Remembering John O’Brien Much like the books he published, John O’Brien (1945–2020) was a complicated man. He was an idealist who devoted his life to a self-described “quixotic enterprise” of creating a repository for strange, innovative fiction from around the world—fiction that would stay in print forever, for future generations of readers to discover and wonder at. John had impeccable taste in literature. He especially liked French and Eastern European literature that toyed with ideas of repetition and variation, frequently centered around a hapless narrator who struggles to understand what’s happening to him. Through the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Dalkey Archive Press,