-independence writing portrayed tinkers as alien interlopers, while contemporaneous Unionists labelled them a contaminant from the hostile South. However, after Travellers politicized in the 1960s, more even-handed depictions heralded a querying of the 'tinker' fantasy that has shaped contemporary screen and literary representations of Travellers and has prompted Traveller writers to transubstantiate Otherness into the empowering rhetoric of ethnic difference. Though its Irish equivalent has oscillated between idealization and demonization, US racial history facilitates the cinematic figuring of the Irish-American Traveler as lovable 'white trash' rogue. This process is informed by the mythology of a population with whom Travelers are allied in the white American imagination, the Scots-Irish (Ulster-Scots). In short, the 'tinker' is much more central to Irish, Northern Irish and even Irish-American identity than is currently recognised.

From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and A Gentleman in Moscow, a “sharply stylish” (Boston Globe) book about a young woman in post-Depression era New York who suddenly finds herself thrust into high society—now with over one million readers worldwide On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society—where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve. With its sparkling depiction of New York’s social strata, its intricate imagery and themes, and its immensely appealing characters, Rules of Civility won the hearts of readers and critics alike.

Special edition of Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel—featuring a new foreword by Marilynne Robinson and book club extras inside In this deluxe tenth anniversary edition, Marilynne Robinson introduces the beautiful novel Tinkers, which begins with an old man who lies dying. As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past, where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature. The story behind this New York Times bestselling debut novel—the first independently published Pulitzer Prize winner since A Confederacy of Dunces received the award nearly thirty years before—is as extraordinary as the elegant prose within it. Inspired by his family’s history, Paul Harding began writing Tinkers when his rock band broke up. Following numerous rejections from large publishers, Harding was about to shelve the manuscript when Bellevue Literary Press offered a contract. After being accepted by BLP, but before it was even published, the novel developed a following among independent booksellers from coast to coast. Readers and critics soon fell in love, and it went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize, prompting the New York Times to declare the novel’s remarkable success “the most dramatic literary Cinderella story of recent memory.” That story is still being written as readers across the country continue to discover this modern classic, which has now sold over half a million copies, proving once again that great literature has a thriving and passionate audience. Paul Harding is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family: Enon and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tinkers. He teaches at Stony Brook Southampton.