(photo: wikimedia)

A clever new infographic from BuyBooks appeals to both the literary impulse and the traveler’s grail—both central to this website—and maps a notable clutch of Irish literary icons. It’s tough to quarrel with any list of Emerald Isle literary figures that includes Cecil Day-Lewis, father of the incomparable Daniel, but where are G. B. Shaw (“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance”) and Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde? I waited in vain to find Beckett on the list and progenitor of today’s vampire obsession, Bram Stoker.

More currently, the McCorts, Malachy and Frank? Man Booker winner Roddy Doyle? Where’s Thomas Flanagan and The Year of the French—“a masterwork of historical fiction,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer? (Despite its merits, this book did not survive a run through the washing machine that I cannot explain.) For more modern history, where’s Adrian McKinty and his cop’s dilemmas during the Maze prison hunger strikes? Where, or where, is Gerry Conlon?

Wandering a bit into the peat fields here, for riveting Netflix picks, the movie based on Conlon’s book, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Emma Thompson, In the Name of the Father (trailer), is super, as is the biopic, Michael Collins (trailer), with Liam Neeson and an amazing cast—Stephen Rea, Alan Rickman, et al. My weakness for political thrillers is showing.

Possibly Ireland is too full of literary masters to include them all on one map, but BuyBooks could have been braver and more contemporary in its picks. Which favorite authors/books of yours were left out? And here’s a more complete map.