O'BRIEN, Flann

As a civil servant who wrote a newspaper column under the name Myles na Copaleen, Brian O'Nolan needed yet another pseudonym for his fiction, and so chose Flann O'Brien . His clever masterpiece is At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), a novel about an author whose characters turn against him by writing a novel about him. Because the initial narrator is a student writing a book, At Swim-Two-Birds has three beginnings and three endings. The extremely witty writing includes this interrogation of a...