Jonathan Coe's six favorite books

Jonathan Coe’s awards include the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Prix Médicis Étranger, and, for The Rotters’ Club, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

His latest novel is The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.

One of his six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien

Along with Tristram Shandy, this cerebral Irish comedy ties for best postmodern novel ever written. Enclosing stories within stories, O’Brien makes us reflect on the fraught, often absurd, relationship between writers, their characters, and their readers. The jokes are frequent and exquisitely precise.

Read about the other books on the list.

Flann O’Brien is, according to Max McGuinness, one of four unjustly overlooked Irish writers.

--Marshal Zeringue