Unusual, Neglected and/or Lost Literature

Major update during Nov. 2008 including reformatting (e.g. what was I thinking using all those HTML lists?), many new entries, and adding new material to old entries (although I've not yet found the motivation to check for all the dead links).

Contained herein are links and books in my personal collection (well, a few aren't...yet) in the general category of unusual literature, for which the best definition I can come up with at the moment is: stuff I like that's a little or a lot different than most of the stuff you'll find down at the local Books'R'Us. The list will expand in number and in content as I add personal editorial content as well as comments from elsewhere [Right. Don't stay up late waiting for the former. - Ed.] Some of the volumes are obviously intrinsically better pieces of literature than others, but intrinsic literary quality will not in itself be a criterion for including/excluding a volume from the list. Actually, there probably won't be any criteria for excluding volumes from the list unless I have a strong visceral reaction against a particular volume, and even then I can probably get over it.

I guess the ultimate goal is to provide somewhere for myself and others of my particular bent (and I use that word very deliberately) to go to find something to read during those times when the usual fodder just isn't satisfying the need, as well as to provide a web presence for the writings of obscure/unusual authors who deserve wider recognition. To put it another way, if your interests are anywhere near consonant with mine, you've hit the mother lode. If not, run like hell, but with the hopefully comforting thought that there are another billion or so pages on the web.

I've chosen/pinched/pilfered reviews basedly almost entirely on their informational content rather than their opinion of the book, on the theory that the more you know about the author and the book the more you'll be able to appreciate it. If you want my opinion just ask. If I have one I'll share it, and if I don't I won't. If you don't want your review on here, just ask and I'll delete it.

Suggestions and commentary are more than welcome and will be fully credited unless otherwise desired. Email to:

For anyone interested, my personal collection has been cataloged and can be browsed by poking around here.

Enjoy.

Meta, i.e. Other Sources Similar to This Page

99 Novels
An article written by Anthony Burgess to accompany his "99 Novels" book, wherein he listed and wrote brief essays about "99 fine novels produced between 1930 and now [i.e. 1983]." If I hadn't chanced upon that book in the mid-1980s, this page almost surely wouldn't exist. Thanks, Wilson.
Alternate List Source

The Most Unusual Books at the Complete Review
The Most Obscure Books at the Complete Review
The 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English Language BOoks of Fiction
A reaction to the 1998 Modern Library list of the 100 greatest English language novels. This one's a whole lot more fun.

Rough Guide's "Cult Fiction: The Isolation Ward"
A book dedicated to authors who produced one cult novel.

Books About Books
Rich, creamery metabookage.

Top 50 Irish Novels
Created by the Irish Times. The Irish novelists are better at the unusual than most.

50 Essential Alternative Horror Books
New York Review of Books Classics
Modern Horror Fiction: 113 Best Books
Checklist of Lost Race Literature
The Encyclopedia of Steampunk
This is mostly in Polish, although a Chronology is in English.

The Invisible Library
"A collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound." Alas, this marvelous site seems to have vanished. A degree of consolation can be found at the Wikipedia List of Fictional Books, though. Hooray for the archive.org copy.

Great Science Fiction and Fantasy Works
"What we have here is a site dedicated to presenting works in the fields of science-fiction and fantasy--sometimes collectively called "speculative fiction"--that get high grades for literary quality without needing any bonus points just for being science fiction or fantasy. The books are judged as literature, not as "science-fiction books" or "fantasy books"."

Fantastic Metropolis
"Since its inception in October 2001, Fantastic Metropolis has been engaged in what is part of a permanent revolution against sterile, stereotypical fiction by encouraging the cross-pollination of ideas between genres and cultures, while showcasing speculative literature written by uniquely talented and creative people from around the world."

