Search results for ""The Lilliput Press Ltd""
The Lilliput Press Ltd Archipelago Anthology
Archipelago is one of the most important and influential literary magazines of the last twenty years. Running to twelve editions, it was edited by scholar-poet Andrew McNeillie, with the assistance later of James McDonald Lockhart, and began as an attempt to reimagine the relationships between the islands of Ireland and Britain. Archipelago has brought together established and emerging artists in creative conversations that have transformed the study of islands, coasts and waterways. It journeys from the Shetlands to Cornwall, from the Aran Islands to the coast of Yorkshire, tracing the cultures of diverse zones through some of the best in contemporary writing about place and people. This collection gathers poetry, prose and visual art in clusters grouped around the Irish and British archipelago, with contributions from an array of significant artists. With fifty contributors, Archipelago: A Reader includes: Moya Cannon is an Irish poet with seven published collections, the most recent being Collected Poems (2021). Deirdre Ni Chonghaile is a graduate of the University of Oxford and University College Cork. She is associated with NUI, Galway, and the University of Notre Dame, and is known for her work in music studies. Tim Dee is a naturalist, BBC radio producer and author of The Running Sky (2018). Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was born in Northern Ireland. His career included teaching at Harvard and Oxford. He received many awards including the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1995. Kathleen Jamie is a Scottish writer whose work has appeared internationally. She has taught poetry at the University of Stirling since 2010. Michael Longley is a Northern Irish poet, and winner of the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and the PEN Pinter Prize in 2017. Robert Macfarlane is a Writing Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He has won the EM Forster Award for Literature. Derek Mahon (1941-2020) was a Northern Irish poet. He won the David Cohen Prize for Literature and the Poetry Now Award. Andrew McNeillie is a Welsh poet and current Literature Editor at Oxford University Press. His memoir An Aran Keening was published by The Lilliput Press, and he is founder of the Clutag Press and publisher of the Archipelago series. Sinead Morrisey is a Northern Irish winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize. She has taught in Belfast and Newcastle. 'Archipelago met and extended my own strong sense that there was a need to turn the compass-rose of some storytelling and art in Britain and Ireland away from the south and east and towards the north and west; away from the metropolis and towards the margins.' -Robert Macfarlane
£22.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Last Footman
In the summer of 1964, twenty-one-year-old Gillies MacBain arrives in Dublin off the ferry from England with only his bicycle, a suitcase and a tent to his name. Young, handsome and charismatic, he begins work as a footman in one of the houses of the `dying aristocracy'. Thus begins his foray into the upper echelons of Irish society. The Adventures of an Irish Footman is an irresistible narrative which describes a fading part of Irish society that MacBain subverts with wry humour. MacBain finds himself in a precarious niche: the borderland in between `upstairs' and `downstairs'. Here, he rubs shoulders with a cast of characters from the bohemian socialites to the chancer `Sketchly' and the hippes with their dewy-eyed `morals'. MacBain's memoirs run the gamut of Irish social classes, from his friendship with County Monaghan small farmers and tenants, to working with a dubious cast of actors and producers on a film set at Castle Leslie, to eventually marrying into the circle of the `idle rich'. An irresistible story told by a charming storyteller, this memoir sheds light on an era of Irish domestic industry, and Irish social history, that has all but been forgotten.
£18.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Strictly No Poetry
Strictly No Poetry, Mathews’ fourth volume of poetry, follows upon Windfalls (Dolmen 1977), Minding Ruth (Gallery 1983) and According to the Small Hours (Cape 1998), and has been long awaited. In these forty-eight remarkable individual poems and sequences, Mathews lays out his witness to the travails and joys of youth and age, to the passing political parade and the intimacies of nature, to the exigencies of parenthood, of frailty and endurance. Informed by a Dublin sensibility, he holds fast to spiritual traditions while testing the parameters and indulgences of the modern world. His voice, by times Keatsian in its lyric penetration, is humanist in its instincts, universal in its reach, and exerts a singularity that leaves no shadow.
£12.50
The Lilliput Press Ltd Dublin: The Heart Of The City
The Lilliput Press is proud to reissue this iconic view of Dublin’s northside docks area in the 1980s, which comprises Ronan Sheehan’s text and over 50 black and white photographs by Brendan Walsh. Widely regarded as one of the finest studies of Dublin during this period, The Heart Of The City was taught in UCD and Trinity and to students of Urban Folklore. This edition features a revised introduction by Sheriff Street-born writer and actor Peter Sheridan. Dublin film-director John Carney (Bachelor’s Walk, Once, Begin Again) writes a new foreword. More poignant still in the aftermath of The Celtic Tiger, this is a remarkable portrait of a people and city so badly affected by the catastrophic collapse of employment on the docks in the 1960s and by irresponsible urban planning
£12.10
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Sinners' Bell
Helen’s expectations were far from starry-eyed, but married life with Frank in the late 1960s seemed bewilderingly joyless; from the honeymoon in a seedy Paddington hotel complete with dirty linen and a nosy landlady, her new husband drinking until all hours with a shady ‘friend’, their first home in his parents’ Irish pub, in a provincial backwater town. Frank’s father was his own best customer, his mother a shrill and censorious presence in the background, with the local priest as her only friend. Would she allow a sense of hopefulness to creep upon her when she finds out that a baby is on the way? The Sinners’ Bell is Kevin Casey’s first novel, published in 1968 by Faber & Faber. He reveals a striking capacity to convey with sympathy and unsentimental understanding the feelings of the inarticulate, and his portrayal of Helen’s struggle to come to terms with her own unhappiness is profoundly moving. Atmospheric and finely written, this exposé of a shotgun wedding and subsequent marriage is a jewel of narration, and a reissue that is long overdue.
£10.65
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Indignant Muse: Poetry and Songs of the Irish Revolution
This landmark work contains a remarkable selection of 560 of the thousands of songs and poems created during, and reflecting upon, the most extraordinary decade of Ireland’s history. This opened with the Dublin Lockout of 1913 and ended with the post-independence civil war, embracing World War I, the Rising of 1916, and the Anglo-Irish war. The Indignant Muse also includes 177 musical airs and 136 illustrations.
