11 Facts About At Swim-Two-Birds

At Swim-Two-Birds is a 1939 novel by Irish writer Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien.

At Swim-Two-Birds completes his story by having Trellis's maid accidentally burn the papers sustaining the existence of Furriskey and his friends, freeing Trellis.

At Swim-Two-Birds grew up in an Irish-speaking home and although he claimed in later life that he had attended few of his college lectures, he studied the late medieval Irish literary tradition as part of the syllabus and acquired enough Old Irish to be able to compose in the language with reasonable fluency.

At Swim-Two-Birds contains references to no less than fourteen sources in early and medieval Irish literature.

At Swim-Two-Birds was accepted for publication by Longman's on the recommendation of Graham Greene, who was a reader for them at the time.

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However, most of the support for At Swim-Two-Birds came not from newspaper reviewers but from writers.

At Swim-Two-Birds is best considered as a late-modernist, transitional text which critiques both realism and modernism in an openly deconstructive manner, and in the process comes to the brink of an exciting new aesthetic.

At Swim-Two-Birds was an experimentalist who was way ahead of his time: only after his death did his readers learn how to become his contemporaries.

At Swim-Two-Birds is not only a labyrinth; it is a discussion of the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a repertory of exercises in prose and verse which illustrate or parody all the styles of Ireland.

At Swim-Two-Birds has been translated into several languages, including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Swedish, Romanian and Bulgarian.

At Swim-Two-Birds described the writing of the script as torturous and that it had taken 14 drafts so far.