Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island

Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island

Sayers, Peig
Macmahon, Bryan

Paperback

Series: Irish Studies

Biographies GeneralHistorical FiguresIrish History

Publisher Price: $19.95

ISBN10: 0815602588
ISBN13: 9780815602583
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: Oct 1 1974
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.00
Language: English

Here is one of the classics of modern Gaelic literature--the autobiography of Peig Sayers, a remarkable woman who lived forty years at the edge of survival on barren Great Blasket Island, and who came to be recognized as one of the last of Ireland's traditional storytellers.

Here is a story as unforgettable as it is simple. It reveals with fidelity, humor, and poignancy a woman's life in a bleak world where survival itself was a triumph and death as familiar as life. Peig said of her son Tomás, who was killed in a fall from a clifftop: Instead of his body being out in the broad ocean, there he was on the smooth detached stone. . . . laid out as expertly and as calmly as if twelve women had tended him. Her own farewell to life had the same clear-eyed simplicity: People will yet walk into the graveyard where I'll be lying; I'll be stretched out quietly and the old world will have vanished.

Peig died in 1958, when she was 85. She is buried a short distance from the townland where she was born, above the sea on the Dingle Peninsula, within sight of the Great Blasket Island.

Through this American edition, Peig will reach a new international audience. As Eoin McKiernan, President of the Irish American Cultural Institute, notes in his introduction, Peig has the quality of honesty and sincerity, of life lived at the bone. Long loved in Ireland, this autobiography will now be seen for what it truly is--one of the great heart-cries of the Irish people.

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