£25.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd William Dargan: An Honourable Life (1799 - 1867)
William Dargan’s career began in Wales on the Holyhead Road, working under the famous Scottish engineer, Thomas Telford. He went on to build roads, railways, canals and reservoirs, developed hotels and the resort towns of Bray and Portrush, laid out Belfast harbour, ran flax and thread mills and reclaimed vast tracts of farmland in Derry and Wexford. He operated canal boats and cross-channel steamers, constructed several canals and railways in England and in 1834 built Ireland’s first railway from Dublin to Dun Laoghaire. There is hardly a town in Ireland untouched by William Dargan. Alone he funded and constructed the 1853 Art-Industry Exhibition on Dublin’s Merrion Square as a boost to a country recovering slowly from the effects of the Great Famine just five years before. The National Gallery, raised largely in tribute to him, has a Dargan Wing and his statue stands in its grounds. Despite these achievements Dargan was a modest man. Several times he declined a peerage, a seat in parliament and even the baronetcy offered by Queen Victoria when she came to take tea at Mount Anville, his south Dublin mansion. This fascinating book, complete with over thirty archival photographs, draws on a range of original material and sources, much never seen in print before, to present an all-round portrait of a dynamic and engaging figure showing how his energy and abilities laid the foundations for Ireland’s later prosperity. The story of Dargan and his era will inform and uplift, evoking wider appreciation of a true patriot and an honourable man who did so much for his country.
£18.99
The Lilliput Press Ltd Fathers Come First
Rosita Sweeman’s Fathers Come First is a coming-of-age classic set against a Dublin-city backdrop. Elizabeth is both gauche and perspicacious, walking the edge of her stereotypes while hobbled by the pressures of acceptance – social, physical and sexual. In a world informed by a Catholic upbringing, she wonders whether her indiscretions belong in the letterbox or the confession box. Curious, unflinching and disarmingly honest, teenager turned twenty-something Lizzie speaks to the changes and continuities in Irish society across forty years. It is a novel as relevant today as when it was first published.
£9.19
The Lilliput Press Ltd Solitary and Wild: Frederick MacNeice and the Salvation of Ireland
For lovers of the often dark and troubled poetry of Louis MacNeice, his father is a reassuring presence: solid, sober, pious yet tolerant, a Church of Ireland clergyman who was not afraid to reject the Ulster Covenant of 1912, denounce sectarianism, and even espouse Irish nationalism. This book originated in the discovery of one inconvenient fact. Frederick MacNeice (1866–1942) was not a Home Ruler but an all-Ireland Unionist, who for many years was an enthusiastic Orangeman in Dublin and then Ulster. In later life, especially as Bishop of Down after 1934, he set aside these connections in order to pursue intercommunal peace and tolerance in Belfast and beyond. Louis colluded with his father in reinterpreting his earlier career, as part of a process of personal reconciliation which profoundly affected his later poetry and autobiographical writings. The relationship between father and son is discussed in two chapters, and several well-known poems are reinterpreted in the light of fresh evidence. Above all, this is the biography of a visionary who never despaired of spreading salvation through the often derided Church of Ireland. Using unfamiliar archives and local newspapes as well as the writings of both father and son, this book reconstructs the disparate worlds in which Frederick MacNeice lived and worked. It also explores his muted responses to the suffering of his parents and siblings, the early death of his deeply depressed first wife, the benefits resulting from his second marriage and its consequences for his children. The figure that emerges is complex, guarded, astute, and remarkably effective in using religion to spread enlightenment. His life demonstrates that salvation deserves to be taken seriously as a motive force in modern Irish history.
£35.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Dubliner Diaries
In the summer of 2000 a young Irish journalist returned from New York to launch a magazine about life in boomtown Dublin. The Dubliner was an instant failure, and within a few months it was close to bankruptcy. For the next seven years Trevor White struggled to keep the magazine afloat. Along the way he managed to alienate nearly everyone in Ireland. The Dubliner Diaries is an awkward history of the Celtic Tiger by a man who tried to capture it, and ended up being mauled.
£9.19
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Palm House
A monograph of duotone photographs, taken in the Palm House at the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, Dublin, beautifully illustrate this building as it was prior to its restoration. The photographs capture the cluttered green jungle, worn by time and held high in affection by the enchanted visitors who stepped inside its lofty paradise. By bringing the reader around the house as it was, drawing the eye to detail upwards, along its unique metal walkway and into the smaller treasure, the orchid house; to look at the intricate glass panels, metal structure, the wooden frames with their own unique patina of the passage of time, The Palm House tells its story visually. Meanwhile, in an accompanying text, Brendan Sayers relates how a visitor felt on entering and exploring this exotic world, the history and the origin of the planting, the unique pot and tub culture, and the importance of the collection.
£35.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Dublin's Other Poetry: Rhymes and Songs of the City
Dublin's writers rarely remain solemn for long: their wicked sense of humour has travelled the world. This is an irresistible new anthology of what used to be called ‘comic and curious verse’ about the city, written by some of her most entertaining poets and songwriters. Fashions in verse come and go. Too often we forget – paradoxically – the most memorable works of wit, sarcasm or absurdity. The ones gathered here were written over four centuries, and were inspired by many things – among them love, injustice, history, politics, animals and alcohol, but most of all by the citizens of Dublin themselves. Whether the lines are satirical, sentimental, subversive, sexy or just plain silly, you will find that many of them show a rare seriousness as well. Each poem comes with background information about where it originated, and each page is illuminated by Hector McDonnell’s wonderful, witty drawings.
£10.65
The Lilliput Press Ltd Pollyhester
In a disused railway tunnel lives Pollyhester, dressmaker to the stars. Celebrities dream of Pollyhester’s designs, teased out of ancient recycled fabrics and her wonderous imagination. But when Fashion Dictators change the fashion, celebrity Iverna makes extraordinary demands on poor Pollyhester. She summons her loyal helpers, who include a fallen dancing angel, a lovesick Viking motorcycle courier and a host of sinister spiders, to save the day. Beautifully illustrated, and simply told, this enchanting tale will captivate both young and old.
