<p>'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 ...