10 Overlooked Odd Speculative Fiction Classics

The Exploits of Engelbrecht - Maurice Richardson
The Hereafter Gang - Neil Barrett, Jr.
Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book - Don Webb
Dr. Adder - K. W. Jeter
Bones of the Moon - Jonathan Carroll
Zod Wallop - William Browning Spencer
Lunatics - Bradley Denton
Mind Parasites - Colin Wilson
Dead in the West - Joe R. Lansdale
Anno Dracula - Kim Newman

Matt's Top 10 Overlooked, Unknown and Forgotten Books of Speculative Fiction
Lost Book Archives
Best Overlooked Fantastical Fiction
The Lost Club Journal
Science Fiction Curiosities
It Goes on the Shelf
Overlooked Gems of SF and Fantasy
The Cheap Truth
"Cyberpunk's one-page propaganda organ, Cheap Truth, was given away free to anyone who asked for it. Cheap Truth was never copyrighted; photocopy 'piracy' was actively encouraged. Cheap Truth deliberately mocked established [SF gurus] and urged every soul within earshot to boot up a word-processor and join the cause."

Desperado Literature
The Weird Review
The Green Man Review
Nabakovilia
"Nabokovilia is a haphazard collection of quotes by writers who have snuck references to Nabokov and things Nabokovian into their work."

The Electronic Labyrinth
"A study of the implications of hypertext for creative writers looking to move beyond traditional notions of linearity."

Encyclopedia of Superfictions
Rap Sheet's One Book Project
"What one crime, mystery, or thriller novel do you think has been most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years?"

The Modern World
"The web's largest site devoted to exploring twentieth-century experimental literature."

The Compulsive Reader

Dalkey Archive Reading Guides

Overlooked Works of Fiction
Important Works of Fiction with a Reputation for Being "Difficult"
Out-of-Print Works That Should Be Reissued
Best War Novels Since 1945
Under-Read Works of Fiction Booksellers are Passionate About
Out-of-Print Works of Literature That Should Be Reprinted
Funniest Works of Fiction
Challenging Novels College Students Should Read

Dalkey Archive Press
Any Amount of Books

Meta-Books

Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission - Michael Ondaatje et al., ed.
A Reader's Delight - Noel Perrin
Unknown Masterpieces - Edwin Frank, ed.
Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason - Nancy Pearl
Nicholas Brisbanes trilogy:

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books
Patience & Fortitude : A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture
A Splendor of Letters : The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World

Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels : An English-Language Selection, 1949-1984 - David Pringle
Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels : An English-Language Selection, 1946-1987 - David Pringle
Fantasy: The 100 Best Books - James Cawthorne and Michael Moorcock
Horror: The 100 Best Books - Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
Horror: Another 100 Books - Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
They Died in Vain: Overlooked, Underappreciated and Forgotten Mystery Novels - Jim Huang
100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century - Jim Huang
Mystery Muses: 100 Classics That Inspire Today's Mystery Writers - Jim Huang
The Crown Crime Companion: The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time - MWA
Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books - H. R. F. Keating

50 Best Alternative Horror Titles

Authors

The Ambrose Bierce Appreciation Society
The Garden of Forking Paths: Jorge Luis Borges
The Avram Davidson Website
Lionel Fanthorpe Appreciation Page
Harry Stephen Keeler Society
The Nights and Cities of Gerald Kersh
R. A. Lafferty Devotional Page
Jerusalem Dreaming: An Appreciation of the Writings of Edward Whittemore

Weblogs

Anecdotal Evidence
I'vebeenreadinglately
Mumpsimus - Displaced thoughts on misplaced literature.
Clews's Reviews: A Book Log
The Library of Babel: A Book Log
Outside of a Dog: A Book Log
Virtual Marginalia

Amazon Lists of Exceptional Interest

Exotic Fantasy and SF Favorites
Concealed Labyrinths
No One Should Read These Books
Strange Books
Read Closely Enough and Your Eyes Will Fall Out
Curious Contraptions
Essential Genre Reference Works
Truly Modern Suspension Bridges
Labors of Love, by Odd Ducks
Logophiles and Hyperbolists
Metamania
books about nothing
Where Lies the Strange, the Corrupted
Strange Nonlinear Fiction
The Slipstream Core Canon

