In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

In this episode, Will Carr is joined by writer and academic Paul Fagan to discuss At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien.

At Swim-Two-Birds is narrated by a young undergraduate student who invents wild stories featuring a host of strange character. The novel consists of three of the student’s seemingly unlinked stories that introduce characters such as Furriskey who is a fictional character created by the equally fictional Trellis, a writer of Westerns. As the narrative progresses, the student’s characters seem to take on a life of their own, and the novel becomes an absurdist brew of Irish folklore, farce, and comedic satire.

Flann O’Brien was born Brian Ó Nualláin in County Tyrone, Ireland in 1911. After studying at University College Dublin he joined the Irish Civil Service, during which time he wrote novels in both English and Irish Gaelic, scripts for television and theatre, and newspaper columns as Myles na gCopaleen. He died in 1966.

Paul Fagan is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University, where he is working on the Irish Research Council project Celibacy in Irish Women's Writing, 1860s-1950s. He is a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society, a founding general editor of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies. He is the co-editor of Finnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities, as well as five edited volumes on Flann O’Brien.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Flann O'Brien:

An Béal Bocht (1941)

The Hard Life (1961)

The Dalkey Archive (1964)

The Third Policeman (1967)

The Best of Myles (1968)

By others:

The Golden Ass by Apuleius (c. 200)

The Fenian Cycle (from c. 600)

The Madness of Sweeney (c. 1200)

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605-15)

Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1623)

A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift (1704)

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)

The Crock of Gold by James Stephens (1912)

Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

Travelling People by BS Johnson (1963)

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)

Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino (1979)

Lanark by Alasdair Gray (1981)

Blooms of Dublin by Anthony Burgess (1982)

A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers by Hugh Kenner (1983)

House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski (2000)

Milkman by Anna Burns (2018)

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LINKS

Finnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories, edited by Paul Fagan and Richard Barlow

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation Substack

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

In this episode, we’re getting the intel on Catch-22 by Joseph Heller from our guest Spencer Morrison.

Catch-22 takes us back to the dying days of the Second World War and introduces us to Yossarian, a US Air Force bombardier who is stationed on an island off the coast of Italy. Yossarian’s traumatic missions are contrasted with his life on the base, which is populated by various oddball airmen who all have their own agendas. They are overseen by commanding officers who are more concerned with abstract bureaucracy and arbitrary rules than the reality of the war. When Yossarian attempts to get out of flying any more missions he is faced with the most insidious rule of all, Catch-22, which states if an airman flies missions he is crazy and doesn’t have to, but if he doesn’t want to fly missions then he is sane and has to.

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. In 1942, he joined the US Air Force and served as a bombardier on the Italian Front, his experiences informing Catch-22. His first published story appeared in Atlantic magazine in 1948 while he was working as a copywriter for an advertising firm. He went on to write seven novels, a collection of short stories, three plays, three screenplays and two volumes of autobiography. In the 1970s he worked alongside Anthony Burgess in the Creative Writing department at City College New York. He died in 1999.

Spencer Morrison is an assistant professor of English Language and Culture at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, where he specializes in post-WWII American literature. His writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in journals such as American Literary History, ELH, American Literature, and Genre, and he's currently completing a book manuscript on fifties and sixties American literature and culture that includes a chapter on Joseph Heller.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

By Joseph Heller:

Something Happened (1974)

By others:

The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek (1921)

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932)

The Gallery by John Horne Burns (1947)

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)

The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney (1950)

From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1951)

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor (1952)

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)

The Organization Man by William H Whyte (1956)

On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

The Thin Red Line by James Jones (1962)

Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty (1996)

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)

The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015)

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LINKS

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The Burgess Foundation's free Substack newsletter

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

In this episode, we’re learning about The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury, with our guest Joseph Williams.

The History Man tells the story of Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at a modern campus university. Howard is a strident and radical political voice on campus who dominates both his fellow lecturers and his students with his opinions and encourages sit-ins and protests for all manner of causes. Howard is also morally compromised: he has affairs with his female students while simultaneously bullying his male students, and his frequent lies destroy his colleagues’ careers even as they bring him success. Burgess calls The History Man ‘a disturbing and accurate portrayal of campus life in the late sixties and early seventies.’

Malcolm Bradbury was born in 1932. He wrote six novels, of which The History Man is the most well-known, having been adapted for the screen in 1981. He also wrote a novella, a collection of short stories, several well-respected books of literary criticism and many scripts for television. He also set up the famous MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, which launched the careers of Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro among others. He was knighted for services to literature in 2000 and died the same year at the age of 68.

Joseph Williams is finishing a PhD at the University of East Anglia, researching the creative, critical and educational work of Malcolm Bradbury, Lorna Sage, David Lodge, and the journal Critical Quarterly. He has taught at UEA and now teaches for the Workers Educational Association, most recently a course on Ulysses. As a reviewer he has written for Literary Review, The Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator, and Tribune, and in 2023 he was appointed reviews editor at Critical Quarterly.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Malcolm Bradbury:

Eating People is Wrong (1959)

Stepping Westward (1965)

The Social Context of Modern English Literature (1971)

The Modern American Novel (1983)

The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1988)

The Modern British Novel (1993)

By others:

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

Loving by Henry Green (1945)

The Great Tradition by F.R. Leavis (1948)

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)

The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis (1973)

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975)

Gossip from the Forest by Thomas Keneally (1975)

Changing Places by David Lodge (1975)

How Far Can You Go? by David Lodge (1980)

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

Money by Martin Amis (1984)

Small World by David Lodge (1984)

White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985)

Nice Work by David Lodge (1988)

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)

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LINKS

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation Newsletter

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.