Bookshop Picks: Lilliput Press, Dublin
I'm very excited to publish this interview with the Lilliput Press! Lilliput Press is a national treasure and celebrated its 35 year anniversry in 2019. It is an amazing independent bookshop and publisher in the heart of Stoneybatter in Dublin. Amy from Lilliput Press was kind enough to pick some excellent smart thinking books for us this week! Read her great interview answers below.
Q. What are two recent smart thinking books that are your favourite and/or have been popular in your shop?
The Scar by Mary Cregan is an intimate memoir in which Mary Cregan shares deeply personal memories of loss, despair and self-inquiry and links them intelligently and sensitively with a medical and cultural history of depressive illness. When her daughter passed away at 2 days old, Mary plunged into a deep depression. After attempting suicide, she received a diagnosis of a ‘major depressive episode, with melancholia.’
The Scar is a timely, relevant and riveting memoir as well as an education in the history of melancholia, the asylum, electroconvulsive therapy, anti-depressants, and the experience of those who suffer from the too-often stigmatized illness of depression. It is a book for anyone has known grief, sadness, or despair. Cregan throws off the shackles of silence and stigma, and in doing so, she offers hope to all those still struggling.
The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery
Review from Book Depository:
At the age of twenty-seven, married, living in New York, and working in book design, Mary Cregan gives birth to her first child, a daughter she names Anna. But it's apparent that something is terribly wrong and two days later, Anna dies, plunging Cregan into suicidal despair. Decades later, sustained by her work, a second marriage, and a son, Cregan reflects on and attempts to make sense of this pivotal experience.
Weaving together literature and research with details from her long-buried medical records, she writes of her own ordeal and the still-visible scar of a suicide attempt- while considering it as part of a larger history of our understanding of depression. She investigates the treatments she underwent, from hospitalization and shock therapy to psychotherapy and antidepressants.
At once intimate and scholarly, The Scar illuminates a too often stigmatised affliction with compassion and intelligence and offers hope to all those who are still struggling.
Buy On:
Lilliput Press €16.00 Book Depository €12.56 Waterstones £15.00 Amazon UK £10.50 Amazon US $15.69(All affiliate links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
In Introducing John Moriarty, Canadian theologian and academic Michael W. Higgins compiles the essential writings of Irish philosopher and mystic, John Moriarty. This distillation of Moriarty’s texts on ecology, mysticism and spirituality is a perfect introduction to the work of this complex and, at times, esoteric philosopher. Higgins’ commentary provides an excellent guide to one of the country’s most enigmatic modern thinkers and is an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in Irish philosophy and spirituality.
Introducing John Moriarty: In his own words
Buy On:
Lilliput Press €12.00 Amazon UK £9.02(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Q. What are two classic or established smart thinking non-fiction books that you and/or your customers like?
Dead as Doornails, first published in 1976, brings back into print a true classic of Irish memoir. Anthony Cronin’s account of life in post-war literary Dublin is as funny and colourful as one would expect from an intimate of Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Myles na Gopaleen; but it is also a clear-eyed and bracing antidote to the kitsch that passes for literary history and memory in the Dublin of today.
Dead as Doornails: A Memoir
Review from Book Depository: In this account of life in post-war literary Dublin, Anthony Cronin writes of the frustrations and pathologies of this generation: the excess of drink; the shortage of sex; the insecurity and begrudgery; the limitations of cultural life in mid-century Ireland, and the bittersweet pull of exile.
Buy On:
Lilliput Press €15.00 Book Depository €11.30 Waterstones £10.00 Amazon UK £7.11 Amazon US $13.95(All affiliate links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Dreamtime by John Moriarty, is a revised and enlarged edition of John Moriarty’s first published work, which has been out of print since 1994. A Book of Revelations mediated by stories and personal excursions in literature, philosophy and sacred writings, Moriarty articulates the wisdom of humanity, drawing on cultural landscapes in India, China, Egypt, Australia, the Americas and Europe. Now recognized as a classic of spiritual writing, it enlarges our capacity for symbolic understanding in an age of millennial anxiety.
Dreamtime: Revised Edition
Review from Book Depository:
Revised and enlarged, this edition of John Moriarty's first published work presents a book of revelations, meditated by stories and personal excursions in literature, philosophy and sacred writings.
Buy On:
Lilliput Press €15.00 Book Depository €14.34 Waterstones £11.99 Amazon UK £11.23 Amazon US $19.10(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Q. What is one wildcard smart thinking book that you like and/or you have in stock which may not be very well known?
The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many, and Endangered the Planet by Richard Douthwaite. Is economic growth improving our lives? In 1992, when the first edition of The Growth Illusion appeared, most people had little doubt that the answer was ‘Yes’. Today, however, the climate of opinion has changed and there is widespread acceptance that, while growth might be necessary to generate jobs, the development path we are following isn’t making life better for ourselves or our children. This new, revised edition of The Growth Illusion explains what has gone wrong.
The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet
Review From Book Depository:
Revised and reworked, this edition argues that since the 1950s, governments around the world have made economic growth their primary focus in the belief that by baking the biggest national cake, they are creating the resources needed to fulfill their political goals. Richard Douthwaite presents research from the USA, Britain, Germany and Australia that shows that this "growth first, goals later" strategy is not working, and that since the mid-1980s the growth process has actually destroyed more resources than it has created on a sustainable basis. As these economies run backwards, their citizens become worse off.
Buy On:
Lilliput Press €20.00 Book Depository €17.94 Waterstones £12.95 Amazon UK £8.00 Amazon US $9.99(All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Many thanks to Amy in Lilliput Press for highlighting some fantastic books!
Check out Lilliput Press on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: The Lilliput Press (The Scar, Introducing John Moriarty, Dead As Doornails, Dreamtime, The Growth Illusion)
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