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
Little, Big - John Crowley
Magic for Beginners - Kelly Link
Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delany
Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories - Angela Carter
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love and Sleep - John Crowley
Daemonomania - John Crowley
Endless Things - John Crowley
Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology - James Patrick Kelly, ed.
The Complete Short Stories - J. G. Ballard
Stranger Things Happen - Kelly Link
The Lottery and Other Stories - Shirley Jackson
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Conjunctions: 39, The New Wave Fabulists - Peter Straub, ed.
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
The Trial - Franz Kafka

Philip K. Dick Award Winners:

2008 - Nova Swing - M. John Harrison
2007 - Spin Control - Chris Moriarty
2006 - War Surf - M. M. Buckner
2005 - Life _ Gwyneth A. Jones
2004 - Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan
2003 - The Mount _ Carol Emshwiller
2002 - Ship of Fools - Richard Paul Russo
2001 - Only Forward - Michael Marshall
2000 - Vacuum Diagrams - Stephen Baxter
1999 - 253 - Geoff Ryman
1998 - The Troika - Stepan Chapman
1997 - The Time Ships - Stephen Baxter
1996 - Headcrash - Bruce Bethke
1995 - Mysterium - Robert Charles Wilson
1994 - Elvissey - Jack Womack
1994 - Growing Up Weightless - John M. Ford
1993 - Through the Heart - Richard Grant
1992 - King of Morning, Queen of Day - Ian McDonald
1991 - Points of Departure - Pat Murphy
1990 - Subterranean Gallery - Richard Paul Russo
1989 - Wetware - Rudy Rucker
1989 - Four Hundred Billion Stars - Paul McAuley
1988 - Strange Toys - Patricia Geary
1987 - Homunculus - James Blaylock
1986 - Dinner at Deviant's Palace - Tim Powers
1985 - Neuromancer - William Gibson
1984 - The Anubis Gates - Tim Powers
1983 - Software - Rudy Rucker

My Dog Tulip - J. R. Ackerley

Reviews:

"I think My Dog Tulip is possibly the best book about dogs I have ever read. It doesn't suprise me to see that Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (The Hidden Life of Dogs) has written the introduction to the current edition, as Ackerley opened up some of the territory she was to explore. They remind me of each other quite a lot.

In the first scene of My Dog Tulip, Ackerley meets a little old lady wheeling a little dog around the park in a pram. The dog is dressed up in a blanket and she is cooing to him like an invalid. It's obvious that this highly anthropomorphised canine is the sort of dog Ackerley wants NOT to portray. He commented at the time that he wanted to restore beastliness to beasts, and as E.M. Forster put it, Tulip is 'a dog of dogdom', not just 'an appendage of man.' My Dog Tulip lampoons the British middle class as well as human anthropocentrism in general. Ackerley's technique of combining shocking subject matter with a genteel, decorous prose style is always a joy to read. It's also definately the main reason he managed to get away with publishing this book in 1956. It's no small measure of the success of this balancing act, that a book which still manages to upset a minority of readers in 2001 was published in 1956 to general critical acclaim.

What you get, if you buy My Dog Tulip, is a very detailed account of Ackerley's life with his dog Queenie (he changed the name to Tulip, only after it was suggested to him that 'Queenie' might cause some tittilation, as Ackerley had been a somewhat outspoken member of London's gay community for some time). At times it is hilarious - never more so than when he's poking fun at English propriety. At other times it is very touching, and at others there is a barely concealed anger against human arrogance. Yes, there are many, detailed descriptions of canine bodily functions - one chapter is titled 'Liquids and solids'. In my view Ackerley pulls this off with complete dignitiy, even if I'm reminded of Salvador Dali explaining to a shocked society lady how he covers himself with filth when he paints, but in order to attract "only the cleanest flies."

