Book description
Des Hogan is, and has always been, the real thing - a writer of
great originality, dramatic flair, linguistic invention - who remakes
the world every time he puts pen to paper.' Neil Jordan. Desmond Hogan
is one of most remarkable literary talents to have come out of Ireland
in the past half-century. Larks' Eggs affirms that stature. Here, with
twenty-two classic stories taken from earlier collections and twelve
fresh narratives, Hogan displays anew his lyricism, compassion and
sheer prismatic brilliance. His subject is exile and self-image,
explored through isolates and eccentrics, brittle lives trapped by
poverty, personal histories and restless identities, giving a voice to
those on the margins -Travellers, the misplaced, the dispossessed.
Describing 'The Airedale' in William Trevor's The Oxford Book of Short
Stories, Cressida Connolly wrote: 'it is profound, moving and
exquisitely executed. Hogan is one of the finest writers alive today
and deserves to be much better known.' In the Times Literary
Supplement, Joyce Carol Oates called 'Winter Swimmers' an 'elegiac,
daringly sustained prose poem; a collage of meticulously rendered
Irish scenes that weaves in and out of tales of tinkers and youths'.
The San Francisco Chronicle remarked: 'Desmond Hogan's mastery of
language and characterization rivals that of Flannery O'Connor and
Anton Chekhov; never has the psychological landscape of the exile been
rendered with such incisive, haunting prose.' Larks' Eggs' compelling
tales of diaspora are both global and local, telling of subsumed
identity and allurement, of past merging with present through
landscape and mindscape. Desmond Hogan's fragmented personas are
repositories for childhood memory and a collective unconscious that is
distinctly Irish and history-burdened, while exhilaratingly and wholly
universal and modern. 'Here's to the storytellers. They made sense of
these lonely and driven lives of ours.' The Lilliput Press is proud to
reintroduce one of Ireland's most evocative prose writers. Desmond
Hogan takes his place alongside Joyce, Plunkett, Trevor, O'Faolain,
Kiely and McGahern.
Desmond Hogan was born in Ballinasloe, East Galway, in December 1950
and currently lives in south-west Ireland. He has published five novels:
The Ikon Maker (1976), The Leaves on Grey (1980), A Curious Street
(1984), A New Shirt (1986) and A Farewell to Prague (1995), as well as
four books of stories: The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea (1979),
Children of Lir (1981), The Mourning Thief (1987) and Lebanon Lodge
(1988), published in the USA in 1989 under the title A Link with the
River. His travel writings, The Edge of the City, appeared in 1993. In
1971 he won the Hennessy Award, and in 1977 the Rooney Prize for
Literature. He won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1980 and
was awarded a DAAD Fellowship in Berlin in 1991. In 1989 he was
writer-in-residence at the University of Alabama, and in 1997 taught at
the University of California, San Diego.
