Aidan Higgins Livres

Covers worn, page edges tanned, bookseller's marks, owner's inscription. Orders received by 3pm Sent from the UK that weekday.

Langrishe, Go Down traces the fall of the Langrishes - a once wealthy, highly respected Irish family - through the lives of their four daughters, especially the youngest, Imogen, whose love affair with a self-centered German scholar resonates throughout the book. Their relationship, told in erotic and occasionally melancholic prose, comes to represent not only the invasion and decline of this insular family, but the decline of Ireland and Western Europe as a whole in the years preceeding World War II.

March Hares collects thirty years of Aiden Higgins's essays, papers, and diaries, offering reflections on modern literature, modern readers, and Higgins's own experience of literary life in the twentieth century in witty, insightful, often musical prose: "We cannot go on writing novels in a traditional Irish way for the very good reason that one would be poleaxed by a stupor of boredom; although this does not seem to deter some of our contemporaries (whom it would be invidious to name) from plowing the same old furrow that has been plowed since O'Flaherty stuck his plowshare into the old sod." Higgins also discuss and draws connections among a wide array of major literary figures, including Melville, Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett, O'Brien, Olson, and Pinter. -- from back cover.

Here is the great Irish novel of Berlin, way back before the Wall came down. Dallan Weaver, a writer and professor who's been fêted and flattered but has seen better days, has come to the great divided city as a guest of DILDO (Deutsche-Internationale Literatur-Dienst Organization). On arriving, Weaver's life immediately begins to fall apart. Women fight over him. He is not always in the soberest state of mind. Moving from relatively conventional narrative to deliriously long lists, incorporating everything from children's drawings to minute recollections of dreams, Lions of the Grunewald is--in the author's own words--a "missionary stew," marvelously served up in Aidan Higgins's inimitable style.