£13.50
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Shannon Navigation
The Shannon Navigation traces the history of the River Shannon as a navigation up to the present day from the 1750s when the early works were commenced under the Commissioners of Inland Navigation and subsequently under the Directors General of Inland Navigation from 1800 to 1831. These works, which took many years to complete, were not very successful and were badly maintained. In the 1830s the arrival of steamers focussed attention on the poor state of the navigation, which coincided with the efforts of the government to initiate public works to relieve distress by providing employment. During the 1840s a major scheme was carried out creating the fine navigation that is enjoyed today. The works were designed to address the combined issues of navigation and drainage but only partially improved the extensive problems of flooding. The age of the steamers was cut short by the coming of the railways and a second attempt to provide passenger boats in the early 1900s did not live up to expectations. The subsequent history of the navigation is traced including the harnessing of the river as a hydro-electric scheme, which had a substantial impact on the navigation. The gradual decline in the use of the river for commercial trade saw it entering a trough until recent years, which have seen the growth in the use of the river for tourism and recreation, with the great works of the mid-nineteenth century utilized to their full potential for the first time. This magnificent documentary history is illustrated by over two hundred and fifty photographs, engravings, posters, maps and drawings, and contains invaluable appendices detailing the Acts and parliamentary papers, the works, the tonnage carried, and information about steamers and other boats.
£45.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd South Of The Border
It is autumn 1942, and young Balbriggan teacher Matt Duggan arrives on his first posting at the small town of Rathisland in the Irish midlands, barely alive to the global war raging outside. Lawn tennis alternates with Church and classroom politics, as rehearsals take place for a staging of Hamlet. Beneath the surface are pockets of support for Germany, and plans afoot to link up with the Wehrmacht. Matt has a mesmerizing first encounter with nineteen-year-old Madelene Coll and, as she edges her way out from the watchful eyes of her aunts, she and Matt enter a world they will remember for the rest of their lives. When a Messerschmitt crash-lands in the locality that world is knocked from its axis. Before long the inherent contradictions of Emergency Ireland boil to the surface, involving Matt and Madelene in a misadventure with deeply tragic consequences. This nuanced coming-of-age story rehearses the inner narrative of neutral Ireland as public perception contends with private experience in a series of convergent tableaux. Beautifully evoked and implosive, divided personal loyalties mirror the wider dramas of the wider European stage. South of the Border is a gem of narrative that brings the reader into the heart of a reality that was wartime Ireland.
£12.10
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Companion
Trevor, a film-school dropout from Dublin, signs on as companion to Ed, a rich, wheelchair-bound New Yorker. A bizarre, mutual-dependency pact is ignited and an odyssey into the mind of an off-kilter, rambunctious Irishman begins. The Companion tells a story of obsession and control in which the dynamics of love and patience are tested to breaking point and beyond. Upbeat, defiant, dark and morally ambiguous, it sifts through family secrets and lies, and discloses the survival codes of Manhattan. This Irish take on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest develops into one of those rare, perversely elegiac novels that lodge in the mind. Long after the last page has been turned.
£12.10
The Lilliput Press Ltd A Bloomsday Postcard
Limited edition of 100 numbered copies, signed by the author, clothbound and slipcased with a 1904 penny inset on the cover. In 1904, the sending, receiving and collecting of postcards had become an essential part of life in Edwardian Dublin. In an age of few private telephones, the postcard was a popular and reliable form of communication – in Dublin there were six mail deliveries a day, and one on Sunday. To celebrate James Joyce and the centenary of Bloomsday, Niall Murphy has assembled a dazzling selection of 240 postcards, all of them posted in the Dublin area during 1904, four of them sent on 16 June that year. Here are the messages of ordinary people who walked the streets of Dublin side-by-side with the characters of Ulysses, with their words eerily mirroring the novel’s events. There is a rescue from drowning in Kingston; crime and punishment in Grafton Street; the Great Storm of 1903; King Edward’s visit; and memories of a ‘departed day’ spent in Howth. Among the many tales of love, three are enacted in varying degrees of intimacy: Millicent and Francisque de Boissieu, Jack Miller and Maud Tighe, and Ina and John McGregor – echoing Joyce’s use of postcards to establish the blossoming romance between Milly Bloom and Alec Bannon. Published in association with the National Library of Ireland, ‘A Bloomsday Postcard’ features the work of the legendary postcard artists – Louis Wain’s strange human cats; Lance Thackery’s satires of upper-class life; and C. Dana Gibson’s exquisite drawings of beautiful women. Here also are cards depicting the Russo-Japanese War, Yukon gold miners, the Dublin Horse Show, and life in Connemara – creating a mesmerizing full-colour mosaic that brings to life the world of Bloomsday, 1904 like never before.
£32.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Junior Dean: R. B. McDowell: Encounters with a Legend
Dr RB McDowell is a legend. To graduates of Trinity College, Dublin, he is a symbol of their years at university, the enduring source of endless amusing anecdotes and memories. Now, for the first time, reminiscences by graduates and friends, recording entertaining encounters with ‘RB’ over a period of some seventy years, appear in book form, enlivened by comments from Dr McDowell himself and illustrated with evocative sketches of College circa 1950 by Bryan de Grineau, archival photographs, many hitherto unseen, and a Derek Hill painting in full colour. The result is an intriguing portrait of the traditions and the way of life at Ireland’s oldest university during the greater part of the twentieth century and the part played by the charismatic and unique RB McDowell. RB MCDOWELL is an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. His works include Irish Public Opinion 1750-1800, The Church of Ireland 1869-1969, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution 1760-1801, Land and Learning: Two Irish Clubs, Crisis and Decline: The Fate of the Southern Unionists, and Grattan: A Life.
£10.64
The Lilliput Press Ltd "Cadenus" & "Swift's Most Valuable Friend"
These books are being reissued as they appeared in the first Dolmen Press editions in one composite volume, with a valuable, contexual introduction by 18th-century Swift scholar Andrew Carpenter. He assesses the reaction of Swift's serious biographers and commentators to the original publication. "Cadenus" is primarily concerned with the relationship between Swift and Vanessa (Esther Van Homrigh), "Swift's Most Valuable Friend" with that between Swift and Stella (Esther Johnson). Both help to determine the precise nature of this triangle, and the impact it had on his writing and career.
