Alan Burns published eight novels, two essay collections, a play, and a short story collection. Major works include Europe After the Rain, Celebrations, Babel, and Dreamerika! A Surrealist Fantasy. From the 1960s on, he was associated with the loosely-constituted circle of experimental British writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall that included Stefan Themerson, Eva Figes, Ann Quin and its informal leader, B. S. Johnson.In 1982 he co-edited (with Charles Sugnet) The Imagination on Trial: British and American Writers Discuss Their Working Methods, which the Washington Post "Book World" called "diverting, iconoclastic, and compulsively readable". The book included interviews with 11 authors (as well as Burns himself): J. G.

Ballard, Eva Figes, John Gardner, Wilson Harris, John Hawkes, B. S. Johnson, Tom Mallin, Michael Moorcock, Grace Paley, Ishmael Reed, and Alan Sillitoe.Angus Wilson called Burns "one of the two or three most interesting new novelists working in England.".