Search results for ""the lilliput press ltd""
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Beat: Life on the Streets
Who are the women who walk the beat in Dublin’s red-light districts? How did they get there? Why do they stay? What happens when they try to leave? What are their lives really like? The Beat: Life on the Streets in a fascinating, disturbing account of the lives of sixteen women and their struggle for surival in Dublin’s underworld. Haunted by the drug-related death of his lover Seema, herself a ‘working girl’, David Fine decided to confront his grief head-on – journeying to the heart of an invisible Ireland to find out what it means to be a prostitute. Working as a taxi driver, Fine got to know the women on the streets, unveiling every aspect of their harrowing lives. Their stories command attention and compassion on every page of this revealing book. Fine describes how these women – alternately raging or gentle, brutal or loving, vicious or simply wounded – destroy themselves, how their personalites crash and collapse, driven by the drugs coursing through their veins. Here are Dublin’s ‘working girls’ in their own words. Imelda is fierce, and fiercely loves her two daughters. Sorcha is so strung out on heroin she eats her own clothes. Una will do anything to avoid sex. Teresa was gang-raped at the age of eleven. Despite it all, these women continue to live and love and dream of a better world. The Beat gives voice to the voiceless – Fine’s admiration for their courage shining through. LIke Jim Carrol in The Basketball Diaries and Scorsese in Taxi Driver, he sees human dignity and beauty in life’s darkest corners.
£9.19
The Lilliput Press Ltd Mirror, Mirror: Confessions of a Plastic Surgery Addict
Terry Prone once thought plastic surgery was for the vain, the self-regarding and the rich. She thought herself the person least likely to submit to the plastic surgeon’s scalpel. But this was before a traumatic car crash in which the steering wheel caved in her cheekbones, broke her jaw and smashed her teeth. In the days and weeks that followed, she began to understand how radically her appearance had changed. She then embarked on a journey of physical – and emotional – reconstruction that gradually became an addiction. Liposuction. Tooth implants. An arm-lift. Two face-lifts and a brow-lift. Diamond eye surgery. Foot surgery. She found she could not stop. Mirror Mirror tells the dramatic story of Terry Prone’s experience of plastic surgery on both sides of the Atlantic and reveals the truth about each procedure: discomforts, costs, failures and (mostly) successes. Charged with her remarkable candour, it is an astonishing story of courage and personal reinvention – and a hilarious exploration of the wilder shores of plastic surgery.
£9.19
The Lilliput Press Ltd She Moves Through The Boom
What’s happening in Ireland? Behind the triumphalist headlines of the boom, there are changes going on – in the way people work, speak, eat, even the way they think – that cannot be quantified by statistics nor squared with the hollow cliché of the Celtic Tiger. She Moves through the Boom is a book about these intangible changes, and it paints a picture the newspapers and tourism propagandists are missing. Ann Marie Hourihane talks to working mothers, Mullingar wine importers, the organizer of a rural water scheme, shop assistants, a Nigerian preacher, teenaged removal men, and other exemplary – because ordinary – members of Irish society. These people aren’t talking about the boom; they’re living it, sometimes without even noticing, and they speak its languages – of social liberation, stubborn tradition, banal consumerism, and others. She Moves through the Boom presents a quirky, kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Ireland. By turns hilarious and dark, it is a fascinating snapshot of a singular moment in our history.
£9.19
The Lilliput Press Ltd Dead As Doornails
Dead as Doornails, first published in 1976, brings back into print a true classic of Irish memoir. Anthony Cronin’s account of life in post-war literary Dublin is as funny and colourful as one would expect from an intimate of Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Myles na Gopaleen; but it is also a clear-eyed and bracing antidote to the kitsch that passes for literary history and memory in the Dublin of today. Cronin writes with remarkable subtlety of the frustrations and pathologies of this generation: the excess of drink, the shortage of sex, the insecurity and begrudgery, the painful limitations of cultural life, and the bittersweet pull of exile. We read of a comical sojourn in France with Behan, and of Cronin’s years in London as a literary editor and a friend of the writer Julian Maclaren-Ross and the painters Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun. The generation chronicled by Cronin was one of wasted promise. That waste is redressed through the shimmering prose of Dead as Doornails, earning its place in Irish literary history alongside the best works of Behan, Kavanagh and Myles.
£10.65
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Marriage At Antibes
The Country Road’ moves heartbreakingly through the days of Cathy, a lonely eight-year-old in a Northern Ireland populated by her elderly neighbours and the vague menace of the security forces. In ‘Bronagh’, the eponymous heroine is wrenched from an idyllic sojourn in Andalucia when her mother falls ill, embarking on a homeward journey of oblivion along the western flank of Europe. ‘A Banal Stain’ tells the story of a graduate student lodging in a once-grand house in Lyon and confronting the ghosts of France’s colonial and Vichy past. In ‘A Recitation of Nomads’ an English painter and her American writer boyfriend, slouching through their twenties together, light out for Morocco to mend their dreams. And ‘The Marriage at Antibes’ is an arranged one between a political refugee, long settled in France, and his newly arrived bride. These stories of travel, unbelonging and otherness, related with the poised eye of a young Elizabeth Bowen, and with remarkable emotional power, announce a compelling voice in Irish fiction.
£9.19
The Lilliput Press Ltd The State Of Ireland
Arthur O'Connor was the most important conduit between French republicanism and Irish political radicalism in the late 1790s … His State of Ireland, published in 1798, created a distinctively Irish language of radical democracy out of French sources, by fusing them with the local political tradition and Scottish political economy.' So writes editor James Livesey in his introduction to this new edition of The State of Ireland, first published in pamphlet form in 1798 by Arthur O'Connor, a prominent member of the United Irishmen. O'Connor brought to the revolutionary movement of the 1790s a mind honed on the ideas of Adam Smith – ideas that might not seem revolutionary today, but that had radical implications as adapted by O'Connor and applied to the bizarre political economy of eighteenth-century Ireland. As perhaps the most steadfastly anti-sectarian member of the United Irish movement, O'Connor viewed the vexed debates over 'Protestant liberty' and Catholic Emancipation as distractions from the fundamental questions of political and economic reform; he supported emancipation as a necessary but by no means sufficient element of a free, democratic Irish society. 'What O'Connor's work reveals to us', Livesey writes, 'is the breadth of vision within the United Irishmen and the novelty of their intervention in Irish political culture … O'Connor's text deserves to find a place in the canon of classic political texts that have constructed and made possible, or even imaginable, Irish democracy.'
