News of Authors: Nuacht faoi Udair

The signature pieces of one of Ireland's most provocative novelists, Edna O'Brien's tales of "country girls," have lately attracted substantial critical attention. A welcome addition to this growing body of O'Brien scholarship will appear later this year, when the University of Wisconsin Press will release Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O'Brien as a title in its ambitious new Irish Life and Literature Series. The collection, which is coedited by Maureen O'Connor and Lisa Colletta, features an article by Belfast's Sophia Hillan, "On The Side of Life: Edna O'Brien's Trilogy of Contemporary Ireland," which originally appeared in New Hibernia Review,4, 2 (Summer, 2000).

The Catholic University of America Press also continues to release important new titles for the study of Irish literature, including Michael L. Storey's Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction (ISBN0-8132-1366-5). A comprehensive survey of more than eighty years of fiction from the time of the Rising to the conflict in Northern Ireland, portions of Storey's book appeared here, in volume 2, number 3 (Autumn, 1998), as "Postcolonialism and Stories of the Irish Troubles."

The editors of New Hibernia Review take special delight in learning that an article from these pages has found its way into a classroom, and thus we congratulate Constance B Rynder, author of "The Origins and Early Years of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition" in volume 6, number 1 (Spring, 2002). Rynder's article, which recounted the emergence of an unexpectedly vigorous coalition party, has lately been included as required reading in a University of Minnesota graduate seminar on "Women in Electoral Politics" taught at the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.