The Alan Burns Omnibus

<p>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 <em>Buster</em> 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. <em>Europe After the Rain </em>moves into a surrealist aesthetic one in which non sequiturs the absence of rational motivation and surprising juxtapositions predominate. <em>Celebrations</em> 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 <em>Babel</em> 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.</p><p>INTRODUCTION BY DAVID W. MADDEN. CONTAINS BUSTER EUROPE AFTER THE RAIN CELEBRATIONS BABEL AND THE STORY 'WONDERLAND'.</p>