£25.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Creativity in its Contexts
Two poets, a playwright and a novelist – Michael Longley, Eavan Boland, Frank McGuiness and Anita Desai – explore in these essays aspects of the imaginative process as each has experienced it: four major writers, four sensibilities, four ways of seeing creativity and its contexts. MICHAEL LONGLEY writes with remarkable candour of his years – 1970 to 1991 – as arts administrator in Northern Ireland. Transforming anecdote into parable, this noted poet measures the cost of ‘trying to remain true to yourself facing the ”dark tower”‘ while being part of an essential but often soul-destroying bureaucracy. EAVAN BOLAND, merging the personal and the theoretical, contends that the place of women as writers in Irish society have been shaped by a ‘ fusion of the national and the feminine’. FRANK MCGUINESS, the internationally acclaimed playwright, offers a radically innovative reading of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, while calling into being the material contexts of creativity – in this instance, a prison cell. The Indian novelist ANITA DESAI looks at her country’s colonial heritage and a shared background that gave rise to the work of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and the film-maker Satyajit Ray. Her fascinating lecture shows how a vibrant indigenous culture, coming into fruitful contact with the West at the end of the nineteenth century, blossomed into artistic creation – yielding parallels with Ireland.
£7.73
The Lilliput Press Ltd Memoirs of a Happy Belfast Man: The Life and Witness of Arnold Marsh 1890-1977
Arnold Marsh, son of Belfast tin-factory owner born in 1890, is best remembered as an educationist and headmaster of Newtown Quaker School in Waterford, Ireland. His life also saw him travel widely, leaving Canada to work in a gold mine in Northern Ontario, on railway construction in British Columbia, and in a lumber camp in Alaska where he met Scandinavians, Chinese and Japanese, Russians and a Finn who learned language after language so that he could read different versions of the Bible. There he encountered the racism experienced by native Alaskans treated as foreigners in their own country. In 1917, once war was declared in the United States, Marsh sailed from Alaska to California where he played an extra in the Douglas Fairbanks movie A Modern Musketeer. He was eventually ‘inducted’ into the US Army at Camp Lewis, Washington, and was sent to France to join the front line beset by Spanish Flu. After peace was declared, Marsh returned to Ireland where he cycled 1200 miles around Ireland on a ‘Grand Tour’. Returning to his first love, education, he got a job in the Friends School, Lisburn, becoming headmaster in 1926. At that time, he observed that Irish Protestants were pessimistic about their future, many sending their children to English schools. Numbers at Newtown had fallen to twenty pupils and the buildings were dilapidated. In sympathy with the new post-1916 independent Ireland, Marsh took immediate steps to improve the school’s conditions, and during his tenure, numbers grew to 300–400 pupils. His fresh ideas about multi-denominational education took inspiration from his own schooldays at Sidcot in England: ‘The masters were our friends. We could look up to them and enjoy their company. … I got a great deal out of being away for those years, doing other work and getting to know other people. With my students I discussed the whole social system, trying to get people to think things out afresh.’ He married the distinguished portrait painter Hilda Roberts and they, with their daughter Eithne, settled at the foot of the Dublin mountains in Woodtown Park during the late 1930s, building a community of like-minded tenants and idealists drawn from all over Europe. In his later years, he was inspired to write his memoir, illustrated with postcards, letters and photographs describing his journeys and adventures in North America, and his experiences as a headmaster. In 1976, a year before his death aged eighty-six, he was still splitting and sawing logs for the fire, recalling his early career as a lumberjack in Alaska those fateful years ago.
£25.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd My Dublin 1963 // My Dubliners 2020: Photographs & Commentary
These 87 black & white photographs taken by Alen MacWeeney in Dublin in 1963/5 are spontaneous images of Dublin and Dubliners in all areas of the city, a street odyssey reflecting a cross section of the people, their habits and behaviour, ten years before Ireland joined the European Union and the wider world. The text on facing pages is composed of social commentary gleaned from a posting of each of the book's photographs on Dublin social media platform Down Memory Lane, eliciting a flood of 70,000 responses during 2020. These photographs of Dublin and Dubliners in 1963 have pertinent social and historical value as attested by their placement in numerous US Universities and museums. The text offers a novel way of understanding and appreciating a full gamut of Dublin personalities through their reactions to the posting of these photographs during the current pandemic. The responses ranged from wonder and incredulity to heated derision, offset by the hilarity that characterize Dubliners. The richness of the commentary will be of interest to any Irish person curious to glimpse Dublin life in the '60s and to gauge the reactions of Dubliners today. MacSweeney's work partakes of the tradition of reportage by Walker Evans, Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank and Richard Avendon, to whom he was apprenticed in Paris during the late fifties.
£35.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Edith
Martina Devlin, an award-winning columnist for the Irish Independent and podcaster for Dublin City of Literature #CityofBooks, has delivered a new novel based on the life of Edith Somerville of 'Somerville and Ross' fame - authors of The Irish R.M. In this work, set during the turbulent period of Irish Independence 1921-22, Somerville finds herself at a crossroads. Her position as a member of the Ascendancy is perilous as she struggles to keep her family home, Drishane House in West Cork, while others are burned out. After years in a successful writing partnership with Violet Martin, Edith continues to write after her partner's death, comforted in the belief they continue to connect through automatic writing and seances. Against a backdrop of Civil War politics and lawlessness erupting across the country via IRA flying columns, people across Ireland are forced to consider where their loyalties lie. In Edith, Devlin limns a vivid historical context in this story of proto-feminist Edith Somerville courageously trying to keep home and heart in one piece.
£14.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Long Lost Log
In 1974, 22-year-old virgin sailor Mick escapes unemployment, family and 3-day-week London to become a deckhand on a small sailboat, Gay Gander, setting out to sail the Atlantic from England's West Country, via the Canaries, to Antigua in the Caribbean. Under the eye of an unfathomable skipper, John Francis Kearney, and his formidable sailing companion Carola (both escaping from a rain-sodden Ireland and broken marriages), Mick has to learn sailing, table manners, bridging the generation gap and getting along with Stryder, the Russian Blue ship's cat. The Long Lost Log should be fiction but is the true story of a voyage of discovery that Mick - against all odds - survived to tell this remarkable and hilarious tale. His inner and outer journey combines danger with the unexpected, the erotic and the comic, in a resonantly related rite of passage that leaps from the page like the curious whale that once disturbed the narrator's watch. The skipper involved happens to be the publisher's late father.
£14.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Left Without a Handkerchief
Left without a Handkerchief contains ten stories of destruction and loss during the Irish War of Independence and Civil War. Between 250 and 300 Irish country houses were burnt in the early 1920s during the course of the War of Independence and subsequent Civil War. The reasons behind their destruction were various, but because of their scale and prominence on the Irish landscape, setting fire to them was judged by perpetrators to be good propaganda. Hitherto historians have concentrated on the actions and motivation of those responsible for carrying out the burnings. Left without a Handkerchief will tell the other side of the story, of history seen from the perspective of the losers.
