The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman: Including the Brother

By Flann O'Brien

Book Overview

Along with Joyce and Beckett, Flann O'Brien] constitutes our trinity of great Irish writers. And who is funnier?- Edna O'Brien The cream of Flann O'Brien's comic tour-de-force, the Keats and Chapman stories began in O'Brien's column in the Irish Times, He called them studies in literary pathology -- monstrously tall tales that explore the very limits of the shaggy dog story. As one critic wrote, they will accumulate the fantasy to the point of sadism, and then cash home with the flat, desolating pun. The Brother is another of O'Brien's funniest creations. He is the archetypal Dublin man -- an authority on every one of mankind's ills, from the common cold to the court case. Forget the experts, The Brother knows best. The best comic writer I can think of.- S. J. Perelman

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312329075
• ISBN13: 9780312329075
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Would be five stars if it came with the first bit blun off

A welcome compilation of the incomparable Myles marred only by a thoroughly cack-handed introduction by Jamie O'Neill, whose sole qualification for the job it seems is having written something called At Swim, Two Boys--a novel apparently, set against the backdrop of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, about the love that blossoms between two boys. Shudder. Seriously though, I haven't read this much cartoon Irish claptrap in prefatory remarks since I ran across Malachy McCourt's acknowledgements in his ghastly little memoir, A Monk Swimming. If O'Neill's smugly contemptuous and entirely unwarranted swipe at the Catholic Church doesn't give you the full measure of this imposter's stunted perspective, then his trite and tired rehearsal of the Irish way with the English language certainly will. My advice is skip the introduction, better yet yank it completely, and start straight in on Flann, a joy as ever from start to finish. Saw Eamon Morrissey do his thing too so I did, back in the eighties, and he done full justice to your man up above in the bed I can tell you.