The Third Policeman

One man wants to publish, so another must perish, in this darkly witty philosophical novel by “a spectacularly gifted comic writer” (Newsweek). The Third Policeman follows a narrator who is obsessed with the work of a scientist and philosopher named de Selby (who believes that Earth is not round but sausage-shaped)—and has finally completed what he believes is the definitive text on the subject. But, broke and desperate for money to get his scholarly masterpiece published, he winds up committing robbery—and murder. From here, this remarkably imaginative dark comedy proceeds into a world of riddles, contradictions, and questions about the nature of eternity as our narrator meets some policemen with an obsession of their own (specifically, bicycles), and engages in an extended conversation with his dead victim—and his own soul, which he nicknames Joe. By the celebrated Irish author praised by James Joyce as “a real writer, with the true comic spirit,” The Third Policeman is an incomparable work of fiction. “’Tis the odd joke of modern Irish literature—of the three novelists in its holy trinity, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien, the easiest and most accessible of the lot is O’Brien. . . . Flann O’Brien was too much his own man, Ireland’s man, to speak in any but his own tongue.” —The Washington Post

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The Third Policeman

With the publication of The Third Policeman, Dalkey Archive Press now has all of O'Brien's fiction back in print.

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The Third Policeman

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Flann O Brien

"Flann O'Brien was the best-known pen-name of Brian O'Nolan (1911-1966) one of modern Ireland's most perplexing, subversive and underrated writers. In At-Swim-Two-Birds (1939) he exploded the modern novel into a riot of multiple narratives and contending discourses, in a way that both echoed the example of James Joyce and anticipated later developments in experimental fiction and theory. The subsequent works The Third Policeman and The Poor Mouth confirmed his significance, but for two decades he redirected his talents into the newspaper column Cruiskeen Lawn, producing a surreal commentary on independent Ireland and redrawing the borders of journalism and literature. Joseph Brooker's new study assesses the whole span of Brian O'Nolan's achievement, including his early forays into public satire and his fabrication of authorial identities. Brooker argues that in a period when modernism is being reassessed, O'Nolan's negotiation with Ireland, the press, and the aesthetic make him newly relevant."--BOOK JACKET.

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Flann O Brien

Flann OBriens The Third Policeman, completed in 1940, was initially rejected by his publishers for being "too fantastic," and only appeared posthumously in 1967. Since then OBrien has achieved cult status, although critical appraisal of his work has focused almost exclusively on his first novel, At Swim Two Birds (1939). By 1940 OBrien was confronted with two towering traditions: the jaded legacy of Yeatss Celtic Twilight and the problematic complexities of Joyces modernism. With The Third Policeman, OBrien forges a powerful synthesis between these two traditions, and the paraliterary path he chooses marks the historical transition from modernism to post-modernism. This groundbreaking study, first published in 1995 and now substantially revised, reconfigures OBrien as a highly subversive writer within a rich and fertile literary landscape: indisputably Irish yet distinctly post-modern. It identifies The Third Policeman as a subversive

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The Complete Novels

A compilation of five novels by one of the leading novelists of modern Irish literature features such works as "At Swim-Two-Birds," "The Third Policeman," and "The Poor Mouth."

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At War

This is a collection of writings from the Irish satirist Flann O'Brien, edited from more than 3000 columns which appeared daily in the Irish Times under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen.

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Assembling Flann O Brien

Flann O'Brien - also known as Brian O'Nolan or Myles na gCopaleen - is now widely recognised as one of the foremost of Ireland's modern authors. Assembling Flann O'Brien explores the author's innovative and experimental work by reading him in relation to some of the 20th century's most important theorists, including Derrida, Agamben, Freud, Lacan and Žižek. Assembling Flann O'Brien offers a detailed study of O'Brien's five major novels – including At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman – as well as his plays, short stories, journalistic output and unpublished archival material. The book presents new theoretical perspectives on his works, exploring his compelling engagements with questions of the proper name, the archive, law, and desire, and the problems of identity, language, sexuality and censorship which acutely troubled Ireland's new state. Combining a wide range of contemporary theory with a sensitivity to the cultural and political context in which the author wrote, Maebh Long opens up entirely new aspects of Flann O'Brien's writings, and explores the ingenious and the problematic within his oeuvre.

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Stories and Plays

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A Flann O Brien Reader

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The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman

A collection of humorous vignettes by the late author of At Swim-Two Birds, culled from his Irish Times columns, includes The Brother, a tale of an opinionated Dublin male archetype. 15,000 first printing.

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The Collected Letters of Flann O Brien

An unprecedented gathering of the correspondence of one of the great writers of twentieth century, the Collected Letters of Flann O'Brien presents an intimate look into the life and thought of Brian O'Nolan, a prolific author of novels, stories, sketches, and journalism who famously wrote and presented works to the reading public under a variety of pseudonyms. Spanning the years 1934 to 1966, these compulsively readable letters show us O'Nolan, or O'Brien, or Myles Na gCopaleen--or whatever his name may be--at his most cantankerous and most intimate.