When the real Queenie died, Ackerley was devestated, and never really recovered. The greatest achievement of My Dog Tulip is its final chapter 'The Turn of the Screw', where suddenly the style of the writing changes; the comic veneer is dropped, and suddenly all the imagery about life, death and reproduction make sense. Tulip is still with him, but time is against them. It is one of the most beautiful and moving ruminations on mortality that I've read." - T. Gadd

We Think the World of You - J. R. Ackerley

Reviews:

"It's practically impossible to imagine a book like this being published in today's publishing atmosphere, but thankfully, NYRB is around to buck that trend. I mean what editor today would manage a straight face upon opening a proposal about a middle-aged gay man taking care of the irrepressible dog of his working-class lover who's in jail? But as usual, with any work of art -- craft, talent, intelligence, compassion -- this remarkable work is so much more than that. Around its droll premise, Ackerley found a way to brilliantly expose the pettiness of people, regardless (or precisely because) of their social standing. The dog, which is just as vividly alive as each of this novel's (bipedal) characters, is really only it's lovable catalyst. But finally, what makes this work astounding is how it slyly and assuredly gets funnier and funnier and more blackly though generously hilarious with each successive page. A real snicker of a book." - wordtron

Reviews:

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres - Henry Adams

"Privately printed in 1904 (and revised seven years later), "Mont Saint Michel and Chartres" was never meant for the general public. It's the intellectual's ultimate "what I did on my summer vacation" essay, written for friends as a gift to accompany their excursions through France. The first half is a highly personal travel book and an idiosyncratic guide to art and architecture of medieval French cathedrals (particularly of Chartres); the last six chapters offer a succinct excursion through the spiritual mindset of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

If you've never been to Mont Saint Michel or to Chartres, the first ten chapters can be hard going; it's like reading a 250-page description of a painting you've never seen. Even if you have been to both locations, it's unlikely you'll remember the details Adams expected his readers to have in front of them. Fortunately, his prose is not dry (and is at times characteristically witty). Adams is able to render vividly the fleches, the portals, the arches, the statues, and the stained glass panels, and he provides the tourist with a thorough understanding of the achievement represented by medieval religious art. He also supplies as background a wealth of related literary and historical references .

The tenth chapter (and the last of Adams's official "tour") focuses less on the cathedral of Chartres itself and more on the cult of the Virgin that it represents. It serves as a segue to the second half of the book, which will be far more accessible to general readers. He compares contemporary portrayals of three queens--Eleanor of Guienne (Aquitaine), Blanche of Castile, and Mary of Champagne (who wasn't really a queen, but never mind)--to the representations of the Virgin Mary in the art, in poetry, and in hagiography. "The Virgin was a real person, whose tastes, wishes, instincts, passions, were intimately known," Adams argues. "Like other Queens, she had many of the failings and prejudices of her humanity." The final three chapters turn to the intellectual life: the ongoing tensions between universalism and nominalism, Bernard and Abelard, mysticism and rationalism--all culminating in the balancing act of Thomas Aquinas.

Over 75 years ago the "Cambridge History of English and American Literature" judged Adams's book as "probably the best expression of the spirit of the Middle Ages." Well, not quite; such a view could be proffered by a literary critic perhaps, but certainly not by a historian, and I think Adams himself would have been appalled by such a statement. (A more accurate and more thorough account from the early twentieth century is Charles Homer Haskins's "Renaissance of the Twelfth Century," published in 1927.) What Adams offers here is a glimpse of the medieval Catholic intellectual spirit as seen through the prism of his own rather conservative nineteenth-century Protestantism. His book is not so much a scholarly treatise as it is a wistful refashioning of the medieval spirit." - D. Cloyce Smith

Seven Serpents and Seven Moons - Demetrio Aguilera-Malta

Cold Hand in Mine - Robert Aickman

Reviews:

