Alan Burns

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. Meer

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. Meer

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. Meer

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. Meer