Bøger i Irish Literature serien

"Originally co-published in 1984 by Allison & Busby and Brandon Books; a second edition was published in 1986 by Allison & Busby" -- Verso title page.

Following a crippling depression, a writer wanders from his native Dublin around an increasingly unrecognizable Europe in the years following the Cold War, assembling a patchwork of stories, conversations, love affairs, and regrets.

The Poor Mouth relates the story of one Bonaparte O'Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the abject poverty of its residents. Potatoes constitute the basis of his family's daily fare, and they share both bed and board with the sheep and pigs. A scathing satire on the Irish, this work brought down on the author's head the full wrath of those who saw themselves as the custodians of Irish language and tradition when it was first published in Gaelic in 1941.

In the same spirit as his novels, O'Brien's plays are speculative, inventive, wickedly funny, and a delightful addition to his collected works-now available at last: this volume collects Flann O'Brien's dramatic work into a single volume, including Thirst, Faustus Kelly, and The Insect Play: A Rhapsody on Saint Stephen's Green. It also includes several plays and teleplays that have never before seen print, including The Dead Spit of Kelly (of which a film version is in production by Michael Garland), The Boy from Ballytearim, and An Scian (only recently discovered), as well as teleplays from the RTE series O'Dea's Your Man and Th' Oul Lad of Kilsalaher.

This novella recounts the imagination of a lonely old man who becomes obsessed by a beautiful young girl in his village. His every moment is filled with thoughts and fantasies about her. Eventually lines cross as this fantasy becomes a reality, paternal feeling and sexual urges combining as they become lovers. This is a brialliant, poetic account of the wanderings of an old man's mind

Childhood play, scarlet fever, a first kiss, befriending a Nazi spy--the narrative of "Past Habitual" roams through experiences both commonplace and formative, all under the uneasy canopy of wartime Ireland. Moving with ease between the voices of a young child, a German immigrant, an I.R.A member, and colloquial chatter, MacLochlainn forms a web of interactions that expose a century's tensions. A combination of traditional prose, poetry, monologue, and music, "Past Habitual" is an engaging and fascinating depiction of an Ireland struggling through the effects of war--both distant and on her doorstep.

Set in a future world devastated by the development of capitalism, King Goshawk concerns the eponymous tyrant's attempt to buy all of the wildflowers and songbirds in Ireland, and the attempt by a Dublin philosopher as well as a number of mythical heroes of Irish tradition to stop him.

This riotous collection at last gathers together an expansive selection of Flann O'Brien's shorter fiction in a single volume, as well as O'Brien's last and unfinished novel, Slattery's Sago Saga. Also included are new translations of several stories originally published in Irish, and other rare pieces. With some of these stories appearing here in book form for the very first time, and others previously unavailable for decades, Short Fiction is a welcome gift for every Flann O'Brien fan worldwide.

There is no doubt that Desmond Hogan is one of most remarkable literary talents to have come out of Ireland in the past half-century, and perhaps the best introduction to his work is through his magnificent short stories, widely anthologized and praised throughout the world. Focusing as always on the downtrodden and the eccentric, the misplaced and the dispossessed, Hogan's stories merge past with present, landscape with mindscape-distinctly Irish and burdened by history, while exhilaratingly and wholly universal and modern.

Warrenpoint is a memoir, and more than a memoir: with moments of novelistic narrative and lyricism wedded to musings on the aesthetic and theological themes of the author's coming of age-filial piety, original sin, a child's perceptions, and then the nature of terrorism, and of reading itself-it demonstrates the same insight and lucidity that have contributed to Denis Donoghue's fame as one of our most important critics. Taking its title from the seaside town in Northern Ireland whose police barracks served as the residence for the Catholic Donoghues, it has been described as a family romance, dealing not only with the author's love for his strong-willed, taciturn, policeman father, but his love for literature and how it shaped his life to come.

Perversely, but perhaps appropriately, Aidan Higgins-one of the few contemporary writers worthy of comparison with Beckett and Joyce, now celebrating his 85th year-has chosen to wait until his sight has nearly left him to assemble this collection of visual treats. A commonplace book of anecdotes and cartoons-the latter never before published, though familiar to all of Higgins's correspondents from the margins of his letters and postcards-Blind Man's Bluff is a compendium of tart and comic insights into sight itself, as well as other varied indignities: personal, historical, and literary.

This intriguing novel brings us to a future in which electricity is scarce and Dublin has gone to seed. Hawk-eyed octogenarian Monk is keeping assorted desperate characters under strict surveillance -- among them Schroeder, recently sacked from Trinity College, now stalking a reporter in the days leading up to the visit of the U. S. President. When the unthinkable happens and the President is assassinated, Monk sets about discovering what's happened to those in his care and, along the way, to the late President -- but this is not, he insists, the story of an assassination. Nor is it a thriller. It's the truth.

