A Devil, a Guinness Brewer, and a King: In Praise of 'At Swim-Two-Birds'
By Allen Barra
This St. Patrick's Day, get acquainted with Irish author Flann O'Brien's funny, bizarre 1939 book of stories within stories within stories.
Flann O'Brien
In 1939, German planes bombed London, damaging, among other buildings, a publishing house that had just released Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. O'Brien blamed the commercial failure of his novel on that raid, which prevented the book's wide release. He may have been right, though he was probably overstating the case when he claimed that Hitler had started the war to prevent At Swim-Two-Birds from reaching the mass audience.
