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Flann O'Brien
The undergraduate narrator lives with his uncle in Dublin, drinks too much with his friends and invents stories peopled with hilarious and unlikely characters, one of whom, creates a means…
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A masterpiece of black humour from the renown comic and acclaimed author of ‘At Swim-Two-Birds’ - Flann O'Brien.
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Takes you to a world where bicycles listen to conversations, inventors search for methods of ‘diluting’ water, and characters play truant while novelists sleep; a world where spiteful fairies wreak…
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Dr Joe Brooker
Flann O'Brien was the best known pen name of Brian O'Nolan one of modern Ireland’s most perplexing, subversive and underrated writers. This new study assesses the whole span of O'Noaln’s…
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The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence.
Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal…
A welcome gift for every Flann O Brien fan, this collection at last assembles his short fiction including a final, incomplete novel, and other never-before-published pieces into a single volume.
The classic satire from the renowned comic and acclaimed author of ‘At Swim-Two-Birds’ - Flann O'Brien.
Tobias William Harris
Crossing the boundaries of a single-author study, this book uncovers Flann O'Brien's attempt to forge a commercially successful Irish literary project from international avant-garde influences.
Situating O'Brien's early work within…
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Under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen, Flann O’ Brien wrote a daily column in the ‘Irish Times’ called ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ for over twenty years which hilariously satirised the absurdities and…
Flann O'Brien and the Nonhuman is the first book to explore in detail the author's interest in the agency, materiality, and potential sentience of environments, animals and machines.
The best comic writer I can think of. S.J. Perelman
This new study assesses the whole span of O'Brien’s achievement, including his early forays into public satire and his fabrication of authorial identities.
Flann O'Brien & Modernism brings a much-needed refreshment to the state of scholarship on this increasingly recognised but still widely misunderstood ‘second generation’ modernist. Rather than construe him as a…
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Dr Maebh Long
A complete guide to the writings of Flann O'Brien, including his major novels, plays and journalism –
Employing a wide range of critical perspectives and new comparative contexts, Flann O'Brien: Contesting Legacies breaks new ground in O'Brien scholarship by testing a number of popular commonplaces about this…
An unprecedented gathering of the correspondence of one of the great writers of the twentieth century spanning the years 1934 to 1966, these compulsively readable letters show us O'Brien at…
Flann O'Brien’s writing displays a knack for comic doubling and self-contradiction. Focusing on the satirical energies and anti-authoritarian temperament invested in his style, this book interrogates the author’s clowning with…
The book draws on unprecedented critical attention to the centrality of politics in Flann O'Brien’s art. Focuses these inquiries onto key encounters between the body and the law, between death…
Flann O'Brien: Acting out is the first full-length study to comprehensively address the themes of performance, masking and illusion in the author’s fiction, columns, correspondence and scripts. These essays reveal…
Myles Before Myles reveals that some of O'Brien’s wittiest and most unusual works were published years before Myles na Gopaleen (or Flann O'Brien) had even been born, and were destined…
Using a play by Karl and Josef Capek as source, Flann O'Brien locates his insect drama in Dublin, his most familiar stalking- territory. His adaptation is a vehicle for ridicule…
This is a companion volume to The Best of Myles and The Hair of the Dogma . It covers the Myles na Gopaleen columns for the Irish Times written between…
Flann O'Brien’s comic writings were much praised by contemporaries like James Joyce, Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene. This is the tale of two orphans, Manus and Finbarr, growing up in…
Wit, humor, satire, the exact fall of a Dublin syllable, the ear for the local turn, the flight of fancy that can spin into a Dublin joke or a Limerick…
M. Keith Booker
This work applies Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of literary discourse and the concept of carnivalisation to the work of Flann O'Brien. The author emphasises the political and social implications of the…
The Poor Mouth relates the story of one Bonaparte O'Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the…
Keith Donohue
The most full length critical and biographical studies of Flann O'Brien(the nom de plume of Brian O’ Nolan an otherwise inoffensive Irish public servant) tend to push asid e the…
Anthony Cronin
With a foreword by acclaimed author Kevin Barry and striking redesign, No Laughing Matter is an undisputed classic of Irish literary biography.
Keith Hopper
This groundbreaking study, first published in 1995 and now substantially revised, reconfigures O'Brien as a highly subversive writer within a rich and fertile literary landscape: indisputably Irish yet distinctly post-modern.
Jennika Baines
This collection of essays considers the work of Flann O'Brien, a subversive, confounding, and hilarious Irish novelist. The book also considers the work of Myles na Gopaleen, whose Cruiskeen Lawn…
Flore Coulouma
With Flann O'Brien now widely acknowledged as a subversive genius of early post-modernism, Flore Coulouma gives the question of language a central position in his literary identity. Tracing O'Brien’s philosophy…
The Review of Contemporary Fiction is a tri-quarterly journal that features critical essays on fiction writers whose work resists convention and easy categorization.
Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja
Providing insightful analysis of the game and play theories and drawing from a wide range of ideas, from the thinking of the great philosophers to basic chess and poker strategies…
A feast of a book. The Independent
Rarely reprinted, rarely staged, and often entirely unpublished, Flann O'Brien’s works for the stage and television are speculative, inventive, and as wickedly funny as his novels.
Carol Taaffe
Investigates how the Irish cultural debate informed O'Nolan’s early fiction and journalism. This work offers an assessment of his work in its Irish context, arguing that his self-reflexive comic writing…
O'Brien was one of the comic geniuses of the 20th century … The Poor Mouth is wildly funny and Steadman’s drawings catch the spirit. Boston Globe
Ralf Zimmermann
Diese Arbeit untersucht die Facetten der Kreativitat in Flann O'Briens Romanen At Swim-Two-Birds und The Third Policeman.Kreative Konstituierungsmoeglichkeiten der literarischen Imagination erlauben es, Erfahrungsraume ausserhalb der Alltaglichkeit zu schaffen…