£27.99
The Lilliput Press Ltd Navigations: Selected Essays 1977-2004
£19.99
The Lilliput Press Ltd Cadenus and Swift's Most Valuable Friend: Reassessment of the Relationships Between Swift, Stella and Vanessa
These books are being reissued as they appeared in the first Dolmen Press editions in one composite volume, with an invaluable, contextual introduction by eighteenth-century Swift scholar Andrew Carpenter. He assesses the reaction of Swift’s serious biographers and commentators to the original publications: ‘… two remarkable books, driven by sympathetic and intuitive enquiry, which made an important contribution to Swift studies when they appeared in the 1960s and which still remain significant for all those interested in Swift’s life and works’. Cadenus is primarily concerned with the relationship between Swift and Vanessa (Esther Van Homrigh), Swift’s Most Valuable Friend with that between Swift and Stella (Esther Johnson). Both help to determine the precise nature of this triangle, and the impact it had on his writing and career.
£12.99
The Lilliput Press Ltd Changing the Times: Irish Women Journalists 1969-1981
This ‘new journalism’ by Irish Times women writers originally appeared on the Women First pages during the 1970s. Together, the pieces reflect the enormous social and political upheaval of the years when, as the first woman’s page editor Mary Maher put it, “Irish women were invented”. The voices of this exciting anthology, diverse, sparkling, irreverent, record with wit and intelligence an Ireland on the brink of transformation. Changing The Times showcases the best of this writing, by Maeve Binchy, Mary Leland, Gabrielle Williams, Christina Murphy, Geraldine Kennedy, Maev Kennedy, Eileen O’Brien, Caroline Walsh, Theodora FitzGibbon, Nell McCafferty, Renagh Holohan, Elgy Gillespie and others. Issues of the day are articulated and explored: pregnancy, fashion, first loves, sexuality, a burgeoning feminism, an imploding Catholic Church, an exploding North. Nell McCafferty profiles a young Ian Paisley, visits New York and talks to the family of a girl tarred and feathered in Derry; Maeve Binchy interviews Samuel Beckett and Iris Murdoch; Mary Holland follows the North, while Renagh Holohan is caught in its explosions; Elgy Gillespie encounters Muhammed Ali, Tyrone Guthrie and Robert Lowell; while Mary Cummins interviews Bernadette Devlin about having her first baby. As the mirror of a confident young nation, and a window onto one of the most eventful decades in recent Irish history, Changing the Times gives these writings the afterlife they richly deserve.
£12.99
The Lilliput Press Ltd Through The Gate Of Ivory
Trinity student Charles Stanihurst, the son of a Dublin merchant and a Roscommon chambermaid, flees his native city after assaulting an English officer and heads for the West of Ireland, where he encounters a culture virtually unknown within the pale. Beyond the Shannon much of the old Gaelic way of life is still intact, though under growing threat from the political power and land greed of the ‘foreigners’. Charles is forced to confront divisions between his Anglo-Irish and Gaelic loyalties, while seeking his spiritual father, Bishop William Bedell, who is translating the Old Testament into Irish. Set in post-Flight of the Earls, pre-Cromwellian Ireland of 1641, this novel tells the gripping story of a struggle between two opposing cultures that set the scene for the rebellion sealing the fate of Gaelic Ireland.
£10.64
The Lilliput Press Ltd Song Of Duiske
In south Kilkenny, where Duiske stream joins the river Barrow at Graiguenamanagh, lies one of Ireland’s many Norman-Cistercian abbeys. Song of Duiske is a novella set amongst this monastic community in the year 1304, a century after the abbey’s foundation. It evokes the textures and rhythms of a medieval religious settlement, its peaceful routines as well as occasional trials, and celebrates with quiet lyricism the seasons and their solaces, ‘the open sky, the fields and the woods’.
£9.19
The Lilliput Press Ltd Rhapsody In Stephens Green: And The Insect Play
Using a play by Karl and Josef Capek as source, Flann O’Brien locates his insect drama in Dublin, his most familiar stalking- territory. His adaptation is a vehicle for ridicule and invective, targeting race, religion, greed, identity and purpose. With his extraordinary ear for dialogue, O’Brien creates his own fantastical world, and the outcome is a hilarious satire of Irish stereotypes – as Orangemen, Dubliners, Corkagians and culchies become warring ants, bees, crickets, dung-beetles, and other small-minded invertebrae. The lost text of this play, Hilton Edwards’ prompt copy from the 1943 Gate Theatre performance, was discovered in the archives at Northwestern University, Illinois.
£7.73
The Lilliput Press Ltd Showbusiness with Blood: A Golden Age of Irish Boxing
In Showbusiness with Blood, Eamon Carr beguiles the reader with an insightful account of the world’s greatest boxers, from Steve Collins to Mike Tyson to Tyson Fury and Katie Taylor. Boxing, Ireland’s most successful Olympic sport, became turbo-charged in the mid-90s. A golden age followed as Irish boxers excelled in the harsh, violent and sometimes tragic business that is professional boxing. Having become enamoured of the sport during a period of serious illness as a child, Eamon Carr was on hand to witness the victories and disasters. The core principle of prize-fighting – striking and defence – demands enormous courage each time the boxer steps forward. Surrounded by enthusiastic fans, the ring can yet be the loneliest place in the world. Ireland embodies this tradition with renewed focus over the past three decades in a golden age of boxing. Showbusiness with Blood takes the reader on an intimate journey through Irish boxing’s years of triumph and desolation. Carr’s enthusiasm for the sport illuminates the dark corners of the fight game with stories from gruelling training camps, noisy press conferences, behind-the-scenes hustling and the savage brutality of championship fights. These are stories of aspiration and devastation. Yet amid the chaos and destruction of the boxing ring are inspirational tales of courage, resilience and personal redemption: boxing’s enduring saving grace Featured boxers include: Steve Collins, Wayne McCullough, Bernard Dunne, Darren Sutherland, Tyson Fury, Jamie Conlan, Andy Lee, John Joe Nevin, Katie Taylor, Willie Casey, Carl Frampton, Michael Conlan, Mike Tyson, Seamus McDonagh, Conor McGregor, Martin Rogan, Michael Carruth, Francis Barrett, Matthew Macklin and Gary ‘Spike’ O’Sullivan.
