The Lilliput Press: 235 books

The Nobel Prize for Literature has drawn unprecedented attention to the poetry and prose of Seamus Heaney, who now takes his place alongside Dante and Yeats. Yet in spite of his international reputation, some still see Heaney as an earthbound, pastoral poet inspired by nostalgia. The Achievement fo...

'Our finest living essayist. Maurice Craig's exquisite collection... is at once literary, erudite and mechanical: poppet-valves and cams, Yeats's inability to spell, bookbindings and motor-car design, the Tichborne scandal and airships, raised foc's'les and the particularity of certain words - all...

'That Montague is a significant poet does not need proving. These essays show that he is almost equally formidable as an autobiographer and critic.' - Robert Greacen, Irish Independent The Figure in the Cave selects the prose of one of Ireland's foremost contemporary poets - part autobiography, part...

ULSTER' S OTHER POETRY proves that the people of Ulster have never been humourless or dour. Far from it. With its sparkling variety of rhymes, songs and humorous poems from every tradition of the province, the book demonstrates that those who dwell in the northern quarter of Ireland have their own...

J. P. Donleavy has been writing now for forty-five years and, as he admits, an answer to the question why is 'difficult to dig out of a long past'. Yet over these pages he author's query is largely answered for him: he has written so much for so long because he writes so very well. From the banks...

Myles Before Myles is a wonderfully funny selection of writings from the pen of Brian O'Nolan (aka Flann O'Brien, Myles na Gopaleen, George Knowall). In this fun-filled extravaganza he is, above all, an entertainer, a 'gas man'. Like much of O'Nolan's most entertaining work, the pieces in this did...

'Masterly and moving ... Philip Orr enhances his already high reputation as a military historian for not only illuminating and meticulous command of detail but for a sense of balance and a fair-mindedness too rare in work on the long-neglected history of Irish soldiers in the First World War. Field...

Among the possessions seized from Theobald Wolfe Tone upon his arrest in 1798 were two copies of Belmont Castle, the epistolary novel he wrote and published with his friends Richard Jebb and John Radcliffe in 1790. Much more than a mere youthful literary squib, Belmont Castle is an elaborate roman...

While Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67) was above all a poet, for most of his writing life he was a prolific producer of critical and autobiographical prose. Work for newspapers and magazines was often his main source of income, and provided him with a necessary outlet for his views on the writers of his...

John Millington Synge, controversial in his own time and long established as a major figure of world theatre, has nonetheless suffered relative critical neglect. Where his great contemporaries Yeats and Joyce and his outstanding successor Beckett have attracted whole industries of scholarly attention,...

Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), one of the most celebrated authors of her day both in Ireland and England, is best known for her novels 'Castle Rackrent' (1800) and 'The Absentee' (1812). A contemporary of Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, her prolific correspondence, penned largely from...

Irish Names contains just under a thousand names selected from the enourmous wealth of historical sources - annals, genealogies, myth, legend and epic poetry - that make up the literature of early medieval Ireland. Of the the extraordinary variety of names available to the early Irish - some twelve...

Until now Lady Lavery has been remembered for the numerous portraits by her husband, the painter John Lavery, celebrated in 'The Municipal Gallery Re-visited' by W.B. Yeats, This first biography of Hazel tells the story the pictures cannot: ow a girl from boomtown Chicago became one of the most stylish...

In this astonishing volume of autobiography, John Moriarty's earlier works of mystical philosophy, Dreamtime and Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, are given a biographical grounding. Inhabited by all that he reads and perceives, Moriarty recovers lost forms of sensibility and categories of understanding,...