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Flann O Brien s Exorbitant Novels

Since the debut of At Swim-Two-Birds in 1939, Flann O'Brien's novels have delighted and perplexed generations of readers with a taste for creative havoc. But while praise has been plentiful, serious scholarly criticism has been lacking. Shea's book remedies this deficiency by analyzing O'Brien's novelistic career in the light of previously neglected material: his early, uncollected prose written for Comhthrom Feinne and Blather, two unpublished manuscripts of At Swim-Two-Birds, and his unpublished letters which reveal some of the hidden authorial strategies of the man behind the masks. Eight years prior to the publication of At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien launched his writing career with a satiric essay in University College Dublin's student magazine. Through his writing that followed - first in the university publication Comhthrom Feinne, then in his own magazine Blather - O'Brien emerges as a subversive, experimental craftsman with words. An analysis of the early, unpublished manuscripts of At Swim-Two-Birds, composed between 1934 and 1938, is essential for a full appreciation of O'Brien's first and most exorbitant novel. These manuscripts reveal O'Brien in the act of constructing, reimagining, and radically revamping his fiction. Through these early manuscripts, we witness him experimenting with the activity of authoring, testing the volatile, unreliable propensities of words, styles, and narrative arrangements. The Third Policeman, written a year after At Swim, examines the potential of transgression for affirming and perhaps reinscribing a self. The novel focuses on an unnamed, nonexistent narrator who finds himself in a bizarre environment where none of the "normal" cognitive operations hold true. In this twilight zone, the procedures of language through which he has learned to make sense of "himself" and "the world" are abruptly invalidated. In response to his predicament, he probes irregular sorts of coherence, different methods of amalgamation, and modified criteria of communication. Through permutations of phrase making, newerfangled arrangements of words, and transgressive metaphors, he discovers the animating charge of authoring innovation. O'Brien's last two novels, The Hard Life (1961) and The Dalkey Archive (1964), share several attributes. Both were written twenty-odd years after the earlier novels; both appear unusually tame for O'Brien; and both are often taken lightly as enervated, end-of-career efforts by an author who once had good stuff. However, O'Brien's unpublished letters to his friends Niall Montgomery and Niall Sheridan; his agents at A.M. Heath, Patience Ross and Mark Hamilton; and his new publisher during the 1960s, Timothy O'Keefe, reveal that these novels are intended as experiments in subterfuge. The Hard Life masquerades as a tame, straightforward novel as it explores how discourses collapse, sounding only a desperately squalid void. The Dalkey Archive scoffs at the disposition of novels to revolve around character, determining predictable paths limited by spent serial arrangements. By conforming to conventional formats, O'Brien's last completed novel harkens back to his first full-length invention as it powerfully implodes continuity, development, and literary tropes of "redemption."

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Parliamentary Debates

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At Swim Two Birds

An indolent college student creates a chaotic fictional world in this classic of Irish literature: “A marvel of imagination, language, and humor” (New Republic). In this comic masterpiece, our unnamed narrator—a student at University College, Dublin, who spends more time drinking and working on his novel than attending classes—creates a character, a pub owner named Trellis, who himself is devoted mainly to writing and sleeping. Soon Trellis is collaborating with an author of cowboy romances, and from there unspools a brilliantly unpredictable adventure that James Joyce himself called “a really funny book.” “’Tis the odd joke of modern Irish literature—of the three novelists in its holy trinity, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien, the easiest and most accessible of the lot is O’Brien. . . . Flann O’Brien was too much his own man, Ireland’s man, to speak in any but his own tongue.” —The Washington Post “As with Scott Fitzgerald, there is a brilliant ease in [O’Brien’s] prose, a poignant grace glimmering off every page.” —John Updike “One of the best books of our century.” —Graham Greene

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Choice

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Flann O Brien

Employing a wide range of critical perspectives and new comparative contexts, Flann O'Brien: Contesting Legacies breaks new ground in Brian O'Nolan scholarship (he wrote his novels under the name of Flann O'Brien) by testing a number of popular commonplaces about this Irish (post-) Modernist author. Challenging the narrative that Flann O'Brien wrote two good novels and then retired to the inferior medium of journalism (as Myles na gCopaleen), the collection engages with overlooked shorter, theatrical, and non-fiction works and columns ('John Duffy's Brother', 'The Martyr's Crown', 'Two in One') alongside At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, and An Béal Bocht. The depth and consistency of O'Nolan's comic inspiration that emerges from this scholarly engagement with his broader body of work underlines both the imperative and opportunity of reassessing O'Brien's literary legacy. Finally, the contributors excavate O'Nolan's oeuvre as fertile territory for a broad range of critical perspectives by confronting some of the more complex ideological positions tested in his writing. Employing perspectives from genetic criticism and cultural materialism to post-modernism and deconstruction, the essays gathered in this volume address with new critical rigor the author's gender politics, his language politics, his parodies of nationalism, his ideology of science, and his treatment of the theme of justice.

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The Poor Mouth

"O'Brien was one of the comic geniuses of the 20th century . . . The Poor Mouth is wildly funny and Steadman's drawings catch the spirit." Boston Globe

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Constitutional Rights of the American Indian

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The money lender

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