“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.” – Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better

Some interesting news via John Connolly’s blog, folks, where he’s musing on a novel he’s currently writing: “At the same time, having finished the fairly minor edits for THE LOVERS, I’ve returned to an odd book that I’ve been humming and hawing over for quite some time … That urge to experiment, to try new things that may fail, is one that’s becoming increasingly difficult to indulge as time goes on.” ‘An odd book’? If we’re into territory even remotely approaching the ‘experiment’ of JC’s meisterwerk THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS, I’ll be a very happy man indeed. As the boy Beckett may never have actually said, ‘Try again, fail again, fail better.’
  Meanwhile, I heard yesterday that John McFetridge’s SWAP will be coming to an American shelf near you in early 2010, and possibly late this year in a Canadian edition, which is superb news. I read SWAP last year in m/s, and even factoring in the provisio that El Fetch is a buddy of mine, it’s still a terrific read, and his best yet in my not-very-humble opinion. The vid below is the proposed trailer: roll it there, Collette …
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1 comment:

Dana King said...

I agree, if Connolly's "odd book" is remotely as good as THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS, it will be worth waiting for.

I doubt I'll wait for our backward publishing industry here in Baja Canada to publish SWAP; I'm sure Amazon Canada ships south of the border.

January 22, 2009 at 3:09 PM

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