£16.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd A Hut at the Edge of the Village
There is a radical agency in John Moriarty's work that we as readers don't always spot. As our heads spin with mythological cross-referencing, poetical leaps and the philosophical bent, it is clear that there is nothing domestic, nothing tame, about John Moriarty. The power of Moriarty is that he has found a thousand beautiful ways to say something very disturbing: we have to change our lives. In this small book of big thoughts, award-winning author, mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw situates Moriarty's work with respect to our eco-conscious era and a readership seeking spiritual and philosophical guidance. Moriarty asks of us only one thing - that we move our gaze from seeing to beholding. And there the trouble begins, when we realize there is a world beyond us far bigger than our temporary ambitions. A Hut at the Edge of the Village presents a collection of Moriarty's writings ordered thematically, with sections ranging from place, love and wildness through to voyaging, ceremony and the legitimacy of sorrow. These carefully chosen extracts are supported by an introduction by Martin Shaw and foreword by Tommy Tiernan, a long-time admirer of Moriarty's work. According to Shaw, 'These are not pastoral times we are living in, but prophetic. We are at a moment when the world as we understand it has been turned upside down. The challenge is that there are fewer and fewer people who can interpret such happenings in a deep, soulful way. Moriarty can do that. When culture is in woeful crisis, the insights never come from parliament, senate, or committee; they come from the hut at the edge of the village. Let's go there. There is tremendous, unexpected hope waiting.'
£13.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd A State Of Mind
In mid-1970s rural Wicklow, John Hughes, a once-feted journalist/author with writer’s block, reflects on recent events. When English author William Cromer and his German lover Ingrid move to the Old Rectory nearby, their lives are transformed and an alcohol-fuelled affair begins. Hughes puts at risk everything he has ever loved – his wife Laura, teenage daughter Rachael and the bucolic ease of their quiet corner of Ireland. Nationalist resentment of this tax-free haven enjoyed by foreigners is sparked by events in Northern Ireland, and John finds himself in the middle of extortion, blackmail, marital betrayal and a suicide. As old and new friendships unravel, even lunchtime visits to the local pub become points of attrition. Losing his friends and mistress, John is forced to take responsibility for his actions in order to save his family and his integrity, and to find release as a writer.
£11.25
The Lilliput Press Ltd Reading The Future: Twelve Writers from Ireland in Conversation with Mike Murphy
Featuring nine in-depth interviews with Mike Murphy and three round-table discussions with fellow Irish writers and critics, Reading the Future creates a unique freeze-frame portrait of Ireland’s literary culture at the turn of the century – and provides fascinating insights into the shaping influences on the lives, creative minds and working methods of twelve great writers. Including a challenging introduction by Declan Kiberd, consulting editor to the series and chairman of the selection panel, Reading the Future is an indispensable source for any serious reader of Irish literature.
£12.99
The Lilliput Press Ltd Lives Less Ordinary: Thirty-two Irish Portraits
The people who talk about their lives in this book represent a creative, dissident Ireland. They are artists, writers, map-makers, weavers, water-diviners, teachers, environmentalists, farmers, wood-cutters, gardeners, travellers and monks. Some continue ways of life that have existed for generations; others have chosen to live and work in ways that are experimental, exploratory, and always singular. The choices they have made prompt us to reflect on our own choices. These thirty-two portraits in word and image provide an alternative view of the possibilities of life in Ireland, and a bracing antidote to the banalities of the consumer society.
£15.99
The Lilliput Press Ltd Diaries of Ireland: From Ludov Von Munchhausen to Lady Gregory
This anthology of Irish diaries features an eclectic selection from diarists known and unknown, including poets, farmers, politicians, scientists, preachers, architects, butter merchants, and even a reverend captured by Turkish pirates. Biographical detail and historical background are supplied for all diarists and diaries. The anthology covers diary excerpts from the 17th to the 20th century. From the 17th century, diarists include Richard Boyle, Elizabeth Freke and John Stevens; from the 18th century, the writings of John Scorr, John Wesley, Lucy Goddard, John Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone and Elisabeth Richards are covered. The 19th-century diarists featured are Nicolas Cummins, Humphrey O'Sullivan, Lady Morgan, the Reverend Robert Traill, W.J. O'Neill Daunt, Elizabeth Grant, Thomas Carlyle and Henry Allen. From the 20th century, the diaries of James Stephens, Lady Gregory, Gemma Hussey and Richard Murphy are included.
£25.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd The Irish Aesthete Buildings of Ireland Lost and Found
Inspired by his passionate interest in Ireland's architectural heritage and concern for its preservation, The Irish Aesthete culminates the writings and photography of Robert O'Byrne to showcase Ireland's historic architecture.
£22.99
The Lilliput Press Ltd Habitat
Habitat follows seven neighbours over the course of a surreal and life-changing week as their mid-century apartment building in Oslo begins to inexplicably break down around them.
