Bøger af Alan Burns

Alan Burns was an important voice in a group of experimental writers who came to the fore in Great Britain in the post-World War II era. He worked in multiple genres-essays, interviews, drama, non-fiction, and short fiction-however, his reputation is based primarily on his eight novels, the first four of which are collected in this volume. In Buster, Burns recounts the childhood and maturation of Dan Graveson, a middle-class boy who experiences the death of his mother and older brother at a young age and who wanders from one undertaking and profession to another. Europe After the Rain moves into a surrealist aesthetic, one in which non sequiturs, the absence of rational motivation, and surprising juxtapositions predominate. Celebrations is the first of the "cut-up" novels: Burns visited used bookstores, purchased "good junk fiction," searched for clichés and folded the pages or cut trenchant phrases and sentences out and reassembled them on a drafting table. The result, he commented, "was a wonderful fragmentation, a chaos of language in which I can find new connections and images of language". In Babel, this technique is taken to an extreme: the novel has no continuous narrative thread and no chapters; pages are arranged in blocks of text separated by white space, and in some cases the text appears to be arranged in newspaper columns or like a concrete poem, with lines that can be read horizontally or vertically. These four novels showcase the inventive and exciting prose innovations of one of Britain's most daring novelists.INTRODUCTION BY DAVID W. MADDEN. CONTAINS BUSTER, EUROPE AFTER THE RAIN, CELEBRATIONS, BABEL, AND THE STORY 'WONDERLAND'.

Never before published in standalone volume form since its original publication in the inaugural New Writers anthology in 1961, Buster is characteristically succinct and of huge literary merit, but in its autobiographical and pre-aleatoric style it provides, perhaps more importantly, a key to understanding the rest of Burns's works.

Celebrations, Alan Burns's third novel, brings the inherent violence and oppression so apparent in Europe after the Rain into the setting of a family-owned factory, where social hierarchies, legal structures and humiliation keep the workers in line.

By turns comic and tragic, tender and brutal, religious and blasphemous, the narrative rockets from London to the United States to Vietnam to interstellar space, familiar events are constantly fragmented and reset into new patterns, and ultimately Babel becomes a cautionary tale about the tragedy arising from attempting to build Utopia.

Upon the novel's first publication, Burns was heralded as presenting a picture of his age and capturing the `collective unconscious' of the twentieth century - in a language that can have few rivals for economy, beauty and rhythm.

Presented in a fragmented form that reflects society's disintegration, Dreamerika! fuses fact and dream, resulting in a surreal biography, an alternate history which lays bare the corruption and excesses of capitalism just as the heady idealism of the 1960s has begun to fade.