178 pages. The jacket is lightly chipped at the edges and suffers from very minor insect damage along the back flap while the tail of the front flap is ragged. The fore-edge is foxed, and there is intermittent mild foxing throughout the book. Apart from the foxing, a clean, unmarked and solid copy. 'In this book of short pieces Donleavy has given us the lyric poems to go with his epics. They are almost all elegies - sad songs of decayed hope, bitter little jitterbuggings of an exasperated soul, with barracuda bites of lacerating humour he brings blood-red into the gray of fate. These stories and sketches move between Europe and America, New York and Dublin and London. America is always the spoiled paradise, the land of the curdled milk and maggoty honey. The place that used to get you in the end, but that now does it in the beginning.' (Newsweek)