Heather Reyes, the English editor who has 'lived with the voices of Ireland in my head', talks about this collection: "It has been a particular pleasure to edit a collection of writing on Dublin. My first visit to the city felt like a home-coming: since the age of eleven, when I began my education with the Ursuline Sisters in a school near London, I have lived with the voices of Ireland in my head. A non-Catholic 'scholarship girl', this was my first encounter both with nuns and with Irishness: the distinctive lilt and phraseology of Irish English was as fascinating to me as the traditions of St Patrick's Day when the sisters would appear with bright clumps of shamrock fastened to their sober black habits and girls of Irish descent were allowed to flout the strict uniform rules and sport a tin brooch -- a golden harp on a piece of folded green ribbon --  and even green ribbons in their hair. The nuns -- intelligent, loving, dedicated, strict but broad-minded and independent women -- instilled, along with the rules of Latin grammar and quadratic equations, a great respect for the country from which most of them had come. When, as a student of literature, I discovered it to be also the country of Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett and a host of other great writers, I often wondered how such a small country with a difficult history could have produced so many great people. This collection aims to be a lyrical but realistic exploration of and tribute to Ireland's capital. If there are fewer foreign voices in city-pick DUBLIN than in other volumes in the series so far, it is mainly because a city so rich in writers should be allowed to speak for itself. With so much to choose from, there are inevitable omissions -- sometimes the result of hard decisions due to lack of space, sometimes to 'rights' difficulties, sometimes from the wish to give exposure to lesser-known voices rather than the already famous, and sometimes simply from personal taste. In the case of James Joyce, I felt that those who already love his work do not need it repeated here, while those yet to be persuaded of its great riches and pleasures could hardly be converted by a short extract: this is why I have chosen passages that give a way into Joyce, rather than face the hopeless task of choosing a 'representative' passage (which is impossible).  I hope the reader will find here, along with a little of the 'expected', some less familiar voices and surprising gems, and the inspiration to seek out the whole texts from which their favourite extracts are taken -- and to look more deeply and widely into the great treasure chest of writing about this great European city which even names bridges after its writers."

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