£16.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Pure Filth
Pure Filth, Aidan Mathews’ fifth volume of poetry, follows upon Windfalls (Dolmen, 1977), Minding Ruth (Gallery, 1983), According to the Small Hours (Cape, 1998) and Strictly No Poetry (Lilliput, 2017). At its heart, the collection is about reflections on a career and sustained loves for people, God and art, with themes threaded throughout such as the pandemic, suburban Dublin, Irish landscape and history and the Holocaust. His critic and biographer David Wheatley says: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that Mathews does not have themes so much as obsessions. If his Catholic faith provides the ground base for all his work, sexuality, mental illness and the Holocaust recur in poem after poem, stitching together the quotidian and the extreme … Synthesizing the sexual, the sacred, and the secular, Mathews’ poetry is a testament of great personal power, answerable to the cloister and the locked ward, the social lepers and the captains of the ship of state.’ (Irish Poetry, Wake Forest 2017)
£13.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Fierce Love: The Life of Mary O'Malley
Fierce Love is a compelling and candid biography of Cork-born theatre pioneer (1918-2006) Mary O’Malley, founder-director of Belfast’s Lyric Players Theatre from 1951 to 1981. Neé Hickey, Mary went to Loreto Secondary School in Navan, Co. Meath, writing and directing her first play, The Lost Princess, before living with her mother in Dublin. There she became a key member of the New Theatre Group, immersed in the city’s social and cultural life and joining the Irish Society for Intellectual Freedom. On 14 September 1947 Mary married Armagh-born psychiatrist Pearse O’Malley, later moving to Belfast’s Derryvolgie Avenue off the Malone Road. There she formed a fifty-seat studio theatre above the stables and created Belfast Lyric Players Theatre, a company of actors and artists who were to put on 140 plays over seventeen years on a stage only ten-foot wide, asserting a broad Irish and European culture. W.B Yeats, twenty-six of whose plays were performed, was her standard-bearer. In 1952 she was elected to Belfast Corporation as an Irish Labour Party councillor, and in 1957 she founded the literary magazine Threshold, which enjoyed a thirty-year lifespan. Her other activities included running a drama school, an art gallery and music academy, while raising a family of three. As she battled conservatism, a socialist and nationalist in a Unionist city, this courageous and tenacious woman transformed Belfast with her playhouse — Liam Neeson and Ciarán Hinds were among her protégées — expanding her repertoire and bridging the political quagmire of the sixties to build a permanent 300-seater Lyric Players theatre, which opened with Yeats’s Cuchulain Cycle in October 1968. Her fierce will survived the Troubles, ensuring that her broad-based community theatre never had to close its doors. Her vision was posthumously crowned by the 2011 Lyric Theatre building overlooking the Lagan. Fierce Love celebrates these achievements, chronicling a resourceful and controversial individual, who swam against the tide of populism and sectarianism to establish an independent academy for actors and artists in a tireless quest for imaginative freedom and excellence. Mary O’Malley’s life was complex, and her legacy enduring.
£19.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Yell, Sam, If You Still Can: Le Tiers Temps
This novel by Maylis Besserie, the first of her Irish trilogy, shows us Samuel Beckett at the end of his life in 1989, living in Le Tiers-Temps retirement home. It is as if Beckett has come to live in one of his own stage productions, peopled with strange, unhinged individuals, waiting for the end of days. Yell, Sam, If You Still Can is filled with voices. From diary notes to clinical reports to daily menus, cool medical voices provide a counterpoint to Beckett himself, who reflects on his increasingly fragile existence. He remains playful, rueful, and aware of the dramatic irony that has brought him to live in the room next door to Winnie, surrounded by grotesques like Hamm or Lucky, abandoned by his wife Suzanne who died before him. Besserie delights in Beckett’s bilingualism and plays back and forth between the francophone and anglophone properties of language, summoning James Joyce as Beckett reminisces about evenings the two spent together singing, talking and drinking. Largely written in the library of the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Besserie has kept the hum of Irish voices throughout this work. Yell, Sam, If You Still Can won the “Goncourt du premier roman”, the prestigious French literary prize for first time novelists, just before the country went into lockdown. Besserie is now planning a further two novels that will explore the links between Ireland and France and is touted as the new star of the French literary world. Financial Times Book of the Year 2022
£13.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Living With My Century: A Memoir
Professor Eda Sagarra, born in 1933, has been significant and influential figure in Irish and European academic policy-making, contributing to the early development of the Erasmus scheme. Now, aged nearly 88, this memoir gives striking evidence of her self-discipline and formidable energy. This substantial memoir by one of the foremost female academics in Ireland starts with Sagarra's own perspective on committing her life story to history during the pandemic lockdown of 2020: The following memoir recalls for those born in the present century and schooled without the strong sense of Irish history, which defined our people from the Great Famine of the 1840s until recent times, what it was like to grow up as a woman in the twentieth century and seek a career in a man's world. It tries to re-capture as much what it felt like to the person experiencing it as what was happening in society. Younger people today who read of the restrictions to which women were subject in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, will find it difficult to comprehend why our generation and the one that followed ours didn't challenge them. But probably the greatest contrast between the Ireland of then and now was the room for manoeuvre - or rather the absence of it. Today our lives are premised on a constantly changing world. Ireland is more connected across the globe than ever it was. Today most people are mobile. The Ireland when I was young was in almost every respect a static, hierarchical and paternalist society, one in which the accident of your birth would generally determine your whole life. No life is representative, but every person's experience is unique and worth recording for those who come after us. A south Dublin convent girl, Sagarra probes childhood and family, schooling, and UCD -with a perceptive commentary on the Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s. Her remarkable memory and shrewd eye for detail present at times a painfully honest account of family and in the upper middle-class world of Catholic south Dublin, revealing the profound influence of Europe during her postgraduate years in post-war Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Running through this forensic account of her academic life is a bitter awareness of the constant if subtle barriers to female advancement. For contemporary critics reconstructing the history of gender equality in Ireland and for readers of feminist history, this makes for essential reading. Her description of retirement since 1997 is colourful, poignant and revealing, and her reflections on old age and youth resonate.
£20.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd John Boorman's Nature Diary: One Eye, One Finger
As I step out of the conservatory facing North, supported by my pusher, the first that catches my eye is the dying Sycamore which escapes death every year by producing a healthy crop of leaves, but it looks so decrepit that surely it can't pull that trick yet again. -1 April, 2020 In his eighty-eighth year, John Boorman uses his time in lockdown to reflect on the splendour of the surrounding nature of County Wicklow. Coccooning with his daughter and son among the hills of Annamoe, Boorman chronicles his daily walks and observations of the trees on his estate, writing with heightened appreciation of the beauties of his eyrie using only one eye and one finger. Poetry flows from his pen as he sits chairbound among his trees and flora: sycamores, limes, beech, oak, redwood, shrubs and flowers, birdsong and shifting skies are luminously recorded as the world falls silent. With illustrations by Susan Morley, this slim but meditative volume is a remarkable narrative by the creator of The Emerald Forest, Excalibur and Deliverance - a swansong like no other.
