J. P. Donleavy

A Letter Marked Personal is J.P. Donleavy’s last novel, completed in 2007. Set in New York, it relates the interior monologue of forty-nine-year-old Nathan Langriesh Johnson, the founder of a successful lingerie company. Nathan began his career as a door-to-door lingerie salesman, his wares consisting of imitations of European designs. Now ‘a confirmed social climber’, Nathan distracts himself with remembered or imagined comments by his wife, Iowa the model, Reginald the accountant and Hal the realtor, and reminisces about the struggle before his business took off. A letter marked ‘personal’ arrives at Nathan’s high-rise Manhattan apartment, and is opened by ‘the wife’: his life unravels. This portrait of a flawed sycophant is full of Donleavy’s wit and insight. Tracing a journey from Nathan’s aspirational greed to his realization of the pointlessness of his vanity, this is a poignant story of a man at the end of his days, reflecting upon the futility of human wishes.

As Brendan Behan edited - without permission - the manuscript that would become The Ginger Man, he predicted that it was destined to ‘go around the world, and beat the bejaysus out of the Bible’. Behan got the first part right. Since its first publication in 1955, the novel has sold close to 50 million copies, bringing more (mostly American) tourists to Dublin’s Trinity College (where it was set) than the Book of Kells. To celebrate its sixtieth year of publication, as its author approaches his ninetieth, The Lilliput Press marks the occasion with this specially commissioned volume, available in standard hardback or as a signed, numbered edition, limited to 200 copies. The Ginger Man is simply one of the great comic novels of post-war Europe – an anarchic, light-hearted, rambunctious twentieth-century classic following the social and sexual peregrinations of a footloose American on the streets and in the pubs of Dublin. Dorothy Parker wrote of it, ‘stunning . . . brilliant . . . The Ginger Man is the picaresque novel to stop them all. Lusty, violent, wildly funny, it is a rigadoon of rascality, a bawled-out comic song of sex’. As well as the original text it has a foreword by the actor and director Johnny Depp (who plans to produce a film version); an exchange of letters between Donleavy and the late Arland Ussher; a selection of archival photographs of TCD in the early 1950s, and pages from the original manuscript. This edition will also include an illustrated essay on ‘The publishing odyssey of The Ginger Man’ by bibliographer and archivist Bill Dunn, detailing the book’s fraught origins and its battles against censorship. Banned in Ireland until 1968, the novel has been translated into some two dozen languages including Hebrew, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, with a Mandarin translation set for late 2015. It has been cited as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.

As Brendan Behan edited - without permission - the manuscript that would become The Ginger Man, he predicted that it was destined to ‘go around the world, and beat the bejaysus out of the Bible’. Behan got the first part right. Since its first publication in 1955, the novel has sold close to 50 million copies, bringing more (mostly American) tourists to Dublin’s Trinity College (where it was set) than the Book of Kells. To celebrate its sixtieth year of publication, as its author approaches his ninetieth, The Lilliput Press marks the occasion with this specially commissioned volume, available in standard hardback or as a signed, numbered edition, limited to 200 copies. The Ginger Man is simply one of the great comic novels of post-war Europe – an anarchic, light-hearted, rambunctious twentieth-century classic following the social and sexual peregrinations of a footloose American on the streets and in the pubs of Dublin. Dorothy Parker wrote of it, ‘stunning . . . brilliant . . . The Ginger Man is the picaresque novel to stop them all. Lusty, violent, wildly funny, it is a rigadoon of rascality, a bawled-out comic song of sex’. As well as the original text it has a foreword by the actor and director Johnny Depp (who plans to produce a film version); an exchange of letters between Donleavy and the late Arland Ussher; a selection of archival photographs of TCD in the early 1950s, and pages from the original manuscript. This edition will also include an illustrated essay on ‘The publishing odyssey of The Ginger Man’ by bibliographer and archivist Bill Dunn, detailing the book’s fraught origins and its battles against censorship. Banned in Ireland until 1968, the novel has been translated into some two dozen languages including Hebrew, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, with a Mandarin translation set for late 2015. It has been cited as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.

First published in Paris in 1955, and originally banned in the United States, J. P. Donleavy's first novel is now recognized the world over as a masterpiece and a modern classic of the highest order. Set in Ireland just after World War II, The Ginger Man is J. P. Donleavy's wildly funny, picaresque classic novel of the misadventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, a young American ne'er-do-well studying at Trinity College in Dublin. He barely has time for his studies and avoids bill collectors, makes love to almost anything in a skirt, and tries to survive without having to descend into the bottomless pit of steady work. Dangerfield's appetite for women, liquor, and general roguishness is insatiable--and he satisfies it with endless charm.

The New York Times Book Review called The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, J. P. Donleavy's hilarious, bittersweet tale of a lost young man's existential odyssey, "a triumphant piece of writing, achieved with that total authority, total mastery which shows that a fine writer is fully extended...." In the years before and after World War II, Balthazar B is the world's last shy, elegant young man. Born to riches in Paris and raised by his governess, Balthazar is shipped off to a British boarding school, where he meets the noble but naughty Beefy. The duo matriculate to Trinity College, Dublin, where Balthazar reads zoology and Beefy prepares for holy orders, all the while sharing amorous adventures high and low, until their university careers come to an abrupt and decidedly unholy end. Written with trademark bravado and a healthy dose of sincerity, The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B is vintage Donleavy.

Feckless, unwashed and charming, Trinity College law student Sebastian Balfe Dangerfield is an Irish-American with an English accent. Dreaming of dollars and ready women, he stumbles from public house to pawnbrokers, murmering delusive enticements in the ear of any girl who'll listen.

Perennially short of funds, Cornelius Christian accepts a job at a funeral home in order to pay for his wife's burial. A series of madcap adventures commences in what Donleavy calls "the great sad cathedral that is New York City".

A reserved, lonely, and wealthy businessman falls in love with his beautiful, zany secretary

Darcy Dancer grows to manhood in rural Ireland, finds himself temporarily the squire of Andromeda Park, takes his first steps in love, and travels across the country as a vagabond intent on regaining some of the glories to which he was born