£22.51
The Lilliput Press Ltd A Poet in the House: Patrick Kavanagh at Priory Grove
Patrick Kavanagh (1904–67) was one of Ireland’s foremost poets, best known for ‘The Great Hunger’ and novel Tarry Flynn. He is also remembered for his cantankerous, sometimes volatile nature, fuelled by alcohol. In A Poet in the House: Patrick Kavanagh at Priory Grove, a memoir by Elizabeth O’Toole, we encounter a new Patrick Kavanagh. In 1961, the poet lived with the O’Toole family in Stillorgan for six months at a crucial point in his life, when he was sober, industrious and, as the accompanying photographs will show, much loved by her children. Until now, no one has been aware of how close Kavanagh was to O’Toole and to her husband, James Davitt Bermingham O’Toole. Born and raised in China, Jim O’Toole was the author of Man Alive, a play about the inner workings of the ESB that created a storm of controversy in 1961. On the first night, Kavanagh told the audience that the press was ‘lily-livered’. This was not just ‘a local row’. One of the ESB’s top executives, Jim O’Donovan, was the IRA leader who negotiated a deal with the Nazis that threatened the existence of the State in 1940. Kavanagh’s relationship with O’Donovan and Jim O’Toole’s escape from Germany at the outbreak of the war are here revealed for the first time. Amongst many other revelations in the book is a hitherto unknown connection between the poet and Patricia Avis, novelist wife of the poet Richard Murphy, and lover of Philip Larkin and Desmond Williams. Although Elizabeth O’Toole is now ninety-six, her decidedly down-to-earth voice is that of a much younger woman. Her vivid recollections deepen and challenge the way we view Patrick Kavanagh. The influence of her book will tilt our perception of this passionate man. A contextual essay by the editor of the volume, playwright and novelist Brian Lynch, accompanies the memoir along with photographs from the early sixties.
£13.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Out of the Ordinary: A Life through Gender and Spiritual Transitions
Now available for the first time in Ireland and the UK - more than half a century after it was written - is the memoir of Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (1915-62), the Anglo-Irish doctor and Buddhist monastic novice chiefly known to scholars of sex, gender, and sexuality for his pioneering transition from female to male between 1939 and 1949, and for his groundbreaking 1946 book Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. Here at last is Dillon/Jivaka's extraordinary life story told in his own words. Out of the Ordinary captures Dillon/Jivaka's various journeys - to Oxford, into medicine, across the world by ship - within the major narratives of his gender and religious journeys. Moving chronologically, Dillon/Jivaka was from Lismullin House, County Meath, but spent his childhood in Folkestone, England, where he was raised by spinster aunts, telling of his days at Oxford immersed in theology, classics, and rowing. He recounts his hormonal transition while working as an auto mechanic and fire watcher in Bristol during World War II and describes his surgical transition under Sir Harold Gillies while Dillon himself attended medical school at Trinity College, Dublin (1945-51). He details his travels as a ship's surgeon in the British Merchant Navy with extensive commentary on his engagement with colonial and postcolonial subjects in Asia, followed by his 'outing' by the British press while he served aboard The City of Bath. Out of the Ordinary is not only a unique record of early gender affirmation but also a compelling account of religious conversion in the mid-twentieth century. Dillon/Jivaka chronicles his gradual shift from Anglican Christianity to the esoteric spiritual systems of George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky, to Theravada and finally Mahayana Buddhism. He concludes his memoir with the contested circumstances of his Buddhist monastic ordination in India and Tibet. Ultimately, while Dillon/Jivaka died before becoming a monk, his novice ordination was significant: it made him the first white European man to be ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. This first-person narrative, written in the early 1960s and first published more than a generation later in the US by Fordham University Press, is both ahead of its time and distinctly of its time and class, with Dillon's views being sometimes enlightened, sometimes colonial. A Foreword by Susan Stryker from the Fordham University Press edition describes Dillon as 'a seeker after truth, who traveled wherever his queries led him'. An Afterword, 'A Mapless Journey', by London-based literary agent Andrew Hewson - unique to the Lilliput Press edition - traces the typescript memoir's provenance and preservation prior to its eventual publication. An introductory biographical essay by consultant psychologist Aidan Collins gives an overview of the timeline of this remarkable individual's history. Out of the Ordinary is a landmark publication that sets free a singular voice from within the history of the transgender movement.
£16.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Scar
At the age of twenty-seven, married, living in New York, and working in book design, Mary Cregan gives birth to her first child, a daughter she names Anna. But it's apparent that something is terribly wrong and two days later, Anna dies, plunging Cregan into suicidal despair. Decades later, sustained by her work, a second marriage, and a son, Cregan reflects on and attempts to make sense of this pivotal experience. Weaving together literature and research with details from her long-buried medical records, she writes of her own ordeal and the still-visible scar of a suicide attempt- while considering it as part of a larger history of our understanding of depression. She investigates the treatments she underwent, from hospitalization and shock therapy to psychotherapy and antidepressants. At once intimate and scholarly, The Scar illuminates a too often stigmatised affliction with compassion and intelligence and offers hope to all those who are still struggling.
£15.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Rise Above!: Letters From Tyrone Guthrie
Rise above!: Letters from Tyrone Guthrie details the life of the celebrated theatrical director whose influence on international theatre lives on. Here, in a stunning volume of letters, we are offered a glimpse into the vision of this extraordinary figure as well as a view of the intimacies of his relationships with his mother, sister, wife and friends. During the 1940s and 1950s Guthrie was renowned for liberating the plays of Shakespeare from declamatory delivery and excessive staging. His most enduring legacy was in inspiring the creation of modern theatre buildings where the plays of antiquity could be brought closer to the audience, such as at Stratford, Canada, and the theatre that bears his name in Minneapolis, USA. Of Scots-Irish parentage, he identified most closely with his mother’s home at Annaghmakerrig, Co. Monaghan, which he made his professional headquarters after her death, hosting producers, designers, playwrights and composers there while planning worldwide productions. Guthrie’s letters to his mother, Norah, his wife, Judith, and his sister, Peggy, give a balanced account of his professional and domestic life, and it was on the advice of his sister and her husband, Hubert Butler, that he left his mother’s house to the Irish nation as a workplace for writers and artists. Faced with often seemingly insurmountable financial and personal disaster, his celebrated mantra ‘Rise above!’ was testament to a life lived in the wings of an operatic opening night or a Shakespearean tragedy. Guthrie’s vivid descriptions of places visited are matched by the observational skills of his remarks on the people he worked with, among them well-known figures such as Benjamin Britten, Alec Guinness, Charles Laughton, Siobhán McKenna, Micheál MacLíammóir, the Oliviers and others. Family members come in for as many amused comments as do the famous and distinguished: Cousin Molly is no more spared than Sir Winston Churchill. Fitz-Simon has gathered an important, and entrancing, collection of Tyrone Guthrie’s letters, raising a curtain on the life of Ireland’s leading theatre director of the twentieth-century
£30.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd A Lost Tribe
A Lost Tribe is a novel that charts the role of the priest in Ireland, from his exalted position to one of an endangered species. The seminarians at St Paul’s are granted permission to watch the opening of Vatican II, transfixed by the procession of bishops ‘vested in flowing robes’. Seduced by the power emanating from Rome and inspired by the vision of the Vatican Council, these young men sacrifice their instincts to a life in the priesthood. The dream collapses when the Irish Church becomes unwilling to evolve with a rapidly mutating world and unable to wield the power it once had. Unable to cope with the pressures of ministry and no longer fulfilled by their call, many abandon their vocation to seek a new life. Mac, a spirited young student, is disillusioned with the inadequacy of his seminary training and is expelled for a tryst, while timid fellow priests share remedies for the collective loneliness of their vocation. King’s daring novel offers an insight into the conflicted life of the priest struggling with the demands of a self-selected lifestyle and the isolation of clerical celibacy. A Lost Tribe is a poignant study of an altered society.