£10.65
The Lilliput Press Ltd Are You With Me?: Kevin Boyle and the Human Rights Movement
Kevin Boyle (1943–2010) was one of the world’s great human rights lawyers. In a career that lasted decades and spanned continents, he tackled issues ranging from freedom of the press to terrorism to minority rights. This compelling account of Kevin Boyle’s life and work is a remarkable tale of how a taxi driver’s son from Northern Ireland inspired the human rights movement around the world. Born in Newry in 1943, Boyle attended Queen’s University Belfast in the early 1960s, beginning to teach law in 1966. He was a co-founder of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and the People’s Democracy, mediated during the 1981 hunger strikes and helped forge the basis for the agreement that ended the Troubles. His ideas, endorsed in a previously unrevealed conversation Margaret Thatcher had with Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald, provided much of the intellectual underpinning for the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. He was the lead lawyer in the case that decriminalized homosexuality in Northern Ireland, which then led to its decriminalization in the Irish Republic and other countries. Through a series of landmark cases at the European Court of Human Rights, he left an enduring mark on international human rights law, campaigning against apartheid in South Africa and repression in Turkey. He also played a critical role as the senior advisor to Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, during 9/11 and was involved in shaping the international response. He also led the campaign to support Salman Rushdie after the writer was targeted by Iran’s ayatollahs in 1989. Kevin Boyle was central in founding human rights law centres at universities from Ireland and Britain to Brazil and Japan. Though he was a towering figure, his personal story is not well known. Now, based on years of research, thousands of documents, and scores of interviews, former CNN correspondent Mike Chinoy has crafted the compelling life story of a remarkable Irishman.
£18.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Ethna MacCarthy: Poems
Ethna MacCarthy (1903-59) was a Scholar and a First-Class Moderator at Trinity College Dublin where she taught languages in the thirties and forties before studying medicine. Perhaps best known to posterity for her relationship with Samuel Beckett and appearance in several of his writings, including the play Krapp's Last Tape, she also had a remarkable influence on a number of writers such as Denis Johnston and Con Leventhal, who she later married. Found among Leventhal's papers when he died were MacCarthy's overlooked work, revealing a highly intelligent and culturally sophisticated poet. This collection, published here for the first time, unearths an exceptionally rich and intriguing body of work by a remarkable woman who was ahead of her time. MacCarthy played an important and creative part of a cosmopolitan and free-thinking post-Independence Dublin, publishing translations from Spanish and German poets before developing a highly distinctive style of her own. Her poetry contains exposed lunar and death-haunted landscapes, tales of multifaceted women, and subversive ideas around femininity. Her work highlights a gifted translator who artfully captures the feeling evoked by the original languages. According to Denis Johnston `she has never been shy, can be frank, and outspoken to a degree, is absolutely fearless, intolerant of mediocrity and finds it difficult to suffer fools gladly'. MacCarthy merits reappraisal as an intellectual presence in an age that did not often promote, if acknowledge at all, the woman's voice. This unique collection of Ethna MacCarthy's poems is published as an innovative first step in establishing her as one of the outstanding Irish poets of the mid-20th century.
£18.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd From Lucifer to Lazarus: A Life on the Left
In From Lucifer to Lazarus: A Life on the Left, Mick O'Reilly shares his experiences as a politician and trade unionist and his unwavering thoughts and insights on controversial, complex issues. O'Reilly discovered socialism and militant trade unionism in the early 1960s when he joined the National Union of Vehicle Builders. He went on to join the committee of the Irish Communist Party in 1967 and the Dublin Housing Action Committee, and helped establish Connolly Youth. He took part in strikes against the European Economic Community and negotiated for protection for car workers. This book explores the power struggles and negotiations that O'Reilly has faced throughout his career, without generalities or truisms. After a party dispute in 1977, O'Reilly was employed by the Transport and General Workers' Union, and in 1979 negotiated a huge equal pay claim. Later, O'Reilly's Labour Left group sparked reform within the Labour Party, establishing that its leader must be elected by its members. O'Reilly was even suspended from the Party for a time before the charges against him were proven to be untrue, and he was reinstated in 2004. Despite navigating a career filled with adversity, O'Reilly remains decent, honest and humble. The authenticity of From Lucifer to Lazarus: A Life on the Left emphasises these often overlooked values, setting itself apart as a unique, intimate read. The foreword is written by Gene Kerrigan of The Independent.
£18.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Paddy Rossmore: Photographs
Paddy Rossmore: Photography records half a century of the travels made by Lord Rossmore and his companions the Knight of Glin, Desmond FitzGerald, and Mariga Guinness of the Irish Georgian Society. The visual record made by Rossmore provides a unique archive dedicated to preserving the landscape of a bygone era. With accompanying essays by fine art historian Robert O'Byrne, Rossmore's photographs capture the bittersweet beauty of an uncertain era for Ireland's architectural heritage, with many of his subjects now fallen to ruin, and others enjoying restoration and new life in modernized Ireland.
