<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>
