At Swim-Two-Birds
10 best books like At Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O'Brien): Murphy, Gogol's Wife and Other Stories, The Man Who Loved Children, The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr Norris/Goodbye to Berlin, Borstal Boy, The Recognitions, Mulligan Stew, Appointment in Samarra, Dog Soldiers, Call It Sleep
| Author | Samuel Beckett |
| ISBN | 0802150373 |
'Murphy', Samuel Beckett's first published novel, was written in English and published in London in 1938; Beckett himself subsequently translated the book into French, and it was published in France in 1947. The novel recounts the hilarious but tragic life of Murphy in London as he attempts to establish...
| Author | Tommaso Landolfi |
| ISBN | 0811200809 |
Much admired in Europe, Landolfi has been called "the Italian Kafka"; he is often linked with the Surrealists, and in the intellectual quality of his fantasy there are certain affinities with Borges; but beyond these superficial comparisons, his is a truly unique—and fascinating—art. It is...
| Author | Christina Stead |
| ISBN | 0312280440 |
Gentle warning note added here because it seems fans of this book can find the below review a little disheartening. So if you're a fan, you might want to skip this review. But, everybody knows that one reader's dogpile is another reader's marzipan souffle with attendant hummingbirds. I myself cannot...
| Author | Christopher Isherwood |
| ISBN | 0811200701 |
A classic of 20th-century fiction, The Berlin Stories inspired the Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film Cabaret.
First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two astonishing related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which are recognized today as classics of...
| Author | Brendan Behan |
| ISBN | 1567921051 |
This miracle of autobiography and prison literature begins: "Friday, in the evening, the landlady shouted up the stairs: 'Oh God, oh Jesus, oh Sacred Heart, Boy, there's two gentlemen here to see you.' I knew by the screeches of her that the gentlemen were not calling to inquire after my health . . . I grabbed...
| Author | William Gaddis |
| ISBN | 0140187081 |
The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the "ur-text of postwar fiction" and the "first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both”—The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the...
| Author | Gilbert Sorrentino |
| ISBN | 1564780872 |
Mulligan Stew takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress. As a result, his narrative (the very...
| Author | John O'Hara |
| ISBN | 0375719202 |
O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines, but he did it in utterly worldly terms, without Faulkner’s taste for mythic inference or the basso profundo of his prose. Julian...
| Author | Robert Stone |
| ISBN | 0395860253 |
In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America...
| Author | Henry Roth |
| ISBN | 0374522928 |
When Henry Roth published Call It Sleep, his first novel, in 1934, it was greeted with critical acclaim. But in that dark Depression year, books were hard to sell, and the novel quickly dropped out of sight, as did its twenty-eight-year-old author. Only with its paperback publication in 1964 did the...
| Author | Elizabeth Bowen |
| ISBN | 0385720173 |
The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen's best-known book. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human...
| Author | Mickey Spillane |
| ISBN | 0792721055 |
Nobody ever walked across the bridge at night. But on the foggy night that Hammer took that chance, his encounter with a gun-toting thug and a girl on the lam ended with both strangers dead. Soon Hammer is caught in a web of sinister gangsters and beautiful women the likes of which he's never seen -- and his...
| Author | Henry Green |
| ISBN | 0099285096 |
One of his most admired works, Loving describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. In the absence of their employers the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe, invading one another's provinces...
| Author | Anthony Powell |
| ISBN | 0226677141 |
Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill...
| Author | John Barth |
| ISBN | 1903809509 |
Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business...
| Author | Bernard Malamud |
| ISBN | 0374504849 |
Bernard Malamud’s second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who “wants better” for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his...
| Author | Rudolph Wurlitzer |
| ISBN | 1852424230 |
Originally published by Random House in 1969, Nog became a universally revered cult novel and a symbol of the countercultural movement.In Rudolph Wurlitzer's signature hypnotic and haunting voice, Nog tells the tale of a man adrift in the American West, armed with nothing more than his own three pencil-thin...
| Author | Peter Handke |
| ISBN | 0374508240 |
This play is the story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own. Drilled by prompters who use terrifyingly funny logical and alogical language-sequences, Kaspar learns to speak "normally" and eventually becomes...
| Author | John Cheever |
| ISBN | 0679737863 |
Falconer Correctional Facility certainly sounds dreary and no place I’d want to spend any time, but it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as many fictional prisons. In fact, it seems pretty dull. There weren’t any beatings from brutal guards. There’s no racial tension evident. No one gets shivved...
| Author | William H. Gass |
| ISBN | 0879232544 |
First, an admission. Gass’s first collection of essays is lightyears beyond my intellectual level. Switching between heavy philosophical investigations to poetical and opaque literary meditations (by way of book reviews), the essays here lack the same layman’s entrypoint as in later collections...
| Author | Max Frisch |
| ISBN | 0156569523 |
Climate Change
Floods, avalanches, landslides, mass extinctions. What are we to make of these randomly destructive events? Do they exist if there is record, no memory of them? And what difference would it make to not know about them? Or to receive no news from the rest of the world at all? Catastrophe...
| Author | John Hawkes |
| ISBN | 0811200655 |
An English horse race, the Golden Bowl at Aldington, provides the background for John Hawkes' exciting novel, The Lime Twig, which tells of an ingenious plot to steal and race a horse under a false name. But it would be unfair to the reader to reveal what happens when a gang of professional crooks gets wind...
| Author | B.S. Johnson |
| ISBN | 0330484826 |
Christie Malry is a simple man. His job in a bank puts him next to, but not in possession of, money. As a clerk he learns the principles of Double-Entry Bookkeeping and adapts them in his own dramatic fashion to settle his personal account with society.
Under the column headed 'Aggravation' for...
