In “Trasnú” (Crossing), Gaeltacht poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh revels in the creative tension inherent in the comingling of traditional Irishlanguage culture with late modernity. He describes contemporary identity as a messy hybrid of ancient and tenacious tradition on the one hand and a freeing but fickle globalized culture on the other: “tá muid leath-réamhstairiúil / agus leath-postmodern intertextual” (we are half prehistoric, half postmodern intertextual).1 Few authors exemplify this dual identity better than the Gaeltacht novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Micheál Ó Conghaile. Born in 1962, Ó Conghaile is by no means an old man, yet the upbringing that he describes is now totally unthinkable. While Ireland entered the “Lemass era” of economic change—often considered to have catalyzed radical social transformation over the following decades—Ó Conghaile spent his youth in one of the most dramatically isolated, and consequently culturally stable, parts of the country. Now an acclaimed author with a secure place in the Irish-language canon, Ó Conghaile—who went on to found one of the language’s most important publishers, Cló Iar-Chonnacht—grew up reading by candlelight. His hybrid identity as a rural gay man, a native Irish-speaker, and an educated and welltraveled entrepreneur provides him with a unique and complicated perspective that seems to accommodate both the authority of one on the inside and the marginalization of one inherently different. Difference is accepted as a fact of life in his work, which ranges from realistic testimony to the wildly experimental and obscene.