Donleavy continues the adventures of one of his most popular heroes, show biz impressario and libertine extraordinaire, Franz Sigmund "Isadorable" Schultz. Now amidst mayhem and confusion, Shultz turns to the eminent Rabbi Low for assistance.

Nathan Johnson, forty-eight and restless, began his career as a door-to-door lingerie salesman, reaching the top of the rag trade with a penthouse overlooking Manhattan.A 'confirmed social climber' in 1990s New York City, he looks back on his early struggles, indulging fantasies of life as a country squire on Blueberry Hill – the Westchester estate he buys his wife Muriel as a birthday present. He meets a model from Iowa, different from the rest, and is captivated. When, out of the blue, a letter marked 'personal' arrives, his wife opens it and life unravels.A Letter Marked Personal is J.P.Donleavy's final novel, completed in 2007. His portrait of a flawed Anglophile delineates the American Dream, from aspirational greed to the vanity of human wishes. This poignant story of Nathan's rise and demise speaks for the everyman – an apt farewell from one of literature's true originals.

'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

'A liltingly moving piece of writing from a wonderfully fruity romancer' - Financial Times Where Darcy departing Dublin descends on his darkly decrepit desmesne, skint as a boiled bone. There to ponder his leaking, bat-ridden birthright, devilishly diverted by sexy Miss von B and readily rolled up by Ronald Rashers. And Sees Leila. Lovely, lissome Leila – who tells him no. A definite negative. So Darcy is back to Dublin and the noisome stews to dream of the one bright star in his eternal darkness ... As There's fool's gold at the end of every Irish rainbow, and tarnished silver linings in every cloud, so there's a shimmer on the far horizon for this particular broth of a boy. His future is disastrous, his present indecent, his past divine. He is Darcy Dancer, youthful squire of Andromeda Park, the great gray stone mansion inhabited by Crooks, the cross eyed butler, and the sexy, aristocratic Miss Von B. This sequel to The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman finds our...

This is the dramatic story of J. P. Donleavy's personal struggle to create and publish a book that became a twentieth-century masterpiece: The Ginger Man . It is literally history combined with Donleavy's autobiography -- from his childhood in the Bronx, education at Catholic schools, service in the U.S. Navy, and travels, to his current life as proprietor of a landed estate in the midlands of Ireland. Trinity College in Dublin after World War II was a mecca for adventurous Americans who used the G.I. Bill as a passport to higher education,. Among them were able-bodied seamen, second class J.P. 'Mike' Donleavy, fighter pilot George Roy Hill (now a celebrated Hollywood actor), and a naval yeoman Gainor Stephen Crist, a Midwestern rara avis and model for the Ginger Man. Student life included degrees in debauchery; drunken brawls in Dublin pubs; comic capers with the playwright Brendan Behan; eccentric Anglo-Irish aristocrats; living on miraculous credit and in constant debt with plenty...

J. P. Donleavy has been writing now for forty-five years and, as he admits, an answer to the question why is ' difficult to dig out of a long past'. Yet over these pages he author's query is largely answered for him: he has written so much for so long because he writes so very well. From the banks of the Seine to the streets of the Bronx, from the stables of the Dublin Horse Show to cocktails at Claridge's, we are transported by these collected short pieces into the singular and spirited world of J. P. Donleavy. Bringing an uncommonly objective yet affectionate eye to his writings on his own birthplace, America, balancing unabashed adoration with good-humoured bewilderment in his depiction of his heart's home, Ireland, the author presents us with a fresh, engaging vista that could only be his own. Whether reviewing a book on sexual exercises for women or paying homage to Yeats, the impress is unmistakably Donleavy's. The initial publication of these pieces in various newspapers and...