Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories

DREAMAMERIKA!

Alan Burns

A Surrealist Fantasy

Dreamerika!, Alan Burns's fourth novel, first published in 1972, provides a satirical look at the Kennedy political dynasty, serving up an idiosyncratic hotch-potch of history that gives an old tragedy new meaning.
For this book, Burns collected newspaper clippings, headlines, cartoons and photographs, cut them up, filed them and then interspersed them throughout his text to create a collage of contrasting effects.

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.

A trained lawyer, Alan Burns (19292013) became a celebrated novelist and playwright, loosely associated with the 1960s British experimental circle of writers led by B.S. Johnson. He is best known for Europe after the Rain (1965), Celebrations (1967) Babel (1969) and Dreamerika! (1972).
Available products
Book

Published 2018-12-01 by Calder Publictations

Book

Published 2018-12-01 by Calder Publictations

Comments

Alan Burns obituary: My brother, the author Alan Burns, who has died aged 83, was known to the literary world for his novels, described variously as experimental, surreal and avant garde. He was influenced by James Joyce and his contemporaries in years and style included Eva Figes, Michael Moorcock and BS Johnson. The author Angus Wilson once called Alan "one of the two or three most interesting new novelists working in England". More recently, a character in Ian McEwan's 2012 spy thriller Sweet Tooth remarks, on seeing Alan's 1967 novel Celebrations on a bookshelf, that he was "by far the best experimentalist in the country". ... Read more...

A Conversation with Alan Burns By David W. Madden Read more...