Hailed as "the best comic fantasy since "Tristram Shandy"" upon its publication in 1964, "The Dalkey Archive" is Flann O'Brien's fifth and final novel; or rather (as O'Brien wrote to his editor), "The book is not meant to be a novel or anything of the kind but a study in derision, various writers with their styles, and sundry modes, attitudes and cults being the rats in the cage."

Among the targets of O'Brien's derision are religiosity, intellectual abstractions, J. W. Dunne's and Albert Einstein's views on time and relativity, and the lives and works of Saint Augustine and James Joyce,...

A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, "At Swim-Two-Birds" is the story of a young, lazy, and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading he is composing a mischief-filled novel about Dermot Trellis, a second-rate author whose characters ultimately rebel against him and seek vengeance. From drugging him as he sleeps to dropping the ceiling on his head, these figures of Irish myth make Trellis pay dearly for his bad writing. Hilariously funny and inventive, "At...

Originally published as three separate volumes--"Donkey's Years," " Dog Days," and "The Whole Hog"--"A Bestiary" relates the life and times of one of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers. As in his fiction, Higgins's writing exquisitely captures sights, smells, and emotions, detailing his life from childhood in County Kildare before his family's economic decline, to his mother's slow, agonizing death; from his travels in England and South Africa, to his two years spent living with a schoolmistress after the end of his first marriage.

In writing his memoirs Higgins exposes the sources...

Although Dermot Healy (1947-2014) is probably best known as an award-winning novelist and poet, he was also a prolific playwright, screenwriter, and actor. Healy s interest in drama was long-standing, and was central to his development as a writer. Between 1985 and 2010 he wrote thirteen stage plays, including a critically-acclaimed adaptation of Garcia Lorca s

Blood Wedding in 1989. All of these plays are published here for the first time. One of the most striking features of Healy s dramatic works is their spirit of community collaboration and their strong social conscience. His first...

When Albert Jackson, a middle-aged school teacher, catches a glimpse of the infinite universe and his own tiny insignificance he cannot shake himself free of regret for a life all but squandered. In a blind and demented attempt to salvage something from his life, he sets off, half-lucidly, on a libertine mission to reclaim life, to live it exclusively on his terms. But the wild and sinister crime he plots, so characterised by delusion, sets him on a path to irreversible destruction.

Incarcerated after his crime, at the once prestigious Reil Institute, and in a bid to make spiritual...