£12.10
The Lilliput Press Ltd Before The Wax Hardened
Originally published in 1992, this childhood memoir, revised and augmented, now has the status of a modern Irish classic. On his first trip abroad, Adrian Kenny observes that the signs are in one language only. There is no need for translation: there is nothing behind. Not so in his suburban childhood and adolescence, where Mayo is behind Dublin, poor fields behind the bourgeois drawing rooms of Rathmines, wildness behind authority. Attached to both, his attempts to reconcile them take him from close certainty to total collapse in the year of change – America, 1968. ‘What was it all for?’ his father asks. ‘It's like the end of the Aeneid,’ whispers his friend. ‘You came at the end of that world,’ Father Wilmot says. The end of Latin Mass, maids, floggings and charcoal suits. The author's keen eye and clear style lends this portrayal of an individual and a generation the truth and elegance of an enduring work of art.
£13.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Hopdance
In a great Irish tradition of autobiographical fiction that includes James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Parker’s poignant novel depicts events surrounding the amputation of his left leg as a nineteen-year-old university student. Masterful vignettes present the callow protagonist’s life before, during and after this ordeal. Belfast, drear locus of rain and despond, contributes to the heaviness at the novel’s heart, as its characters strive to rise above the pervasive melancholy of the city and find some human happiness that they can share. Tosh, Parker’s alter-ego, is drifting through life before his cancer diagnosis, plagued by the twin ‘cankers’ of a puzzling pain in the leg and a crippling loneliness. The amputation forces him into a more authentic relationship with life, which ‘Starts with the wound. Ends with the kiss. For the lucky ones.’ This remarkable, posthumously edited work, largely written in the early 1970s, prefigures the skills Parker would demonstrate in his plays: plainspoken and stoical in tone, the emotion seeps through a membrane of numb reserve. The writing is impressionistically vivid, the descriptions of pain and discomfort wholly authoritative. Hopdance is a beautiful, sincere, personal testament by a true artist, a wondrous ‘lost treasure’ of literature now presented to its reading public.
£10.65
The Lilliput Press Ltd Trinity Tales: Trinity College Dublin in the Nineties
Like its three predecessors, this fourth instalment of Trinity Tales gathers together recollections of a decade at Trinity College Dublin. This time, the story is taken up by 1990s graduates– those who passed through its gates as the twentieth century drew to a close–and, through the forty individual voices assembled here, a vivid portrait emerges of student life during those transformative years. Trinity students at the decade’s end had email, mobile phones and the vast resources of the Internet at their disposal. In addition, they were relatively debt-free (undergraduate tuition fees having been abolished in 1996) and every bit as likely to stay and find work in Ireland as to get on the first flight to London or New York. Reflecting this sense of rapid growth, new buildings started springing up around campus, most notably the Samuel Beckett Centre and Goldsmith Hall, and as the millennium approached, the college was expanding in all directions. Contributors encompass the worlds of science, the arts and everything in between, and include actors Dominic West and Mario Rosenstock, writers and journalists Turtle Bunbury, Claire Kilroy and Belinda McKeon, eminent scientists such as Austin Duffy, and sportsman Mark Pollock. Those who arrived at Trinity in the nineties are the generation that came of age in an Ireland caught between the grim, recession-ridden 1980s and the brash, moneyed millenials, an almost unfathomable transition eclipsed only by that between the analogue and digital eras. As with previous volumes, royalties from the book go to the Long Room Library fund.
£15.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Beckett's Friendship
‘Despite his deep sense of privacy, Beckett’s persona has been so widely written about that it has become unavoidably mixed up in our imagination with what Bernold calls his “creatures”. Whether or not Barthes and Foucault were right to dismiss the figure of the author, when confronted with Vladimir wincing or Krapp hunched over his tape recorder or Molloy resting on his bicycle, one’s mind always seems to turn to the “gentle mask” placed over the “severe ossature” that has been immortalized in John Minihan’s photographs, surely among the most iconic images of the twentieth century. We simply cannot help it.’ (From the translator’s preface) Meeting in the cafés and streets of Paris, with conversations noted and hesitancies observed, the gradual exfoliation of a personality is revealed across the last decade of Beckett’s life as one intellectual appraises another. This is a charming and sympathetic study of one of literature’s most opaque writers and of his interests in music, philosophy, visual arts and the spoken arts. In shedding sympathetic light on a famously private Irishman abroad, these verbal exposures complement John Minihan’s contemporaneous and intimate black-and-white photographs, taken in the same environs.
£12.10
The Lilliput Press Ltd Maurice Craig: Photographs
For fifty years, architectural historian Maurice Craig carried a camera nearly everywhere he went. Meticulously catalogued, the resulting collection of over two thousand photographs was donated to the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA) in 2001. During his final year, Craig selected seventy-odd of his favourites, adding comments in his wry, incisive style. Many photographs here originally featured in the IAA 2006 exhibition ‘Maurice Craig: Fifty Years of Photographing Ireland’; others appeared as small prints in Ireland Observed (1980), co-authored with the Knight of Glin. Here, they are grouped into four categories: buildings that no longer exist; tableaux of a byone age; curiosities, such as arresting stone carvings and plaster work, or humourous juxtapositions; and buildings of enduring architectural interest. With an introduction by the photographer and an afterword by Rolf Loeber, this book is part memento mori, part historical document – a tribute not only to Ireland’s buildings and architecture, but also to one of their greatest champions.
£25.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Goodbye Again
Ben Contini, a disenchanted painter of considerable talent, has just buried his mother. Rifling through the attic of her Kilkenny house he stumbles across a Modigliani nude, worth millions. Determined to learn the provenance of the painting, he and Elsa, a disturbed and secretive woman who accosts him at the funeral, become embroiled in the sinister world of Nazi art theft. But they are not the only one with an interest in the painting… Together they set off on a frantic journey that leads them from Dublin to France via the Cotswolds, down the Canal du Midi into Italy. The intrigue surrounding the shadowy half-truths about their exotic families becomes increasingly sinister as Ben and Elsa are forced to confront their pasts and their buried demons. Set in the 1980s, this is a fantastic new book from established thriller writer Joseph Hone, who weaves a breathless, galloping intrigue packed with narrative twists and sumptuous evocations of Europe’s forgotten past.