Like many of the great Irish writers before him, Dermot Healy first announced himself as a writer of intricate and innovative short stories. Healy¿s stories are set in small-town Ireland and its rural environs, and in the equally suffocating confines of the Irish expat communities in London. Throughout these texts, Healy demonstrates a deep sense of compassion towards the marginalized and the dispossessed, without ever becoming sentimental or clichéd. The language is earthy and imagistic by turn, and he continually seeks to extend the formal boundaries of the genre.Gathering all of Healy¿s stories together for the first time, this collection includes the long prose-drama ¿Before the Off¿ and Healy¿s final short works, ¿Along the Lines¿ and ¿Images.¿

When Albert Jackson, a middle-aged school teacher, catches a glimpse of the infinite universe and his own tiny insignificance he cannot shake himself free of regret for a life all but squandered. In a blind and demented attempt to salvage something from his life, he sets off, half-lucidly, on a mission to reclaim life, to live it on his terms.

In An Eochair (The Key), one of Máirtín Ó Cadhain's most Kafkaesque short stories (and one of his longest), J., a 'paper-keeper,' one of the more junior civil servant positions, accidentally locks himself in his office when the key breaks in the lock. The story -- a mixture of satire, farce, black comedy and, ultimately, tragedy -- relates the efforts of J. and various other characters, his wife, civil service colleagues and superiors and others, to extricate himself from his predicament. However, all efforts to free J. must be in accordance with civil service protocols, and no such protocol exists for J.'s unique dilemma.

Farley, a seventy-five year old man, lies on his bathroom floor, having just suffered a stroke. As his mind sifts through his past, we are introduced to the loyal friend he once was, his loving wife, the city of Dublin, and the question of how this very ordinary man has become so lonely at the end of his life. Told in reverse, from Farley's penultimate day to decades before, Christine Dwyer Hickey's bestseller is a jarring look at a life up close. First published in 2011, The Cold Eye of Heaven shows Dwyer Hickey's lyrical prose at its best: rendering sorrow, joy, wisdom, and humor in equal measure. Acutely insightful, this is an eerily accurate portrait of what it's like to grow old.

The anonymous narrator in Alf MacLochlainn's?"Out of Focus"?has more than blurred vision when he looks at the world around him as he recuperates from his many minor accidents. His visual perception or skewed perspective is a working out of the author's theory taken from William Molyneux's statement in 1692 "that an object may be seen in two places yet not seen double." / Whether he is on his bed looking through the crystal of his watch, or in a hospital bathtub peering into the overflow opening, or sitting on a chaise lounge with an empty barrel of a ballpoint pen or ring from a beer can to his eye, or back in his bed looking through a gauze bandage, this very accident-prone hero/victim manages to see inside what appears to be real-life scenes going on outside. / And when he is not playing the voyeur, his mind runs on zany inventions (natural/non-natural bust supports and shot-proof crystal eye protectors, for example) and pseudo-pedantic discussions about optics, clocks and cycling designs. / Although everything about this novel is original--plot, style, illustrations--it tips its hat in passing to some of those who have gone before: Beckett's Malone Dies and Molloy, and the narrators of "At Swim-Two-Birds" and "Cadenza."

In the tradition of Flann O'Brien's comic Irish extravaganzas, Desmond MacNamara's novel is a hilarious excursion into Irish history and literature. A gentleman named Mountmellik and his servant MacGilla escape from the Limbo where characters from unfinished literary works are trapped, and enjoy life on Earth so much that they summon from Limbo other literary characters: a young woman named Loreto Amargamente (from an unfinished story by F. Scott Fitzgerald), an Irish maiden named Liadin (from George Moore's unrealized historical novel), and, most terrifying, the eight-feet-tall Eevell of Craglee, Queen of the Munster Hosts of Fairy. These five hatch a scheme by which they can spring more characters from literary Limbo and, by finishing and publishing their stories, send them to Parnassus, all the while holding the author captive so that they themselves won't be forced to go. But during a bizarre climax, the author escapes and sends this novel to his publisher, immortalizing them against their will. Throughout the novel are yarns, digressions, and speculations, the centerpiece being a forty-page retelling of the story of the legendary Irish poets Curither and Liadin. Like O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, it mixes the glorious Irish literary past with its messy present and has a good deal of fun at the expense of the novel as an art form.

Stuart Byrne is a young, beautiful, single businessman who finds his perfect life sabotaged by a growing awareness of his own superficiality. Nauseated by his own helplessness, struck by a creeping lethargy, Stuart tumbles through a tumultuous week of excess, promiscuity, deception, cowardice, and regret, and in the process manages to trade his slick perfection for a fantastic, and darkly hilarious, catastrophe. A deadpan comedy about the rather unfunny void in the center of many modern lives, "Sleepwalker" explores how our trying to fill that void can be just as destructive as ignoring it, and how the world will always let the beautiful get away with murder.