Sixties baby yeah! - Flamingo books

Choosing a decade when Flamingo wasn't even in existence requires a closer examination of the titles selected. Flamingo's backlist identifies it as a publisher of works containing strong counter-culture content. The literature chosen for selection, spans 1961 to 1969 and hopes to capture the flavour of the literary output of the times.

The first half of the list is dominated by American authors, whose work provoked censorious attacks from critics at the time. Henry Miller's account of erotic hedonism in 'Tropic of Cancer' opens the turbulent decade followed by William Burroughs' drug-fuelled prose in 'The Naked Lunch'. Both steeped themselves in morasses of excess and shocked a nation with their frank and graphic writings.

A Burroughs contemporary, Jack Kerouac is the 1963 representative with 'Big Sur'. The novel was written as an antidote to the Beat musings of 'On The Road', the book that made him famous but was dually his friend and his enemy. Len Deighton's classic espionage thriller, 'Funeral in Berlin' heralds the voice of 1964. The book has been cited by the New York Times as, "Ferociously cool, even better than 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold'."

One of the most influential writers and commentators of the twentieth century is crucially pivoted between the first and second half of the decade. Norman Mailer's 1965 work 'An American Dream' is as fascinating as it is horrifying. While the first half of the decade is dominated by the US, the Europeans occupy the niches allocated to the later half.

Influential British writer JG Ballard's 1966 work 'The Drought' is thought to be an example of true surrealist writing and his work is lauded by writers such as Martin Amis, who says of him: "All we know for certain is that the novels of Ballard will not be written, could not be guessed at by anyone else."

The sole Irish representation is Flann O'Brien's 1967 absurdist, hallucinogenic work 'The Third Policeman'. A hilariously comic tale, it is a bizarre satire about an atypical village police force, murder and bicycles. It's an eccentric magical mystery tour through a barely recognisable landscape. Indubitably O'Brien's work placed him at the pinnacle of post-modern writing. His brand of linguistic surrealism and tangential meandering parallels Joyce and Beckett.

Women are glaringly absent from the list, with Joan Didion the only female writer. Her 1968 work 'Slouching Towards Bethleham' paints a disturbing flip side to the flower-power era, in which the America she sees is corrupt, amoral and rank. The decade's denouement closes with Henri Charriere's incarcerated writings in 'Papillon', the longest book in the collection.

Sinéad Gleeson