£10.64
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Devil To Pay: The Story of Alice and Petronilla
Kilkenny, 1324. Alice Kyteler, outspoken daughter of a wealthy Flemish banker, has survived four husbands and is beset by the gossip and rivalry of a medieval Anglo-Norman town. Her beautiful maid is Petronilla, child of an itinerant shoemaker, her lover Sir Arnaud le Poer is seneschal and lord of south Leinster. Her nemesis is Richard de Ledrede, English Fransciscan, scholar, poet and now bishop of Ossory, determined to reassert clerical power and restore the dilapidated cathedral. To him Alice embodies the moral laxity of the age, her irreverence and knowlege of healing feeding his anger and obsession with witchcraft. Outside the city walls the native Irish are resurgent after 150 years of dispossession. In the streets of Kilkenny, crowds gather around the stake. In The Devil to Pay, HUGH RYAN tells the true story of Alice and Petronilla – portrayed against a backdrop of the struggles between Norman and Gael – bringing to life a remarkable tapestry of this pivotal era in Irish history.
£11.36
The Lilliput Press Ltd Essays Tribute to J.Valentine Rice: 1935-2006
Professor J. Valentine Rice, erstwhile Chair of Education at Trinity College Dublin (1966-2005) to whom this volume of essays is dedicated in memoriam, engaged in the richness and diversity of education debate during the thirty-nine years that he held his academic post. His interests in the philosophy of education, Catholic education, human growth and guidance and the Irish language and culture are reflected in the essays by his former colleagues and students presented here. Whether it is the teaching of Irish, the involvement of the churches in education, the points system or the managerialism and "edunomics" of the universities, educational debate is vigorous and often passionate. The diversity of the themes of the contributions seems, on a first viewing, to indicate the lack of a common theme. On closer reflection, however, Val Rice's lifelong commitment to a view of education that must always be broad enough to encompass the many ways in which it aids genuine human flourishing, shines through. These essays are examples of the ways in which colleagues and students have responded to his influence as teacher, mentor, advocate and friend as they continue to work and engage in the broad field of education.
£20.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Brian Bourke: Five Decades: 1960s-2000s
The book contains writings by Seamus Heaney, Frances Ruane, Carlos Garcia-Monzon, Eva Bourke, Frankie Gavin, Rosemarie Noone, James McKenna, Desmond Egan, Patrick Murphy & Frank McGuinness. It is lavishly illustrated & surveys the entire career of this distinguished artist.
£54.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Ulster's Other Poetry: Verses and Songs of the Province
ULSTER’ S OTHER POETRY proves that the people of Ulster have never been humourless or dour. Far from it. With its sparkling variety of rhymes, songs and humorous poems from every tradition of the province, the book demonstrates that those who dwell in the northern quarter of Ireland have their own unique take on the strange ways of the world, coupled with a whole-hearted appreciation of good fun. Spanning over three centuries of Ulster’s past, this anthology is full of comic pleasures. In its pages, country ballads jostle with city satires, songs aimed at children meet jingles advertising bread, and university light verses encounter the folk-poems of the Antrim weavers. Each poem comes with background information about its origins, and each page is illuminated by Hector McDonnell’s wonderful, witty drawings. This book is destined to become a much-thumbed, much-loved companion.
£10.65
The Lilliput Press Ltd Cathal Gannon: The Life and Times of a Dublin Craftsman 1910-1999
Cathal Gannon (1910-1999) revived the art of harpsichord making in Dublin in the early 1950s after a lull of some 150 years. His story is one not of rags to riches but of obscurity to recognition. Despite a modest start in life, he became hugely respected for his skills and was awarded two honorary MA degrees (TCD 1978, Maynooth 1989) for his contribution to music in Ireland. This richly documented biography charts Cathal’s life from his Dublin childhood through his career in the Guinness Brewery, begun at the age of fifteen, to an active and prolific retirement, during which he continued to make harpsichords and restore antique pianos. Although the seeds of interest were sown in early life, his harpsichord-making career only began in 1951, and his first harpsichord was played in public in 1959 – an occasion lauded in the national press. A few years later, his employers set up a special workshop in the Brewery where Cathal would work exclusively on instrument making. With his impish sense of fun, he became well known as a prankster by his colleagues. This book also offers fascinating behind-the-scene glimpses of the ‘unofficial ‘ goings-on in the Guinness Brewery. Many people were drawn to Cathal through his liveliness and quick mind. He befriended the likes of Grace Plunkett (widow of Joseph Mary Plunkett), Carl Hardebeck, a noted arranger of Irish music, and Desmond and Mariga Guinness, founders of the Irish Georgian Society. He was the subject of several RTE radio and television programmes, including The Late Late Show. This intimate account of a man who was, in his own words, ‘interested in everything’ (amongst other hobbies, he was a keen amateur horologist), reveals a storyteller who delighted in the colourful characters he encountered. The work is further enriched by its lively evocation of Dublin and its environs in bygone times, from a rustic Dolphin’s Barn in the 1920s to the bookstalls and antique shops of the city centre during the 1930s and 1940s, giving a real sense of time’s passing and the social change that has since occurred.
£25.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Winter Bayou
‘Each time we lay down together, I thought of pounding fetlocks, the flex of tendons, the press of horse shoe against my chest, the ring of purple flesh it would leave on my stomach, his galloping, galloping into me … Each night, after, I filled the space we’d made with the whine and later the voice of the violin, my voice, coming quicker and quicker, my fingers finding the notes through his hair, quicker and quicker through my bow arm sweeping across the strings, down the flutes of muscle on his back. It came mellow and low then quicker and harder and pizzicato and striking each note, forcing it from the wood and into the still sycamores, pin oaks, maples. Always, the violin called between the spaces.’ In this stunning fictional début Kelly Sullivan explores of the inner life of Grace: mother, wife, and talented violinist. Finding release only in her music, Grace exists in a state of profound emotional paralysis, until the storm. 18 August 1969 – Hurricane Camille ravages all that lies in her path; at a party in Mississippi drunken revellers eagerly await her arrival. As they sway to the sound of a stereo hi-fi, outside ‘the trees whip by and the rain whips down’. Twenty-four people die inside the beachfront building when it’s razed ‘flatter than a winter bayou’. Speeding over drifting sand, Grace, her husband and his newly acquired lover make a last-minute dash to safety. In the days that follow, Grace surveys the destruction wrought by the tempest. Like the wood of her beloved violin, her fractured ego risks crumpling under the pressure: ‘Too much moisture and you’re gonna warp her, but too little and you’ll have more cracks,’ the violin repairman had warned. In Winter Bayou, Grace journeys through the past, from the heady rush of teenage love to a marriage ‘ripped apart too … shredded and pushed beyond our boundaries’ – her meditations forming a perfectly poised novella as lyrically tender as it is viscerally sensuous.
