Conjuring Complexities: Essays on Flann O'Brien. Ed. by ANNE CLUNE and TESS HURSON. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University. 1997. xv + 233 pp. 25 [pounds sterling] (paperbound 12.50 [pounds sterling]). In Conjuring Complexities Anne Clune and Tess Hurson have assembled...

Anthony Cronin. No Laughing Matter: The Life & Times of Flann O'Brien. Fromm, 1998. 260 pp. $29.95. Originally published in England in 1989, Anthony Cronin's excellent biography of Flann O'Brien is finally available to readers in the United States. Like his more...

With No Country For Old Men's cinematic debut it was perhaps inevitable that bookstores would see a surge of popular interest in the already-popular work of Cormac McCarthy. And in the East Village, where the reading of novels is hardly the greatest danger posed...

My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973, by Harry Mathews. Dalkey Archive Press, 203 pages, $13.95.A few weeks ago, the arts section of The New York Times turned its solemn eye on literary fiction. On Monday, the fine novelist and short-story writer Steve Stern...

O'Brien was an eccentric writer of tremendous comic spirit. His work reveals an impressive knowledge of science, philosophy, literature, and theology. But his attitudes are always playful and satiric. Like Swift, who made fun of the Royal Society in Gulliver's Travels, O'Brien had a talent for making the principles of science seem ridiculous. The Sergeant in The Dalkey Archive, for example, explains the "Mollycule" theory: "Now take a sheep. What is a sheep only mil...

In O'Brien's early writing the surface brilliance of his invention is underscored with an affectionate concern for "the plain people of Ireland," but a harshly bitter quality seeps into his later work, probably because of professional and personal disappointments. He can be compared to Joyce, Beckett and James Stephens. All of them display an obsession with physical details of ludicrous discomfort vividly presented, often to comic effect. O'Brien always angrily rejected th...

To those who know O'Nolan's writing, ["Stories and Plays"] is a treasure. To those who don't, it is an excellent introduction, for every type of thing that he did in English is here, in brief, and in a rich assortment: the unfinished novel, "Slattery's Sago Saga," or "From Under the Ground to the Top of the Trees" is pure wild O'Nolan wit. "The Martyr's Crown" is one of the world's greatest short stories...