(View entire post here)

Michael D'Antonio is our guest blogger during the week of March 23rd. If you have any questions for Michael D'Antonio, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information about Forever Blue:

(View entire post here)

The finale to Penguin's tribute to the Irish: Irish Literature Today!

A leading writer of the Theater of the Absurd in France, Samuel Beckett, who worked for James Joyce in Paris, challenged the boundaries of drama by abandoning a conventional development of plot, action and character, creating tragicomedies that were both nihilistic and funny. His play "Waiting for Godot" did for drama what Joyce's Ulysses did for the novel. Beckett went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

James Joyce's short story collection Dubliners inspired a host of gifted Irish writers to explore this form. Mary Lavin, James Plunkett, Edna O'Brien, and Frank O'Connor all made significant contributions to the Short Story genre.

Mounting social unrest in Northern Ireland provoked Brendan Behan to write his essential 20th century play, "The Quare Fellow," tackling, in Gaelic no less, capital punishment. A little less provocative, but no less effective, Seamus Heaney's poems of Northern Irish rural life evoke Irish history and mythology garnered him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.