The Best of Myles

Book excerpt: The “brilliant, morosely inventive comic turns devoted to . . . the literary life, the Gaelic Revival, civil service bureaucracy, booze and its discontents.” —The Observer For more than twenty years, famous Irish novelist Flann O’Brien wrote columns for the Irish Times under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. This collection compiles his work from the first five years of his journalistic career and brings together themes that shaped O’Brien’s successful novels, including At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Poor Mouth, and The Hard Life. In these pages, you’ll find trenchant and entertaining writing on the Irish Writers, Actors, Artists and Musicians Association; World War II; John Keats; Irish culture and identity; brothers; landladies; railway service; decaying infrastructure; alcoholic ice cream advocacy; and a myriad of other subjects that—as a whole—give a valuable and authentic portrait of twentieth-century Irish life. “This is humorous, satirical, learned, grave-faced, crazy writing. . . . Myles was feared as were some of the ancient Gaelic poets, who it was said could kill with a satire. There was no malice in him, but he could set the town laughing, and a pity for you if the laughter was at your expense.” —The New York Times “It is good to have these fugitive pieces restrained within the covers of a book. Myles was a genial man, a wag, a humorist. . . . Read one by one, his fragments were very funny, but here is a particular pleasure in the continuity of feeling and idiom provided by a book.” —The Times Literary Supplement