£22.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Maria Edgeworth's Letters from Ireland
1 January 2018 will be the 250th anniversary of Maria Edgeworth's birth. Valerie Pakenham's sparkling new selection of over four hundred letters, many hitherto unpublished, will help to celebrate her memory. Born in England, she was brought to live in Ireland at the age of fourteen and spent most of the rest of her life at the family home at Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford. Encouraged by her remarkable father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, whose memoirs she edited, she became, in turn, famous for her children's stories, her practical guides to education and her novels - or, as she preferred to call them, `Moral Tales'. By 1813, when visiting London, she was, as Byron testified, as great a literary lion as he had been the season before, and she was hugely admired by fellow novelists Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. Maria Edgeworth's posthumous fame has dwindled and only her first novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), a brilliant burlesque account of the Irish squirearchy, is still widely read. She was, however, a prolific and fascinating letter writer. She insisted that her letters were for private consumption only, but after her death, her stepmother and half-sisters produced a private memoir for friends using carefully selected extracts. Their literary quality was spotted by Augustus Hare, whose shortened version, The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, appeared in 1894. In the 1970s Maria's great great niece, Christina Colvin edited Maria Edgeworth's Letters from England and Maria Edgeworth in France & Switzerland. No one, however, has revisited fully Maria's original letters from the place she loved and knew best: Ireland. From 1825, Maria's letters reflect sixty years of Irish history, from the heady days of Grattan's Parliament, through the perils of the 1798 Rebellion to the rise of O'Connell and the struggle for Catholic Emancipation. In old age, she worked actively to alleviate the Great Famine and wrote her last story to raise money aged 82. A treasure trove of stories, humour, local and high-level gossip, her letters show the extraordinary range of her interests: history, politics, literature and science. Maria almost single-handedly took over the management of her family estate and restored it to solvency. Her later letters brim with delight at these practical undertakings and her affection for the local people she worked with. Two of her half-sisters and her stepmother were gifted artists, and Valerie Pakenham has been able to use many of their unpublished drawings and sketches to illustrate this book.
£20.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Nobody's Business: The Aran Diaries of Ernie O'Malley
`Nobody's Business': The Aran Diaries of Ernie O'Malley presents new insights into the contradictions and complexities of the mind of Ernie O'Malley, one of mid-twentieth century Ireland's foremost cultural critics. In 1941, 1955 and 1956, the former revolutionary leader and author of the acclaimed memoir of the War of Independence, On Another Man's Wound, visited the Aran Islands. While on the islands, O'Malley kept diaries recounting his daily conversations and interactions with other visitors and islanders including Elizabeth Rivers, with whom he stayed on one occasion, Charles Lamb and Sean Keating. The diaries, devoid of sentiment and often highly critical, reveal his views on art, literature, history and contemporary Irish life and international affairs as well as his thoughts on the economic, religious and daily life of the Aran islanders. His unvarnished observations on the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of life in post-Independence Ireland make his diaries absorbing and provocative. Edited with introductory essays by Cormac O'Malley and Roisin Kennedy and an afterword by Luke Gibbons, `Nobody's Business': The Aran Diaries of Ernie O'Malley offers fascinating insights into the mind and opinions of a key figure in Irish cultural nationalism.
£18.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Horseman, Pass By!
These reflective essays about Déon’s life and experiences in the west of Ireland describe the colourful and varied personalities that the French novelist has come across since he and his family moved there in the mid 1970s. From his friendship with John McGahern and Ulick O’Connor to Tim, the sturdy old postman who prefers his wind-blown country round to retirement in sunny California, Horseman, Pass By! is peopled with fascinating characters and encounters. Taking its title from Yeats, this work is an affectionate portrait of the Irish and a lament for a fading country that has been changed by new wealth and altered values. Déon’s Horseman, Pass By! is an elegant memoir about a beautiful landscape and its inhabitants and forms a touching and amusing tribute to his adopted country.
£10.65
The Lilliput Press Ltd Sins
The original Seven Deadly Sins are still among us, wearing modern dress. In this lavish, stunningly illustrated modern interpretation, the victims take revenge on their tormentors. The weak become strong and the powerful weak. The stories are humorous, violent and erotic; a celebration of the joy of sinning and of taking revenge. Each story, each sin, is different in setting, character and mood. Each sin in turn is inspected, tested and described in spare and unsparing prose. In each, the sin and the sinner are shown as malevolent, the victim undeserving of their state. This graphic fable is conceived as a collection illustrating Envy, Pride, Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony, Anger and Lust. The drawings and collages illuminate the foibles and wickedness described; from perpetrator to victim, no-one can hide
£25.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd Yeats 150: William Butler Yeats 1865-1939
YEATS 150 is a collection of essays, many of them illustrated, commemorating the life and work of Irish poet and Nobel Laureate, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). The book, dedicated to Seamus Heaney, is divided into a number of sections: Academic Essays; Plays; the Yeats family; Scholarly Essays; Yeats Poetry Prizes and, appropriately, the topographical ‘Sligo’, by Sligo natives and visitors to the International Yeats Summer School. The book includes Helen Vendler’s tribute to Seamus Heaney; essays on Yeats’ poetry and plays; on his wife George, his children Anne and Michael, his contemporary, AE, and on the Sligo landscape that so influenced his imagination. It also details his elaborately crafted book designs. A section, appropriately titled Tír na nÓg, includes pieces by the late T.R. Henn, Vincent Buckley and Alec King, connecting to the post-1945 writing on W.B. Yeats. This remarkably wide-ranging collection honours the poet Yeats and those who have lectured and tutored across the world on the man and his work. The US, Canada, UK, Hungary, Japan, New Zealand and Australia are represented in the essays. The thirty-six contributors include former Yeats Summer School Directors: Helen Vendler, Denis Donoghue and James Pethica, Ann Margaret Daniels, as well as Patrick M. Keane, Harvard professors Deirdre Toomey and Daniel Albright, Yeats Annual editor Warwick Gould, publisher Colin Smythe, professor and director of Otago University, New Zealand, Peter Kuch, Tokyo professor Tomoko Iwatsubo, biographer Ann Saddlemyer, critics Lucy McDiarmid, Bruce Stewart and Martin Mansergh: in all, a glittering gathering of writers lend weight to this important commemorative and historical work.
£30.00
The Lilliput Press Ltd All The Spangled Host
In this lyrical and compelling collection of tales of the quotidian, John A. Ryan paints a sincere picture of Ireland, it’s environment and people. His delicate awareness of the world around him is reflected in every paragraph of these poetic and contemplative pieces. Each is infused with a sense of mindfulness, slowness and the almost divine nature of the small and the commonplace, reminding the reader of the sacredness of life at the heart of the universe. Some of these twenty prose pieces, scattered across rural and small-town Ireland, France and the Mediterranean littoral, have already appeared in the pages of the Irish Press. Most are hitherto unseen. They partake of Benedict Kiely, Donal Ryan and the deep traditions of Irish traditional rural literature.
£9.56