Bøker av Aidan Higgins

In addition to his novels and stories, Aidan Higgins--one of Ireland's most respected contemporary writers--has written a large body of criticism. Windy Arbours includes pieces written between 1970-1990 and is the first collection of his reviews to be published. Incredibly well-read, Higgins covers writers from around the world, from relatively well-known authors such as William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, and Jorge Luis Borges, to more obscure writers such as Ralph Cusack and Dorothy Nelson. Serving as an informative guidebook about contemporary fiction, Higgins's criticism is always insightful, and oftentimes entertainingly acerbic.

Though best known as the author of a series of brilliant novels, here Higgins turns his writerly gifts to work for the radio.

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 experiences with his sexuality, 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.

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.

In this bawdy memoir, Irish author Aidan Higgins dissects the pretensions of a Catholic family in County Kildare. He examines the mystery of growing up, his rearing on a run-down estate, the decline of a family fortune, and the wide world that he discovered in London and South Africa.

'Tired of walking in the dream I have returned to the country where I was born half a century ago' - The Higgins family is now dispersed; ' he finds this problematical peace, sharing a bungalow near Brittas in Co Wicklow in an awkward two year tenancy with a school mistress with back back trouble.

This spirited and quirky penman has always set himself apart form the general grind of Irish writing and its set themes, to run along the line of the exposed nerve-system.No other Irish writer has been so obsessed with the terrain inconnu of lost or thwarted love as this odd-man-out.

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.

THE BOOK: Flotsam and Jetsam is a selection of prose, some previously unpublished, written over the last thirty five years by one of Ireland's greatest writers. It includes work adapted from earlier novels, short stories and radio plays.

Aidan Higgins's great novel has long been unavailable, and is here reissued in a new and revised edition. "Balcony of Europe" tells the story of a young Jewish wife from San Francisco and a middle-aged Irish painter who meet in a village on the coast of Spain, beginning an affair during the coldest European winter in two hundred years--all the while surrounded by a cast of characters as bizarre and hilarious as they are, finally, touching. Lyrical and humorous, heartbreaking and hopeful, "Balcony of Europe "is Aidan Higgins's crowning achievement.