Summary

At Swim-Two-Birds tells the story of an unnamed student living with his uncle in Dublin who writes a novel about a character called Trellis, who is himself a novelist whose characters take on lives of their own within his novel. The novel follows the exploits of the student, his fictional author character, and the lives and misadventures of the characters created in the novel-within-a-novel, all while satirizing multiple different literary trends and styles in Irish literature.

The student declares his belief that it is not necessary for a novel to have only one opening and follows up this observation by writing three separate openings for his own novel. The first opening features Pooka MacPhellimey: a mythological figure from Irish folklore thought to be associated with the devil. The second features Mr. John Furriskey, a man who was born at the age of 25. The...