“I shall begin well before the beginning. And end after the end. That is how it should be. And most of it will be lies, fabrications, inexactitudes, approximations, near misses, botched hits...”Ralph Cusack published only one novel in his lifetime: Cadenza, a meandering, autofictional journey through one man’s memory often compared to the work of Joyce and Beckett. A Hyphenated Childhood, Cusack’s previously unpublished and unfinished memoir, pain...

A pioneering work of autofiction, Ralph Cusack’s Cadenza tackles time and memory, life and death “with an Anglo-Irish arrogance worthy of Beckett.” (Gilbert Sorrentino)‘It’s just like this: I don’t want to go home and I can’t stand Dublin nor any place between the two of them either or at all...’After a harrowing trip to the dentist, Desmond, the narrator of Ralph Cusack’s Cadenza, boards a train, locks himself in cabin 304D, and decides t...