"Last Night's Fun: A Book About Traditional Irish Music" by Belfast author Ciaran Carson is the August 2025 selection for the IrishCentral Book Club.
Each month, we will pick a new Irish book or a great book by an Irish author and celebrate the amazing ability of the Irish to tell a good story for the IrishCentral Book Club.
Published by Macmillan in 1998, "Last Night's Fun" will help set the tone ahead of this year's Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, the world’s biggest celebration of traditional Irish music, culture, and entertainment, which is hosted annually in August.
Looking for Irish book recommendations or to meet with others who share your love for Irish literature? Join IrishCentral’s Book Club on Facebook and enjoy our book-loving community.
Synopsis of "Last Night's Fun"
"Last Night's Fun" 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.
Reviews of "Last Night's Fun"
“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
About Ciaran Carson
Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast. He was Professor of Poetry and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University Belfast. He published numerous collections of poetry that have been shortlisted for both the Irish Book Award for Literature and the Whitbread Poetry Award, and won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry. He is the author "The Star Factory," a memoir of Belfast, "Fishing for Amber," and "Shamrock Tea," which was long-listed for the Man Booker prize. Carson's new translation of "Dante's Inferno" was published to great acclaim. He passed away in Belfast in October 2019.
(*Synopsis, reviews, and biographical information from Macmillan.)
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