£9.91
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Road to Riverdance PB
Riverdance exploded across the stage at Dublin’s Point Theatre one spring evening in 1994 during a seven-minute interval of the Eurovision Song Contest hosted by Ireland. It was a watershed moment in the cultural history of a country embracing the future, a confident leap into world music grounded in the footfall of the choreographed kick-line. It was a moment forty-five years in the making for its composer. In this tenderly unfurled memoir Bill Whelan rehearses a lifetime of unconscious preparation as step by step he revisits his past, from with his Barrington Street home in 1950s Limerick, to the forcing ground of University College Dublin and the Law Library during the 1960s, to his attic studio in Ranelagh. Along the way the reader is introduced to people and places in the immersive world of fellow musicians, artists and producers, friends and collaborators, embracing the spectrum of Irish music as it broke boundaries, entering the global slipstream of the 1980s and 1990s. As art and commerce fused, dramas and contending personalities come to view behind the arras of stage, screen and recording desk. Whelan pays tribute to a parade of those who formed his world. He describes the warmth and sustenance of his Limerick childhood, his parents and Denise Quinn, won through assiduous courtship; the McCourts and Jesuit fathers of his early days, the breakthrough with a tempestuous Richard Harris who summoned him to London; Danny Doyle, Shay Healy, Dickie Rock, Planxty, The Dubliners and Stockton’s Wing, Noel Pearson, Seán Ó Riada; working with Jimmy Webb, Leon Uris, The Corrs, Paul McGuinness, Moya Doherty, John McColgan, Jean Butler and Michael Flatley. Written with wry, inimitable Irish humour and insight, Bill Whelan’s self deprecation allows us to to see the players in all their glory, vulnerability and idiosyncracy. This fascinating work reveals the nuts, bolts, sheer effort and serendipities that formed the road to Riverdance in his reinvention of the Irish tradition for a modern age. As the show went on to perform to millions worldwide, Whelan was honoured with a 1997 Grammy Award when Riverdance was named the ‘Best Musical Show Album.’ Richly detailed and illustrated, The Road to Riverdance forms an enduring repository of memory for all concerned with the performing arts.
£22.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd First Quarter
In this reflective and enriching memoir, John Tuomey navigates the places and memories of his life over the scope of twenty-five years. First recognised for the urban regeneration of Dublin’s Temple Bar, which included the construction of the Irish Film Institute, the National Photographic Archive and Gallery of Photography, his life in architecture led him to design social and cultural spaces such as the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, the Glucksman Gallery in UCC and the Victoria & Albert East Museum in London. Imbued with many inter-textual references to poetry, drama and literature and written in limpid prose, this memoir is inherently literary in nature. Tuomey looks back to his early life where he was born in Tralee and lived in different counties around Ireland, from small towns to country landscapes, from schooldays in Dundalk to student activism at University College Dublin. He traces the pathways that led to his formation as an architect, reflecting on the many cultural and social influences on his life. He excels in capturing the social landscape of Dublin in the 1980s and pays particular attention to the many buildings and social hubs of the inner city. His transient years of moving from Dublin to London, and subsequently working in places like Nairobi and Milan, chronicle the international influences on his outlook. The key relationships in his life, including meeting his future wife, Sheila – a fellow student of architecture in UCD – and his pivotal employment by James Stirling in 1976, form the backbone of his personal and professional life. Tuomey’s expertise in his field is unsurpassed, with meticulous detail given to the finer aspects of design and architecture. His thoughts on the challenges facing the encroaching erasure of city life in Dublin are essential reading for anyone with an interest in the future of building in the city.
£13.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd A Life In The Trees: A Personal Account of the Great Spotted Woodpecker
The Great Spotted Woodpecker first bred in Ireland in 2009. Since then the author has followed the daily lives of this species, a family of whom had taken up residence in a windtorn Spanish chestnut tree near his home in the depths of County Wicklow. This unique and personal account of a family of woodpeckers raising their young brings the reader deep into the world of this fascinating species: a world of hope, love, death, new life and ultimately success. It explores the richness and diversity of the natural wonders found in County Wicklow against a backdrop of a more general overview of the species in Ireland. It includes a foreword by filmmaker John Boorman, and features illustrations by Killian Mullarney and Flemming Christoffersen with stunning colour photographs by Dick Coombes. This book is to be treasured by everyone – not just ornithologists, but those with an interest in the natural world around them.
£10.65
The Lilliput Press Ltd Mary Cannon's Commonplace Book: An Irish Kitchen in the 1700s
These are just a few samples from an eighteenth-century Commonplace Book, passed down the generations from Mary Cannon’s kitchen to her many times great-granddaughter Marjorie Quarton. A Commonplace Book was a scrapbook for sayings, letters, prayers, measurements, or, as in this instance, of recipes. Mary Cannon lived in Dunleary (now Dun Laoghaire) and collected over 120 recipes between 1700 and 1707. They are presented here in sections such as ffishe, ffleshe, Puddings and Deserts, Pickles and Preserves. The visceral vocabulary and archaic spellings of these dishes will refresh our word hoard, while imparting a sumptuous flavour to Ireland’s gastronomic repertoire. Unopened and untried for over 300 years, they form a unique resource for food historians and knights of the dining table. Marjorie Quarton has edited these recipes, commenting on the significance and usage of certain ingredients. She has added fragments of family history, from Jacobite leaders and Huguenot refugees to tales of the Indian Mutiny. The recipes are illustrated by Alice Bouilliez, also a descendent of Mary Cannon.
£12.99
The Lilliput Press Ltd Scattered Love
'She came in like a shadow. She slid and bore herself into my eye, between my eyelids which blinked against the dust.' She is Maud Gonne, the muse of writer William Butler Yeats. Yeats here returns as a ghost, after having been buried in France in 1939 in the cemetery of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, to be returned to Ireland a decade later. He emerges from his grave to recount his thwarted love with Maud, a story that merges with that of the independence movement of Ireland, of which they were both emblematic actors. Yeats' ghost has suddenly arisen because diplomatic documents long kept secret have resurfaced, casting doubt on the contents of the coffin brought back into Ireland for a state funeral. Where did the poet's body go? Does he still hover, as he wrote, 'somewhere above the clouds'? What remains of our loves and our deaths, if not their poetry? Besserie's exciting new novel follows on from Yell, Sam, If You Still Can (Le Tiers Temps), translated by Cliona Ni Riordain. In Maylis Besserie's second novel, she turns her attention from Samuel Beckett to another iconic Irish writer, W. B. Yeats. The connection between France in Ireland is once again explored in the context of art, culture and the days at the end of life.
