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.

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.

‘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

‘[The Airedale] is profound, moving and exquisitely executed. Hogan is one of the finest writers alive today and deserves to be much better known.’ – Cressida Connolly, The Oxford Book of Short Stories

‘Elegiac, daringly sustained prose poem; a collage of meticulously rendered Irish scenes that weaves in and out of tales of tinkers and youths.‘ – on ‘Winter Swimmers’, Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement.

‘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.’ – The San Francisco Chronicle

‘this is a deeply challenging and rewarding writer who has dismantled and reassembled his own experience over and over to flesh out new meanings, new insights and vividnew directions.’ – Dermot Bolger, The Independent

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Desmond Hogan was born in Ballinasloe, East Galway, in December 1950. 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.