In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess’s interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess’s list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

In this episode, Will Carr is joined by writer and academic Paul Fagan to discuss At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien.

At Swim-Two-Birds is narrated by a young undergraduate student who invents wild stories featuring a host of strange character. The novel consists of three of the student’s seemingly unlinked stories that introduce characters such as Furriskey who is a fictional character created by the equally fictional Trellis, a writer of Westerns. As the narrative progresses, the student’s characters seem to take on a life of their own, and the novel becomes an absurdist brew of Irish folklore, farce, and comedic satire.

Flann O’Brien was born Brian Ó Nualláin in County Tyrone, Ireland in 1911. After studying at University College Dublin he joined the Irish Civil Service, during which time he wrote novels in both English and Irish Gaelic, scripts for television and theatre, and newspaper columns as Myles na gCopaleen. He died in 1966.

Paul Fagan is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University, where he is working on the Irish Research Council project Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing, 1860s-1950s. He is a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society, a founding general editor of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies. He is the co-editor of Finnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities, as well as five edited volumes on Flann O’Brien.

Books mentioned in this episode

By Flann O’Brien:

• An Béal Bocht (1941)
• The Hard Life (1961)
• The Dalkey Archive (1964)
• The Third Policeman (1967)
• The Best of Myles (1968)

By others:

• The Golden Ass by Apuleius (c. 200)
• The Fenian Cycle (from c. 600)
• The Madness of Sweeney (c. 1200)
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605-15)
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1623)
• A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift (1704)
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)
• The Crock of Gold by James Stephens (1912)
• Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)
• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)
• Travelling People by BS Johnson (1963)
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
• Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino (1979)
• Lanark by Alasdair Gray (1981)
• Blooms of Dublin by Anthony Burgess (1982)
• A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers by Hugh Kenner (1983)
• House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski (2000)
• Milkman by Anna Burns (2018)

(This page contains affiliate links which help support the work of the Burgess Foundation)

In previous series of Ninety-Nine Novels, we learnt about authors including James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood, among others. These episodes are available at your favourite place to get podcasts.

You can join the conversation and tell us which 100th book you would add to Burgess’s list by using the hashtag #99Novels on Twitter.

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to this podcast below or on your audio platform of choice (Apple Podcasts / Soundcloud / Spotify/ YouTube), or use the streaming links below.

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

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