The Ginger Man

The Ginger Man Sixtieth Anniversary Edition with foreword by Johnny Depp \n \nAs Brendan Behan edited - without permission - the manuscript that would become The Ginger Man, he predicted that it was destined to Ôgo around the world, and beat the bejaysus out of the BibleÕ. Behan got the first part right. Since its first publication in 1955, more than 40 million copies of the novel have been sold and it has brought more (mostly American) tourists to DublinÕs Trinity College (where it was set) than the Book of Kells. To celebrate its sixtieth year of publication, as its author approaches his ninetieth, The Lilliput Press marks the occasion with a new, beautifully enanced hardback edition. \n \nThe Ginger Man is simply one of the great comic novels of post-war Europe Ð an anarchic, light-hearted, rambunctious twentieth-century classic following the social and sexual peregrinations of a footloose American student on the streets and in the pubs of Dublin. Dorothy Parker wrote of it, Ôstunning . . . brilliant . . . The Ginger Man is the picaresque novel to stop them all. Lusty, violent, wildly funny, it is a rigadoon of rascality, a bawled-out comic song of sexÕ. \n \nAs well as the original text it has a foreword by the actor and director Johnny Depp, who plans to produce a film version; an introduction by novelist Sean O'Reilly; an exchange of letters between Donleavy and the late Arland Ussher; a selection of archival photographs from Dublin and TCD in the early 1950s, and features pages from the original manuscript. This edition will also include an illustrated essay on ÔThe publishing odyssey of The Ginger ManÕ by bibliographer and archivist Bill Dunn. This details the bookÕs fraught origins, battles against censorship and multiple foreign translations from Korea to China, Finland and farther afield. The book, banned in Ireland until 1968, was published in the Irish IndependentÕs Great Irish Writers Series and has been cited as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century. \n \n'The strength of The Ginger Man rests in Donleavy not having created a tormented artist. Instead he is telling the story, in admittedly graphic detail, of the messy way that one manÕs life staggers along.'Ê- The Irish Times \n \nABOUT THE AUTHOR \n \nJ.P. ÔMikeÕ Donleavy (1926Ð2017) wrote more than twenty books after The Ginger Man, including The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1968), A Fairy Tale of New York (1973), The Onion Eaters (1971) and Schultz (1979) (all available as eBooks from Lilliput), along with several works of non-fiction such as The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival and Manners (1975). He lived along the shores of Lough Owel near Mullingar in County Westmeath. \n \n