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From The Writer’s Almanac for 5 October:
It’s the birthday of the avant-garde novelist who wrote under the name Flann O’Brien, (books by this author) born Brian O’Nolan in Strabane, Ireland (1911). He worked as a civil servant, and he was always impeccably dressed and was a very productive worker, so no one guessed that he was working on one of the strangest novels of the 20th century. That novel was At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). It has three beginnings and three endings and the three different strands run alongside each other for the length of the book. It only sold about 200 copies when it first came out, but some of the most prestigious writers in Europe got their hands on those first 200 copies, and it’s believed that At Swim-Two-Birds was the last novel that James Joyce ever read. The book has since come to be regarded as a masterpiece of experimental fiction.
