Irish Literature Series – serie

Considered to be one of the best Irish writers of the twentieth century, Aidan Higgins has earned a reputation throughout Europe as an unusual and astringent prose stylist. This omnibus of selected short fiction is the perfect introduction to the talents of this Irish successor to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett (although Higgins's work is perhaps more reminiscent of his Welsh contemporary Dylan Thomas), and displays Higgins's warmth of language and character. From a melancholy tale of suicide in "North Salt Holdings" to a colorful depiction of J. J. Catchpole's escapades in "Catchpole, " Higgins builds his characters into touching failures who both attract and repulse the reader.

Set in an airport ("one of the rare places where twentieth-century design is happy with its own style"), In Transit is a textual labyrinth centering on a contemporary traveller. Waiting for a flight, Evelyn Hillary O'Rooley suffers from uncertainty about his/her gender, provoking him/her to perform a series of unsuccessful, yet hilarious, philosophical and anatomical tests. Brigid Brophy surrounds the kernel of this plot with an unrelenting stream of puns, word games, metafictional moments and surreal situations (like a lesbian revolution in the baggage claim area) that challenge the reader's preconceptions about life and fiction and that remain endlessly entertaining.

"A bloody marvelous book." Harold Pinter

Opening with a quote from Richard Brautigan--"I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning"--Scenes from a Receding Past constructs the adolescence and early adulthood of Dan Ruttle out of a variety of scenes and reminiscences about his life in Ireland, his time in a Catholic school, his first sexual experiences, and his brother's mental breakdown. The second half of the book centers around his relationship with his future wife Olivia, her past, and her former lovers. Calling to mind Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man for Dan Ruttle's love-hate relationship with Ireland and the stylistic innovations employed by Higgins, Scenes from a Receding Past is a masterpiece from one of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers.

Although Dermot Healy (1947-2014) is probably best known as a novelist and poet, he was also a prolific playwright, screenwriter, and actor. Healy’s interest in drama was long-standing, and was central to his development as a writer. Between 1985 and 2010 he wrote thirteen stage plays, all of which are gathered here for the first time. Although the settings of Healy’s plays are often local and regional by design, their energy and vision transcend those boundaries. In this respect, the publication of The Collected Plays will be of interest to all scholars and practitioners of contemporary drama.

Grattan Fletcher and Suck Ryle are on the road, risking their dignity and occasionally their lives to renew the civic spirit of Ireland. Grattan is an idealistic, ageing civil servant who has enlisted Ryle, a skeptic prone to violent temper, in a quixotic quest to make a better Irish future for Grattan’s granddaughter. Along the way, they encounter politicians, protesters, and power brokers, some of whom are fascinated and others only flummoxed by Grattan’s wide sympathies and wild philosophical musings. In sprawling comic fashion, Grattan and Me addresses countless contemporary political, economic and ecological problems, allowing no person or institution to remain safe from ridicule.

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 libertine mission to reclaim life, to live it exclusively on his terms. But the wild and sinister crime he plots, so characterised by delusion, sets him on a path to irreversible destruction.Incarcerated after his crime, at the once prestigious Reil Institute, and in a bid to make spiritual and cosmic amends, Albert Jackson employs the guile of a local novelist, Charlie Vaughan, to tell his story. In the telling of Albert’s story, Charlie drives the narrative onward and backward, forcing Albert to confront the horrors of his crime.When the inadequacy of Albert’s initial confession forces Charlie to search further afield, he must cede control of the narrative to a range of other narrators too, among them key witnesses to the events leading up to Albert’s crime and a strange third-person account composed by Albert himself.Slipping is a darkly humorous novel about life and love, ambition, bitter disappointment and the cost of committing the unforgivable.

March Hares collects thirty years of Aidan Higgins’s essays, papers, and diaries, offering reflections on modern literature, modern readers, and Higgins’s own experience of the literary life in the twentieth century. In witty, insightful, often musical prose, Higgins discusses and draws connections between a wide array of major literary figures, including Melville, Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett, O’Brien, Olson, and Pinter.

The Dogs of Inishere collects stories from across Alannah Hop-kin’s thirty-year career as a fiction and travel writer. The stories presented here move from adolescence to middle age, sensitive always to the particular social, emotional, and intellectual challenges of the different phases of a life.An adolescent girl bristles against the gendered assumptions and expectations o mid-sixties London. A young writer struggles to commit fully to the artist’s life. A group of pub regulars in a sleepy seaside town observe the quiet disappointments of love and marriage. Along the way, Hopkin’s protagonists, often writers themselves, wrestle with the influence of literary figures from the past, including Austen, Byron, Poe, Wilde, Lowry, and B.S. Johnson.

Originally published in 1926, King Goshawk and the Birds is the first installment of O’Duffy’s Cuanduine trilogy, which also included The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1928) and Asses in Clover (1933), all set to be published by Dalkey Archive in the near future. 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.

Irish writing, we are told, is currently enjoying a renaissance. Strange, original talents are blossoming, wielding styles and perspectives as variant as the inspirations they bring to bear on their work. The Other Irish Tradition seeks to situate this recent flowering within the centuries-long efforts of Irish writers to experiment and to innovate, to make the form of the novel new and strange again. From Laurence Sterne to Flann O’Brien and beyond, this anthology presents both highly familiar and relatively obscure writers from across the history of Irish fiction, offering afresh perspective on and a provocative reshuffling of the literary canon.