Writing the Sky: Observations and Essays on Dermot Healy is a comprehensive collection of critical essays, memoirs, poetry, and other writerly responses devoted to the life and work of the late Dermot Healy (1947– 2014). Healy was an accomplished poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and editor, and so these essays and observations address the entire range of his eclectic and exciting oeuvre. While paying due tribute to the memory of the man himself, the collection primarily seeks to establish a series of important critical perspec- tives through which Healy’s writings can be properly viewed and assessed. Contemporary writers and poets— including Colm Tóibín, Neil Jordan, Aidan Higgins, Alannah Hopkin, Kevin Barry, Annie Proulx, Michael Longley, Roddy Doyle, Tess Gallagher, Timothy O’Grady, Glenn Patterson, Patrick McCabe, and many others—of- fer creative reflections on Healy’s work, while literary critics provide a wide-ranging foundation for future Healy scholarship. In total, over forty contributors from more than a dozen countries provide insight into one of Ireland’s most powerful and unique literary voices. This collection is absolutely crucial for everyone interested in the work of Dermot Healy and for all devotees of Irish literature.

Initially published in 1984, Dermot Healy's stunning first novel, Fighting with Shadows, returns to print after almost thirty years. Largely set in the border village of Fanacross, Co. Fermanagh, as Ireland stumbles clumsily toward modernity, the Allen family negotiate a bitter and troubled terrain. Fighting with Shadows offers extraordinary and poetic glimpses of the compelling lives of ordinary people. The novel's landscape is of borderlands, of in-between spaces; it tells of violently sundered geographical borders, of maddening religious differences, of the anguished gaps between people as they struggle to find each other, and of how the dead reside among its inhabitants long after they've passed. At once realist account and nightmarish magic realist fable, Fighting with Shadows occupies a truly important position in the history of modern Irish fiction.