Irish Literature

House of Mourning and Other Stories

Desmond Hogan

There is no doubt that Desmond Hogan is one of most remarkable literary talents to have come out of Ireland in the past half-century, and perhaps the best introduction to his work is through his magnificent short stories, widely anthologized and praised throughout the world. Focusing as always on the downtrodden and the eccentric, the misplaced and the dispossessed, Hogan's stories merge past with present, landscape with mindscape—distinctly Irish and burdened by history, while exhilaratingly and wholly universal and modern.

Farewell to Prague

Desmond Hogan

Following a crippling depression and institutionalization, the writer «Desmond» wanders from his native Dublin around an increasingly unrecognizable Europe, and as far as the southern United States, assembling a patchwork of small stories, conversations, love affairs, memories, regrets, and confrontations: «the labyrinth of stories of people whose lives you touch . . . so that your mind becomes like a polychromatic Irish pub.» Whether a series of tragic postcards, a cubist novel, or a memoir shorn of its connective tissue, A Farewell to Prague stands as Desmond Hogan's greatest achievement: a catalog of the moments that justify a life «or shine a light on its emptiness.»