“Flanneurs,” as devotees of Flann O’Brien are called, were undoubtedly thrilled with last year’s release, from Dalkey Archive Press, of the author’s collected short fiction. Indeed, the book — including the manuscript for an unfinished novel, Slattery’s Sago Saga, a short prose typescript heavily edited by O’Brien himself, and a parody of pulp science-fiction stories which, though published under the mysterious name John Shamus O’Donnell, contains compelling evidence that O’Donnell was yet another of O’Brien’s authorial masks — seems a gold mine for scholars curious about the evolution of that wildly inventive oeuvre. Or fans whose copies of the masterpieces At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman are so well worn they are eager to devour any further discoveries from the vault of O’Brien’s forgotten prose.
Click here to read the review at the Mookse and the Gripes
