“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

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Do The Write Thing

It’s not very often I wind up on a list of writers alongside Raymond Chandler, Stephen King and Elmore Leonard, so it was quite the surprise to stumble across this offering from Henry Sutton over at Dead Good, in which Henry talks about ‘Writers Trapped on the Page’ (right now I seem trapped in page 2 of my work-in-progress, but that’s a conversation for another day).
  Henry, the author of MY CRIMINAL WORLD, is no stranger to the idea of a writer getting a little too involved with his characters. To wit:
“Writers have long emerged on the page in the genre’s long and bloody canon. Whether directing the action, playing havoc with the plot, or as victim or perpetrator. Often epigraphs by Friedrich Nietzsche seem to accompany these texts, particularly those that appear to address the issue of creativity itself and simply supply further proof that writing fiction can be a pretty criminal activity. Take the line by Nietzsche that Stephen King used for Misery: ‘When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.’ So the abyss is what? Writing a novel? But beware, when fully engaged with that process, weird things can happen.”
  For the full list, clickety-click here

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