A collection of twelve mint fresh stories from the award winning Irish author, described by Neil Jordan as 'the real thing - a writer of great originality, dramatic flair, linguistic invention - who remakes the world every time he puts pen to paper.' These tales lead the reader around the fringes of Irish society through the eyes of the marginalized.

Desmond Hogan is one of the most exciting literary talents to have come out of Ireland in the past half-century. "Larks' Eggs" reaffirms his stature, displaying anew a compressed lyricism, ferocity and sheer prismatic brilliance in these twenty stories from previous collections and twelve fresh ones. Cressida Connolly called 'Airedale', in William Trevor's "The Oxford Book of Short Stories", 'profound, moving and exquisitely executed. Hogan is one of the finest writers alive today and deserves to be much better known.' Joyce Carol Oates describes 'Winter Swimmers', in the Times Literary Supplement, as an 'elegiac, daringly sustained prose poem...a collage of meticulously rendered Irish scenes that weaves in and out of tales of tinkers and youths'. Hogan's compelling tales of diaspora and exile, of subsumed identity and allurement, merge landscape with mindscape. His history-burdened, fragmented personas are distinctly Irish, while exhilaratingly, wholly universal. 'Here's to the storytellers. They made sense of these lonely and driven lives of ours.' The Lilliput Press is proud to introduce Desmond Hogan to a twenty-first century readership.

Kant writes at one point in the Critique of Pure Reason that practical freedom can be recognized "through experience, as one of the natural causes" (B 831). This claim appears to conflict with a central epistemological theme of his critical philosophy. This work responds by carefully tracing the details of the relationship between transcendental and practical freedom through all of Kant's writings (published works, lecture notes, etc.). Kant uses the term "practical freedom" in several quite different senses and draws on pre-critical theses to varying degrees. While the problematic text has long been noted, there has been no detailed study of its importance.

These eleven stories by Desmond Hogan, his first publication since Larks' Eggs: New and Selected Stories (2005), collect newly minted shards of experience focused on the lives of the dreamers and marginalized who populate his imagined worlds. They range in time and place from France, Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century to Ireland of the 1950s and the present day. Their concerns are fragility and identity expressed through the outer semblances of dress and deportment, and inner realities of involuntary memory and the retrieval of shared pasts. Close observation of nature combines with psychological unveilings, much of it in the form of erotic reverie. This bricolage of melded history and a fragmented modernism renders truth-to-experience like no other contemporary voice.

One of Ireland's most important writers at his finest. Written over a period of twelve years, these stories seem to move nowehere with relentless, slow precision, yet each is as fulfilling and rich with suggestion as a full-scale novel.