back then and I've come to realize that the gore level of Butcher may be related to some of our more "interesting" conversations.) Ellroy's first works — Brown's Requiem, Clandestine, Blood on the Moon and the other Lloyd Hopkins police procedurals — are great reads; The Black Dahlia and The Big Nowhere stand out to me as masterpieces. The first uses a famous unsolved true crime as a springboard for beautiful writing and the best type of social commentary — that which masquerades as entertainment. The second is, literally and figuratively, a bigger book, and is, in my opinion, Ellroy's magnum opus.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Max McGuinness, a columnist at The Dubliner, named four of the greatest alternative Irish writers for The Daily Beast.

One author on the list:

Flann O’Brien

Ithas long been fashionable for aficionados of post-structuralism to question the parameters of authorial control, to explore the fragmented nature of identity, and to assess the diverse “gender claims” inherent within “texts.”

But dipsomaniac civil servant, Flann O’Brien, was streets ahead of the lot of them. His anarchic 1939 début, At Swim Two Birds, introduced us to novels-within-novels, characters revolting against their author, and men born fully formed at the age of 25. Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault were still in short trousers at the time. O’Brien (which was just one of many pseudonyms—his real name was Brian O’Nualláin) also had the advantage over these rather po-faced Frenchmen of telling terrific jokes.

His next novel, The Third Policeman, was even stranger. Featuring men who become bicycles and bicycles which become men