At Swim-Two-Birds
O’Brien—in real life Irishman Brian O’Nolan—would have been disappointed if anybody could come up with a coherent summary of this brilliant, beer-soaked miniature masterpiece. One of the best-kept secrets of 20th-century literature, At Swim-Two-Birds is ostensibly a novel about a lazy, impoverished college student who’s writing a novel (“One beginning and one ending for a book is a thing I did not agree with,” he opines), but his characters won’t stay put, and they get mixed up with all kinds of local Dublin types and figures out of Gaelic myth—it’s like Ulysses played out in a comic mode, on a more human scale. Dylan Thomas said of it, “This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.” Even better to keep it for yourself.
A - B
- The Adventures of Augie March
- All the King's Men
- American Pastoral
- An American Tragedy
- Animal Farm
- Appointment in Samarra
- Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
- The Assistant
- At Swim-Two-Birds
- Atonement
- Beloved
- The Berlin Stories
- The Big Sleep
- The Blind Assassin
- Blood Meridian
- Brideshead Revisited
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey
C - D
- Call It Sleep
- Catch-22
- The Catcher in the Rye
- A Clockwork Orange
- The Confessions of Nat Turner
- The Corrections
- The Crying of Lot 49
- A Dance to the Music of Time
- The Day of the Locust
- Death Comes for the Archbishop
- A Death in the Family
- The Death of the Heart
- Deliverance
- Dog Soldiers
F - G
- Falconer
- The French Lieutenant's Woman
- The Golden Notebook
- Go Tell it on the Mountain
- Gone With the Wind
- The Grapes of Wrath
- Gravity's Rainbow
- The Great Gatsby
H - I
- A Handful of Dust
- The Heart is A Lonely Hunter
- The Heart of the Matter
- Herzog
- Housekeeping
- A House for Mr. Biswas
- I, Claudius
- Infinite Jest
- Invisible Man
L - N
O - R
- On the Road
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
- The Painted Bird
- Pale Fire
- A Passage to India
- Play It As It Lays
- Portnoy's Complaint
- Possession
- The Power and the Glory
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
- Rabbit, Run
- Ragtime
- The Recognitions
- Red Harvest
- Revolutionary Road
S - T
- The Sheltering Sky
- Slaughterhouse Five
- Snow Crash
- The Sot-Weed Factor
- The Sound and the Fury
- The Sportswriter
- The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
- The Sun Also Rises
- Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Things Fall Apart
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- To the Lighthouse
- Tropic of Cancer
Sections
