LAST NIGHT'S FUN

Last Night's Fun's is a sparking celebration of music and life that is itself a literary performance of the highest order. Carson's inspired jumble of recording history, poetry, tall tales, and polemic captures the sound and vigor of a ruthlessly unsentimental music. Last Night's Fun is remarkable for its liveliness, honesty, scholarship, and spontaneous joy; certainly there has never been a book about Irish music like this one, and few books ever written anywhere about the experience of music can compare with it.

Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast and works for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He is the author of The Pocket Guide to Irish Music, The Star Factory, as well as five collections of poetry, one of which, First Language, was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize.

"Ciaran Carson is a class of centaur-a flute-playing poet and a word-rich musician. Last Night's Fun is a cracker of a book, pure pleasure, stuffed with anecdotes, memories, wit and humor and deep knowledge of traditional Irish music. The reader is transported into the smoke and warmth of certain rooms in Northern Ireland where a glass of whiskey stands on the table, the black, cast-iron pan sputters on the burner, and a tune falls canted and sly out of the instruments." --E. Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News

"Last Night's Fun is an uproar."--Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

"This whole beautiful little book is... full of metaphor and observation and side trip and word-juggle and anecdote. It could well be the ideal book to read before a trip to Ireland, offering, instead of maps of highways, a deep drink of what the place is really all about." --Charles M. Madigan, Chicago Tribune