£14.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Big In Japan
When pop Svengali Max of Big In Japan Records discovers Cara in a shop in Temple Bar, he immediately signs her up to his stable of young wannabees. Her friends cannot believe her luck. However little does Cara realize what’s in store for her. Overnight, he transforms her into Colleen: the Celtic popstar with strawberry-blonde extensions and snow-white teeth. Soon she discovers that Max’s plans don’t really include her voice. Whatever! But there are compensations, such as falling for the lead singer of another band and living it up in London. Max decides his protégée is ready to be launched onto the Irish-American circuit. Catapulted onto a mad tour tinged with shamrocks, sex and drugs, Colleen soon ends up on a Senate election bandwagon, and just as she becomes a ‘hit’, she finds that being a pop idol isn’t all it’s cracked up to be …
£9.19
The Lilliput Press Ltd Boss Croker
In 1846 the Crokers, a Presbyterian landlord family, flee famine-stricken West Cork aboard the Henry Clay, survive shipwreck and land in New York. There they are confronted with the grim realities of the teeming city – poverty, prostitution, and street gangs. In this world their youngest son, Richard Eyre ‘Boss’ Croker (1841-1922) thrives. Through sheer ambition, the barely literate Croker – engineer, prize-fighter, fixer, union organizer -battles his way from the backstreets to seize control of Tammany Hall, the very seat of power in New York. Charming but corrupt, Croker manipulates all who fall within his sphere, becoming one of the city’s most influential citizens in the late nineteenth century. Boss Croker also captures the drama of his later years – his move to Dublin, where he rebuilds Glencairn in Sandyford; how in 1907, his horse Orby becomes the first Irish horse to win the Epsom Derby; and his support for rebellion in Ireland through his contacts with Clan na Gael and Michael Collins. After the death of his first wife, heiress Elizabeth Frazer, he defies the disapproval of his children by marrying Bula Edmondson, a beautiful young Cherokee Indian. He is finally carried to his grave in 1922 by Oliver Gogarty and Arthur Griffith. Boss Croker is a gripping novel that unleashes all the extravagant energy of its subject. Telling Croker’s story in full for the first time – and brings New York and Irish America into vivid focus through the prism of one extraordinary, flamboyant, life.
£12.09
The Lilliput Press Ltd Denis Johnston: A Life
This is the first biography of Denis Johnston, barrister, theatre director, film-maker, pioneering television producer, war correspondent, essayist and celebrated playwright. Johnston was of Ulster Presbyterian stock, born into Edwardian Dublin, where he was briefly held hostage in his family home at Lansdowne Road during the 1916 Rising. Son of a Supreme Court judge, he was schooled at St Andrew’s in Dublin, in Edinburgh and Christ’s College, Cambridge, and at Harvard University. He made the name of the Gate Theatre in 1929 with his astonishing first play The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, created the radio epic ‘Lillibulero’ for the BBC in Belfast, and earned an OBE for his war reporting from North Africa, Yugoslavia and Buchenwald. In 1950 he decamped to New York and taught for many years at colleges in Massachusetts, founding the Poets’ Theatre in Boston. An Irishman of wide horizons and wit, and a prodigal dissenter, his multi-faceted life illuminates the cultural history of the past century. He was turbulently married to the actresses Shelah Richards and Betty Chancellor, and had four children, among them the novelist Jennifer Johnston. In this masterly biography, Adams draws upon Johnston’s copious and intimate diaries, letters and uncompleted autobiography deposited in Trinity College, Dublin, cataloguing the ‘untidy museum’ of his subject’s past. The result is an enthralling narrative of the extraordinary secret life of a complex, self-doubting individual, which brings new light to bear on one of the twentieth century’s most original Irish writers.
£25.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Refiguring Ireland: Essays in Honour of L.M. Cullen
This collection of essays has been specially commissioned in order to mark the quite exceptional contribution that Louis Cullen has made to historical studies in Ireland and abroad over the last forty-five years, spanning economic, social, cultural and political history. Introduction and Bibliography of L.M. Cullen David Dickson (TCD)
£50.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Malinski
Two young brothers in Lvov, separated by war. Henryk, imprisoned by theNazis with his mother in the family home, flees with her ahead of the advancing Soviets, eventually settling in Ireland. Stanislav takes refuge with an aunt in Krakow, where he lives out the decades of his life. Half a century later, after the fall of communism, Stanislav receives a letter: Henryk, who now styles himself Henry Foley, is coming for a visit. Malinski is a novel of memory and loss, an exploration of the ways in which human beings invent themselves and imagine other people’s lives. It is written with a concentrated grace that announces Siofra O’Donovan as a major new talent in Irish fiction.
£14.99
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Family Business
Another first in my life: at the age of thirty-one I brought a girlfriend home. Kathleen sat on the chaise longue, small legs crossed, one tiny toe resting on my mother’s lime-green pouffe, her petite nose wrinkling with distaste as she looked about our family den. Through her eyes I regarded the rusticated fireplace, the crenellation of photos above, the grey cloth donkey – creels full of real turf crumbs from the West – propped against the ormolu clock.’ The Family Business is many things: journal of a frustrated young writer and lover; portrait of bohemian social life in 1970s Dublin; intimate history of the rising Catholic middle class and of a family in flux. Kenny writes autobiography with the eye and ear of a novelist, evoking a time, a place and a welter of emotions through vividly remembered scenes, snippets of dialogue, small epiphanies. Unlike most memoirs, which place so much weight on the act of remembering itself, and are thus more about the writer’s present than his past, The Family Business has the immediacy of a diary, and an almost excruciating honesty. It is, above all, an extraordinarily accomplished piece of writing.
£9.19
The Lilliput Press Ltd Foley's Asia: A Sketchbook
While an anarchist group blows up the equestrian statue of General Gough in Dublin’s Phoenix Park during the 1950s, the narrator recalls his mother’s Kiplingesque tales of childhood in India, recreating the atmosphere and events of the Irish abroad in the service of the British Empire. The life of John Henry Foley (1818-1874), Queen Victoria’s favourite sculptor, is interwoven with those of some of his principal subjects, Hardinge, Montgomery, Outram and Lawrence, Foyle College boys from Derry, who formed a remarkable constellation of soldier-administrators in northern India during the nineteenth century. The powerful, suggestive sketches of these Irishmen speak for generations gone. Engagements, atrocities and counter-atrocities are colourfully drawn in a language of heroism that conveys that turbulent, chaotic thing that was Britain’s empire in Asia. Gough himself was a hero of the Peninsular War, wheeled out in the 1840s to pursue the punitive Opium War in China and to conquer the Punjab. Ronan Sheehan has created a remarkable imaginative work through these related narratives, shifting between nineteenth-century set-pieces and modern-day Ireland. The statue from which the book derives its name, the vulnerable and defiant figure of Asia below subverting Albert above in the Hyde Park memorial, expresses the conflicted loyalties at the heart of Foley’s finest monuments. By exploring these fractured identities and interrogating the past, Foley’s Asia enriches our understanding of this sculpted world.
