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A BestiaryAuthor: Aidan Higgins Irish Literature Series July 2004 672 pages, 6 x 9 Paperback, 1-56478-357-X Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $11.96 
Retail Hardcover Price: Our Hardcover Price: $39.96—20% OFF!
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Book Description
Originally published as three separate volumes—Donkey's Years, Dog Days, and The Whole Hog—A Bestiary relates the life and times of one of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers. As in his fiction, Higgins's writing exquisitely captures sights, smells, and emotions, detailing his life from childhood in County Kildare before his family's economic decline, to his mother's slow, agonizing death; from his travels in England and South Africa, to his two years spent living with a schoolmistress after the end of his first marriage.
In writing his memoirs Higgins exposes the sources for many of his best novels, from Scenes from a Receding Past to Langrishe, Go Down, giving the reader a rare look into the "story behind the story." But A Bestiary is more than a factual expose—this collection of memoirs is constructed in a novelistic way, creating a work of literary art out of a life.
About the Author
| Aidan Higgins has written short stories, novels, travel pieces, radio plays, and a large body of criticism. A consummate stylist, his writing is lush and complex— especially in his novels. Although his reputation as a writer is well established in the UK and Ireland, most of his books have never been available in the U.S., a situation that Dalkey Archive Press is changing through the publication of many of his works. |
Praise
"The ferocious dazzling prose of Aidan Higgins, the pure architecture of his sentences, takes the breath out of you. He is one of our great writers. Dog Days is a magpie's hoard of misadventures, little grass fires of the heart and left-hand sleight. The reader who cannot take pleasure from it must be dead. I have stood stunned with admiration for the muscular power and linguistic acrobatics—to say nothing of the elegant play with language and the daring architecture—of his work for years."—Annie Proulx"Dog Days—a bloody marvelous book."—Harold Pinter
"Leaving down Donkey's Years at four in the morning after one straight reading I felt exhilarated. . . . Read it and see. Few books inspire like this."—Dermot Healy
More Information
Also by Aidan Higgins:Balcony of Europe
Bornholm Night-Ferry
Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air
Flotsam and Jetsam
Langrishe, Go Down
Scenes from a Receding Past
Windy Arbours