'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 'The stories are swift, imaginative, beautiful and funny, and no contemporary writer is better than J. P. Donleavy at his best.' The New Yorker