Wanted: reviewer(s)

We’re looking for reviewers for Dalkey Archive’s Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (finished copy), and Best European Fiction 2014 (ARC/proof), for gorse online. If interested, please get in touch: info[at]gorse[dot]ie.

Nicholas Lezard on O’Brien:

Throughout his work O’Brien would cast a very dyspeptic eye on what we may call the Irish mythos. That is, the whole rural shtick involving céilidhs, weeping fishermen’s widows and shebeens. In “Black Peter”, included here, the eponymous hero’s first words, on looking at his local landscape – ie a bog – are “God help us, the world is brown,” and later on in life, after a breakfast of “stirabout and twelve nettles, lovely nourishing nettles that do be on the bog”, he runs to the priest and wakes him to ask: “WHO CREATED ME AND THIS MISERABLE COUNTRY?”

That’s quite an early story, written in 1933, under the name Brian O’Nualláin (there are other pseudonyms here, not just the familiar names of Myles na gCopaleen and Brian O’Nolan, but others such as Lir O’Connor – a new one on me). O’Brien, it could be said, was at his best when young; or certainly at his most acerbic. The pieces here date from 1932 to 1966, and include the first seven chapters of his unfinished novel, Slattery’s Sago Saga, in which a horribly imperious Scotswoman embarks on a scheme to replace the potato in Ireland with sago. The idea is that with sago being more resistant to blight, future generations will not wish to emigrate to the US and infect it with, among other things, popery. Only O’Brien, you feel, could have got away with the long catalogue of slurs and libels he directs at his own people.