'Myles Before Myles' is a selection of writings from pen of Flann O'Brien.

“[Myles] has a good time journeying through Hell, and like a hip Virgil, . . . is happy to show us the way.”—NPR In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity’s immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time. For Myles, time’s “optic quality” is what enables writing in the first place—as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.

The great Irish humorist and writer Flann O'Brien, aka Brian O'Nolan, aka Myles na Gopaleen, also wrote a newspaper column called "Cruiskeen Lawn." The Best of Myles collects the best and funniest, covering such subjects as plumbers, the justice system, and improbable inventions.

Grainy and stripped down, this gritty novel traces the downbeat progress of a tough, queer girl growing up in working-class Boston by "a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant-garde” (The New York Times). Why can’t I live right now. Because I am not rich, I am not a saint. But I do know this: not all of us were sent here to work. The first published novel of legendary poet and performer Eileen Myles follows a queer female growing up in working-class Boston, straining against the institutions that hold her: family, Catholic school, jobs at a camp, at a nursing home, at a school for developmentally disabled adult males. She wants to be an astronaut. Instead, she becomes a poet and journeys through a series of low-end schools, pathetic jobs, and unmade beds. Schooled by mean and memorable Catholic nuns, this tomboy heroine stumbles and dreams her way through the painful corridors of family, early sexual encounters, and an eye-opening series of jobs caring for the sick and insane--the abandoned wards of the state. This is a book hell-bent on telling the truth about poor women, and how they do (and do not) get out of the hands of their families and the state. Without artifice or pseudonym, protagonist Eileen Myles boldly sets down a rich and graphic account of female experience in this world. Free-ranging and deadpan, tragic and joyful, this is a book about women, gender, class, bodies, escape, and what it means to be “inside.” Never more relevant, and now with an introduction by Chris Kraus. "Eileen Myles is a genius!"--Dorothy Allison

The new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Chelsea Girls reads like “an arrival, a voice always becoming, unpinnable and queer” (Natalie Diaz, New York Times Book Review). The first all-new collection of poems from Eileen Myles since 2011’s Snowflake/different streets, Evolution follows the author’s critically acclaimed Afterglow (a dog memoir), as well as a volume of selected poems, I Must Be Living Twice. In these new poems, we find the eminent, exuberant writer at the forefront of American literature, upending genre in a new vernacular that radiates insight, purpose, and risk while channeling of Quakers, Fresca, and cell phones. This long-awaited new collection “lopes forward in the strutting style of the witnessing and sincere, but gorgeously nonaustere, poet in New York…The gift of Evolution is its bold depiction of the textually-rendered ‘I’-Eileen” (Kenyon Review). A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

“A ravishingly strange and gorgeous book about a dog that’s really about life and everything there is…astonishing.” —Helen Macdonald, New York Times-bestselling author of H Is for Hawk In 1990, poet Eileen Myles chose Rosie from a litter of pit bulls on the street, and their connection instantly became central to the writer's life and work. During the course of their sixteen years together, Myles was madly devoted to the dog’s well-being, especially in her final days. Starting from the emptiness following Rosie's death, Afterglow launches a heartfelt and fabulist investigation into the true nature of the bond between pet and pet owner. Through this lens, we witness Myles’s experiences with intimacy and spirituality, celebrity and politics, alcoholism and recovery, fathers and family history, as well as the fantastical myths we spin to get to the heart of grief. Moving from an imaginary talk show where Rosie is interviewed by Myles’s childhood puppet to a critical reenactment of the night Rosie mated with another pit bull, from lyrical transcriptions of their walks to Rosie’s enlightened narration from the afterlife, Afterglow illuminates all that it can mean when we dedicate our existence to a dog. “Myles gets at something no other dog book I’ve read has gotten at quite this distinctly: The sense of wordless connection and spiritual expansion you feel when you love and are loved by a creature who’s not human…raw and affecting.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR