Irish Literature Series

An eminently poetic book, Langrishe, Go Down (Higgins's first novel) 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 lush, 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 preceding World War II. In the tradition of great Irish writing, Higgins's prose is a direct descendent from that of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and nowhere else in his mastery of the language as evident as in Langrishe, Go Down, which the Irish Times applauded as "the best Irish novel since At Swim-Two-Birds and the novels of Beckett."

Blind Man's Bluff

by Aidan Higgins

Published 28 August 2012

Perversely, but perhaps appropriately, Aidan Higgins--one of the few contemporary writers worthy of comparison with Beckett and Joyce, now celebrating his 85th year--has chosen to wait until his sight has nearly left him to assemble this collection of visual treats. A commonplace book of anecdotes and cartoons--the latter never before published, though familiar to all of Higgins's correspondents from the margins of his letters and postcards--Blind Man's Bluff is a compendium of tart and comic insights into sight itself, as well as other varied indignities: personal, historical, and literary.

Scenes from a Receding Past

by Aidan Higgins

Published September 1977

Opening with a quote from Richard Brautigan--"I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning"--Scenes from a Receding Past constructs the adolescence and early adulthood of Dan Ruttle out of a variety of scenes and reminiscences about his life in Ireland, his time in a Catholic school, his first sexual experiences, and his brother's mental breakdown. The second half of the book centers around his relationship with his future wife Olivia, her past, and her former lovers. Calling to mind Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man for Dan Ruttle's love-hate relationship with Ireland and the stylistic innovations employed by Higgins, Scenes from a Receding Past is a masterpiece from one of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers.

Bestiary

by Aidan Higgins

Published 12 August 2004

"A bloody marvelous book." Harold Pinter

Flotsam & Jetsam

by Aidan Higgins

Published 27 January 1997

Considered to be one of the best Irish writers of the twentieth century, Aidan Higgins has earned a reputation throughout Europe as an unusual and astringent prose stylist. This omnibus of selected short fiction is the perfect introduction to the talents of this Irish successor to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett (although Higgins's work is perhaps more reminiscent of his Welsh contemporary Dylan Thomas), and displays Higgins's warmth of language and character. From a melancholy tale of suicide in "North Salt Holdings" to a colorful depiction of J. J. Catchpole's escapades in "Catchpole, " Higgins builds his characters into touching failures who both attract and repulse the reader.

March Hares

by Aidan Higgins

Published 12 October 2017

March Hares collects thirty years of Aidan Higgins’s essays, papers, and diaries, offering reflections on modern literature, modern readers, and Higgins’s own experience of the literary life in the twentieth century. In witty, insightful, often musical prose, Higgins discusses and draws connections between a wide array of major literary figures, including Melville, Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett, O’Brien, Olson, and Pinter.

Lions of Grunewald

by Aidan Higgins

Published 1 December 2022

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.