"Along with Sub Rosa, one of the twentieth century's two or three greatest collections of weird fiction, Cold Hand in Mine stands among Aickman's best books. It contains eight "strange stories", his preferred term for his own works and a very apposite label: more ambiguous and more inclusive than the usual "ghost story" rubric, and much more appropriate to Aickman's achievement, which in his best stories is less that of a teller of ghostly tales than that of the ghost itself. "The Hospice", in which a man spends a night at the establishment of the title, is a brilliant example. The surroundings are luxurious, the food plentiful and rich, the staff polite and obliging; yet the guests (inmates?) are prone to strange moods and night-time excursions - and at least one of them is chained to the wall during dinner. The protagonist leaves the Hospice in the morning, physically unharmed but riding in a hearse which has come for one of the residents. Sexual unease and perversity pervade several of the tales, most spectacularly "The Swords", in which a beautifully described, tatty circus act is the instrument of a young man's fall from innocence; and "Niemandswasser", one of the best in this best of collections, in which a German aristocrat, alone in the unclaimed, desolate middle of an icy lake ("no man's water"), meets a dreadful female apparition with a mouth of spiny, fishlike teeth. More conventional and far more civilised is the vampire story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal"; but that's the only nod to genre conventions you're likely to find here. "The Same Dog", with its weird deja-vu plot; "Meeting Mr Millar" with its narrator's haunted neighbour; "The Clock Watcher", which is partly, perhaps, about the triumph of time over love; and "The Real Road to the Church", in which a woman witnesses a strange ceremony, then meets, and flees from, the image of her own soul, are all exquisitely written, startling and haunting. An encounter with a real ghost could hardly be more unsettling than an encounter with one of Aickman's stories." - Phillip Challinor

The Wine Dark Sea - Robert Aickman

Reviews:

"'The Wine Dark Sea' is a fabulous collection by an unjustly neglected author. Robert Aickman writes stories unparalleled by any other writer. It's not hyperbole to call him the finest spooky story writer of the 20th century.

This particular collection, published several years after Aickman's death, gathers together several of his later stories. My favorite story is the eerie 'The Wine-Dark Sea' which tells the tale of a vacationer in Greece who, against the admonishments of his Greek hosts, takes a boat out to a deserted island. Once there he finds three exotic women who claim to be sorceresses. What follows is a magnificent story of magic, love, and betrayal. Quite simply one of the finest novellas I've ever read.

The rest of the stories in the collection are all fine reading, but none approaches the level of the title story. Of particular note is 'The Trains', the creepy story of two girls bumming through Europe who stumble across a mansion with a mysterious past.

As a previous reviewer noted, Aickman's stories aren't easy to read. You get the most out of an Aickman story if you go slowly, read every word, and occasionally re-read paragraphs. This method, combined with his lengthy stories, means that one story can take you up to an hour to read. It's a lengthy process, but the stories are worth it.

I'm only exaggerating a little when I say that it's a tragedy Aickman's stories are out-of-print. There was a very ..., complete collection released in the UK in 2000, but that doesn't help us Americans!" - Fosky Bob

The Cockatrice Boys - Joan Aiken

Reviews:

"This is one of Starscape Books' better reprints, and one that relatively few readers will know about. Joan Aiken, best known for her "Wolves of Willoughby Chase" books, serves up a delightful fantasy/horror/comedy story that is sure to win over any fan of things that go bump in the night.

Cockatrices have invaded England. What are cockatrices? It's a general term for various malevolent, nasty, omnivorous beasties that arrived via luggage at an airport (hee!) and soon begin snorking up the unwary inhabitants. In a matter of years, people are hiding from them as they roam through England and lay waste to it. General Grugg-Pennington is given an order: Create an armored train and have a special corps of soldiers to deal with the cockatrices.

One of the people who volunteers is the boy Dakin -- Dakin is brought along because he plays the drums, and repetitive loud noises kill some of the cockatrices. Things become substantially more complex when Dakin's cousin Sauna ends up on the train as well. But something evil is massing in the north -- something connected to Sauna and the cockatrices, and something that will do anything to achieve its ends.

There are plot holes in this that you could throw a Flying Hammerhead through (why don't the people just leave England? Why can't they use an electronic recording instead of drums?) but somehow it never really matters. It's fun. Just fun. Aiken expertly mixes goofy Brit humor with a grimmer tone (sort of post-apocalypse-lite) in a newer kind of England where green leafy vegetables are a precious rarity and German dogs are imported to fight the Snarks. The flying sharks, the slightly dotty old lady, the pleasant old Brit soldiers, the apartment full of porcelain knickknacks, and so on. The plotting is tight; it gets darker as the book progresses, bringing in such old details as Michael Scott and covens of plotting witches.

