Search results for ""the lilliput press ltd""

Narrator Noah Gilmore is researching the biography of William Belios, an ex-missionary and once famous photographer, and spends a week in his household at Oughterard, Co. Galway. Belios is Gilmore’s nemesis, his quarry, mirroring his own desires and uncertainties, as he determines to unearth family secrets: the dead wife buried in Africa and the blighted lives of three grown-up children. The eldest Medbh, an erotic illustrator, guides Gilmore down the labyrinth. Their futures demand an erasure of a troubled past as its layers are unpeeled and its perverse roots become exposed. This haunting tale concerns the unravelling of private lives; it offers a world in which the undertow of the imagination makes the reader complicit in its workings. Belios is a startlingly mature and exciting début.

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This new selected edition of Kearney’s writings on Ireland supplants his seminal text, The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions (a revised Introduction appears here), and extends Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture to which eight pieces are added comprising 50 per cent new material, and giving unique access to the state and status of Irish culture in the twenty-first century. Twentieth-century Ireland witnessed a crisis of culture. Experienced largely as a conflict between traditional aspiration and modern realism; transitions, however resisted, are inevitable. Navigations encompasses the notion of the intellectual circumnavigation of early medieval and ancient Irish scholars and exchanges, and the shallows and deeps of competing arguments that make up these texts.

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A Hymn of the Dawn’ tells of the life of the poet Padraic Fallon (1905-1974), his wife Don and their six sons during an idyllic summer in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s. At Prospect, a Georgian house with a small farm, the poet writes his poems, newspaper columns, and radio plays, ‘a cigarette smouldering in the ashtray at his elbow, pounding the keys of his typewriter as his eyes stare beyond the words’. His sons, when not working on house or farm, exploit the solitude and open spaces: fishing, soldiering, sailing, poaching, and finally embarking on an expedition in an old herring cot to discover the secrets of the inland waterways. The poet has his own adventures. He collects ballads and sea shanties for his radio programme, meeting sailors and fishermen, jaunting along the coast in his old car. He takes to the open harbour in a tiny punt. His sons go with him on a fishing-boat to visit a lighthouse. Other figures emerge in rich colour: the ploughman, the well-digger, the wildfowler, the handyman, the water diviner, the mischievous uncle from Dublin, poachers and fishermen, the aspiring Caruso who sings to a full moon, and the local man who runs naked through their fields. To Prospect come visitors from the outside world – the artist Tony O’Malley, piper and traditional singer Seamus Ennis, the poet Austin Clarke, the art critic and former gunman Ernie O’Malley, and a succession of writers, critics and poets. Brilliantly fusing fact with fiction, ‘A Hymn of the Dawn’ is an exquisitely realized evocation of childhood, as the author – the poet’s youngest son – lovingly recreates the mysteries and magic of the countryside and its people.

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What is your problem if you are ringled to a flazzard? When is Chewidden Day? How might you get out of the langle? Why is going for a dacker a quite innocent activity in one place, but something rather more lewd elsewhere? Words, Words, Words probes lexicography, dialect, sexual practices, sport and social history to create a humorous and informative guide to some of the more bizarre byways of the English language. If you’ve ever had trouble telling your etymology from your entomology, this is the book for you.

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This consummate book, illustrated by the artist Louis le Brocquy, was published privately by The Dolmen Press in 1986. It is now being made widely available for the first time, the text deriving from Robert Scholes' 1967 edition, which restored Joyce's original corrections. With this handsome edition, Dubliners returns fittingly to its source.

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Franciscan Ireland tells the story of the arrival and spread of the Order of Friars Minor in Ireland from 1226 to present day. It encompasses the work of foreign missions, other Orders within the Franciscan family, and the rich legacy of Franciscan art and architecture inscribed in sculptures and buildings across the countryside. Gazetteers give descriptions of sites both in Ireland and on the Continent, complete with individual bibliographies, glossary and index. The result is a comprehensive and illuminating reference-guide. This book is illustrated by over thirty specially commissioned line-drawings. These include isometric views of friary sites and map-chronologies.

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The war of words between critics and writers is no paper conflict but affects daily life where literature and politics interact. The twentieth-century concern is nowhere more evident than in Ireland today where the growing 'Troubles' in Ulster gave critical debate particular focus. In this clear-eyed survey Bill McCormack assesses the alliances, the animosities, the factions, seeking to show the common ground they share even as they dispute its possession. In his analysis of individual writers, journals and larger enterprises, McCormack raises some unexpected possibilities: Is Conor Cruise O'Brien best understood as a Catholic mystic? Should Field Day be seen as a depoliticising force in Irish culture? What truly distinguishes the manoeuvres of Seamus Heaney, Terence Brown, Edna Longley and Denis Donhgue from each other? Have critics begun to learn from historians, or have historians begun to fight shy of culture? Is the British "Literary Left" imperialist? Is there a non-sectarian art? Underlying this polished and stimulating critique is a sombre awareness of literature's contribution to political malaise, and a call for an engagement with the real forces that govern people's lives.

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First published in Irish by An Gum in 1965, Seosamh Mac Grianna's magnificent autobiographical novel Mo Bhealach Fein is translated here for the first time into English by Micheal O hAodha. With notes of Dead as Doornails and The Ginger Man in its absurd comedy, Mac Grianna pens his reaction to an anglicised, urbanised, post-revolution Ireland, demonstrating his talents at their peak. This Road of Mine relates a humorous, picaresque journey through Wales en route for Scotland, an Irish counterpart to Three Men in a Boat with a twist of Down and Out in Paris and London. The protagonist follows his impulses, getting into various absurd situations: being caught on the Irish Sea in a stolen rowboat in a storm; feeling guilt and terror in the misplaced certainty that he had killed the likeable son of his landlady with a punch while fleeing the rent; sleeping outdoors in the rain and rejecting all aid on his journey. What lies behind his misanthropy is a reverence for beauty and art and a disgust that the world doesn't share his view, concerning itself instead with greed and pettiness. The prose is full of personality, and O hAodha has proved himself adept at capturing the life and spark of the writer's style. His full-spirited translation has given the English-reading world access to this charming and relentlessly entertaining bohemian poet, full of irrepressible energy for bringing trouble on himself. As well as the undoubted importance of this text culturally, Mac Grianna is able to make rank misanthropy enjoyable - making music out of misery. The voice is wonderful: hyperbolic but sincere.

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Maud Gonne was the beautiful and charismatic inspiration of Yeats’s love poetry, a leading activist in the Irish republican movement and the founder of Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland). One hundred and fifty years after her birth, everyone still knows her face, but her life remains something of a mystery. This biography pursues the story of what attracted Maud Gonne to a man like Lucien Millevoye, and what imprint the attachment left upon her. Once jilted by Millevoye, Gonne marched into a truly ill-starred marriage to Major John MacBride. The horrible truth of their mismatch is examined through the evidence entered by both parties in the divorce proceedings. The author uses the vast resources of newly digitised French newspapers and journals to track the celebrated Gonne and her beloved Lucien Millevoye through the sensational turmoil of the Third Republic in France and into the violent push for a republic in Ireland. The shifting levels of awareness, desire, and mutual complicity in self-deception on the part of W.B. Yeats and his muse are traced with subtlety. Ultimately, the effect of the group biography as a whole is to make Yeats’s early love poems, so long in the public eye, more visible than they have ever been.

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Nevill Johnson is better known as a painter and photographer than as a writer. Eoin O'Brien, close friend of Nevill Johnson and literary executor of his estate, has edited his writings in this volume for the first time. The resulting book, provides an intriguing insight into the life of one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century.

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