Search results for ""author anthony cronin""

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.

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First published in 1989 No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien was the first full-length biography of Flann O’Brien. Rich in background, anecdote and social history, it is an extraordinary portrait of a writer and his times, perceptive, sympathetic and authoritative. Flann O’Brien (aka Brian O’Nolan) was born in Tyrone in 1911 and worked as a civil servant for many years. He also developed an alter ego, Myles na Gopaleen, whose saitrical column in The Irish Times soon acquired legendary status. At Swim-Two-Birds, his first novel, appeared in 1939 and was praised by James Joyce, Graham Greene, Dylan Thomas and others. His second novel, The Third Policeman, failed to find a publisher at the time but has since been acknowledged as one of the most important novels to come out of Ireland in the twentieth century. With a foreword by acclaimed author Kevin Barry and striking redesign, No Laughing Matter is an undisputed classic of Irish literary biography.

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