The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman and the Brother — Flann O'Brien

First published as a column in THE IRISH TIMES, the hilarious escapades of Keats and Chapman (based on the Romantic poet and the translator of Homer respectively) that comprise this volume illuminate the extraordinary talent of the Irish modernist Flann O'Brien. Labelled by the author 'studies in literary pathology', the vignettes - each concluding in a terrible, bathetic pun - are the work of a extraordinarily funny mind exploring the limits of the shaggy dog story. Many have attempted their own Keats and Chapman story, but, in O'Brien's own words, 'Nearly all the stories that reach me from the outside are, for one reason or another, pretty bad - bad in the sense that they are too good...'