£12.99
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Hist & Edmund Burke’s Club: And Edmund Burke's Club
The College Historical Society has been a microcosm of the politics of Ireland since the first discussions in Edmund Burke's Club in 1747. As a student debating society it has always debated the burning issues of the day, sometimes being expelled from the College in consequence. This anthology brings together writings on the Hist over a period of 250 years, which convey the essence of the Society – debate on great and small issues within a highly formal, even legalistic, set of procedures, and yet with a leavening of humour. The opinions expressed by the key figures in Irish Society in their time are reflected, both in youth and in maturity. The Bicentenary in 1970 saw one of the great occasions of the Society. Statesmen and politicians debated Burke's philosophy, freedom and order, and Northern Ireland. Their speeches are still relevant. Past members have contributed their memories of their own time in the Hist. And the records of the Society have been mined for material which illustrates its development. These include part of the minutes of Burke's Club, the topics for debate over the years, and some Sub-committee reports, which tackle even very small issues with the full rigour of a Judicial Tribunal Report.
£30.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Ancestor Album
Part One of this large format book will enable you to collect information for your family tree simply by talking to people, and provides a series of beautiful fill-in charts to permanently record a family tree of up to five generations. Part Two contains information on Irish family history and includes advice for those who want to proceed further with this fascinating hobby. The Ancestor Album is the ideal book for the beginner. If you don’t want to do the family tree yourself give it to the kids and get them to do it.
£7.01
The Lilliput Press Ltd Francis Bacons Nanny
In the final of Maylis Besserie's Irish-French trilogy, her preoccupation with the art and lives of artists who crossed borders between France and Ireland has a fitting climax as Bacon confronts the boundaries between the real and the imagined.
£14.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Road to Repeal
Road to Repeal: 50 Years of Struggle in Ireland for Contraception and Abortion opens in 1970 when the Irish Women's Liberation Movement burst onto the streets and screens of a society bewildered by women demanding equal status in the home and in the workplace. It tracks the bitter backlash to their successes that culminated in the Eighth Amendment's fixture in the Irish Constitution in 1983. Over five decades, Road to Repeal describes and depicts individual tragedy, referendums, court cases, the actions of a misogynist Church and State. It shines a light on the journey of thousands of women and girls who braved stigma and hardship, often travelling alone and anonymously for medical treatment they were denied in Ireland. Road to Repeal closes with the visually dazzling Together For Yes campaign whose determination and grit finally got rid of Article 40.3.3 on May 25th, 2018.
£22.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Written World: Essays & Reviews
Art honours the world, and criticism honours art, even – perhaps especially – when the critic sets out to destroy. The bad review is hardly ever written out of mere spite. In most cases, the motivation is disappointed idealism. Critics are people who love art and who hate to see it traduced. Hence the critic’s sempiternal cry: You’re doing it wrong. What the critic wants is for you to do it better. Since 2008, acclaimed novelist Kevin Power has reviewed almost three hundred and fifty books. Power declares, ‘Even now, cracking open a brand-new hardback with my pencil in my hand, I feel the same pleasure, and the same hope. That’s the great secret: every critic is an optimist at heart.’ Art that thinks and feels at the same time – ‘good art’ – requires explication. The writing of criticism in response to such art is an activity that has taken place since Aristotle first sat down to figure out what made tragedy work. It is in the pursuit of this question – what makes good art ‘good’ – that Kevin Power found his vocation. During a ten-year stint as a regular freelance reviewer for the Sunday Business Post, Power fell in love with the writing of criticism, and with the reading of it, too, particularly by talented novelists who review books on the side. His conclusion is that criticism is absolutely an art. But it is never more so than when practiced by an actual artist. These pieces, ranging from reviews of Susan Sontag to the meaning of Greta Thunberg, apocalyptic politics, and literary theory, represent a decade’s worth of thinking about books; a record of the author’s attempts to honour art, and through art, the world. In The Written World, Power explains how he became a critic and what he thinks criticism is. It begins and ends with a long personal essays, ‘The Lost Decade’, written especially for this collection, about his mental and writing block after publishing Bad Day in Blackrock and his decade-long journey to White City. The pieces gathered by Power are connected by a theme – this is a book about writing, seen from various positions, and about growth as an artist and a critic.
£13.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Trinity Tales: Trinity College Dublin in the 2000s
This, the fifth and final volume in the Trinity Tales series, completes a cycle that began with tales from the 1960s. It invites readers to step into the world of Trinity College as it was in the first decade of this century through the reflections of students who attended the university during those years. Within its pages lie the stories of twenty-eight graduates from a mix of diverse backgrounds whose experiences may dispel the myths of what it means to be a ‘Trinity student’. The collection reveals the rapidly changing world of the early 2000s. This was a time of the internet revolution, when social media first affected student life, when mobile phones and laptops became ubiquitous, when handwritten work was passing into history, when The Buttery closed its doors – and all this coming against the backdrop of an overheating then imploding Irish economy. This kaleidoscope of recollections captures a student body in transformation and features stories of personal discovery and achievement against the odds. For some it proved a life-changing era when sexual, racial or class barriers were confronted. This volume concludes a remarkable half-century journey, portraying the lives of others, and of ourselves.
£18.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Shannon Country
In August 1939 the Irish travel writer Richard Hayward set out on a road trip to explore the Shannon region just two weeks before the Second World War broke out. His evocative account of that trip, Where the River Shannon Flows, became a bestseller. The book, still sought after by lovers of the river, captures an Ireland of small shops and barefoot street urchins that has long since disappeared. Eighty years on, inspired by his work, Paul Clements retraces Hayward's journey along the river, following - if not strictly in his footsteps - then within the spirit of his trip. From the Shannon Pot in Cavan, 344 kilometres south to the Shannon estuary, his meandering odyssey takes him by car, on foot, and by bike and boat, discovering how the riverscape has changed but is still powerful in symbolism. While he recreates Hayward's trip, Clements also paints a compelling portrait of twenty-first century Ireland, mingling travel and anecdote with an eye for the natural world. He sails to remote islands, spends times in rural backwaters and secluded riverside villages where the pub is the hub, and attempts a quest for the Shannon connection behind the title of Flann O'Brien's novel At Swim-Two-Birds. The book gives a voice to stories from water gypsies, anglers, sailors, lock keepers, bog artists, 'insta' pilgrims and a water diviner celebrating wisdom through her river songs and illuminates cultural history and identity. It focuses on the hardship faced by farmers and householders caused by the flooding of the river, which in recent winters left fields and towns under siege by water. Wildlife, nature, and the built heritage, including historic bridges, all play a part. The Shannon Callows, which used to be 'corncrake central', is explored for birdlife, along with the wildflower secrets of roadside hedges and riverbanks. On a quixotic journey by foot, boat, bike and car, Paul Clements produces an intimate portrait of the hidden countryside, its people, topography and wildlife, creating a collective memory map, looking at what has been lost and what has changed. Through intermittent roaming, he maps the geography of the river in stories, testimonies and recollections, intercutting the past and the present in an eternal rhythm. Beyond the motorways and cities, you can still catch the pulse of an older, quieter Ireland of hay meadows and bogs, uninhabited islands and remote towpaths. This is the country of the River Shannon that runs through literature, art, cultural history and mythology with a riptide pull on our imagination. This is a tribute to Ireland's longest river reflecting the deep vein flowing through the culture of the country
£13.00