The fifth volume in The Roger Mifflin Collection is available today: The Demi-Gods, a 1914 masterpiece by James Stephens.
“If you need ‘all manner of Irish,’ and a relapse into irresponsible freakishness, try ‘The Demi-Gods,’ by James Stephens,” said Mifflin, the proprietor of Christopher Morley’s Haunted Bookshop. “It is a better book than one deserves or expects. It’s a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.”
Three angels come to Earth to learn more about people. They land in the Irish countryside and encounter a nomadic man and his feisty daughter, and what happens next is what happens next.
I can’t describe the book any better than that, or any better than Morley does. My main point in sharing this series is that I haven’t yet found a book Roger Mifflin recommends that hasn’t delighted and challenged me as a reader, and what more can you ask?
Once again, this is a “lost” classic that deserves to be rediscovered and preserved, and so it joins The Roger Mifflin Collection.