Dakin is a suitably plucky everyboy, polite and dutiful and thoroughly sympathetic. Sauna is a bit more of a dark horse, as her ancestry and abilities are slowly revealed. The characters around them are less 3-D, but are great fun. There is some violence and creepiness, but nothing too major; this book may, however, scare some younger kids. The scenes with the eerie, almost ghoulish "Aunt Flossie" and her malicious rat were absolutely horrific.

Paper and binding are about average. My only beef? The cover! It's awful! Gris Grimly's drawings are quite good on the inside -- creepy and suitable, kind of a sharp-edged Edward Gorey -- ... In addition, the ending is a bit vague.

This is a really fun romp that kids will enjoy, and adults can chuckle over as well." - E. A. Solinas

St. Burl's Obituary - Daniel Akst

Barefoot in the Head (1969) - Brian Aldiss

Reviews:

"This book deserves to be rediscovered, from lonely out-of-print land, if only for the awesome premise that Aldiss has created. Europe has been devastated by chemical warfare, and the weapon was psychedelic drugs. The unlikely perpetrator is Kuwait of all places, and that's ironic in more ways than one. Now the whole population is on a multiple personality-inducing acid trip. An aid worker named Charteris was one of the few people not affected, and as the only sane person around, all of the headtrippers think this guy is the messiah. But it turns out that the psychoactive effects of the drug are contagious, so Charteris becomes affected himself and starts to believe that he really is the messiah. As Charteris becomes more and more insane as the book progresses, so does the third-person narrator along with Aldiss' writing style, leading toward complete incomprehensibility.

Sadly, such an incredible premise is buried under a completely misguided writing endeavor. Aldiss has used this interesting idea to merely experiment with writing techniques that were derivative for their time. The book is 100% 1969 and is showing its age. The stream-of-insanity writing style that Aldiss inflicts on us here is a thinly disguised copy of the groundbreaking works of William Burroughs, plus a little of Philip K. Dick. This is even more evident when you consider that most of Aldiss' other works are more straightforward sci-fi. So the incredible potential of the premise is squandered beneath waves of faddish psychedelic writing style and an exasperating parade of made-up terminology (though I admit I like the adjective "vonnegutsy.") This type of writing has been done successfully, and can bend your mind to extreme proportions, but get it from the originators.

The actual plot elements, theme, and character development of this story could fit into a much more focused short story of twenty pages. This tale had infinitely more potential when it started. A real disappointment." - domsdayer520

Chromos - Felipe Alfau

Reviews:

"Written in the 1940s but unpublished until now, this surreal and labyrinthine fiction is the only other novel by Felipe Alfau, whose 1936 Locus was reissued to great acclaim in 1989. Set in New York City, Chromos explores the predicament - one that is at once indicative of modern exile and explosively funny - of a community of "Americaniards," Spanish exiles in the New World, adrift in the no-man's land between languages and cultures, spinning out theories on everything from social improvement (can the earth be saved by breeding smaller people?) to the best method of cooking paella, all the while bombarding one another with stories and stories within stories." - Back cover propaganda

"There are so many interesting things to say about Felipe Alfau and his novel, "Chromos," that it is difficult to decide where to begin. There is the novel itself, of course, a complex and sometimes difficult post-modernist narrative written years before the appearance of the so-called post-modernists (Alfau was, in other words, ahead of his time). There is the history of the novel's publication, a fascinating tale in its own right. There is the fact that Alfau, a Spaniard who came to the United States at the age of fourteen, wrote "Chromos" and his earlier novel, "Locos," in English, rather than his native Spanish. And there is, finally, the biography and the views of the author himself-the former enigmatic, almost mysterious, in its obscurity; the latter disturbingly reactionary, reminiscent of Ezra Pound and forcing the reader to separate the man from his work.

"Chromos" is a series of narratives within narratives of a coterie of Spanish immigrants living in New York City sometime between the two World Wars. Among the main characters is Don Pedro Guzman O'Moor Algoracid, also known as Peter Guz and the Moor, and his close friend, Dr. Jose de los Rios, whom the Moor calls Dr. Jesuscristo. It is the Moor who first tells the novel's unidentified first person narrator to write the story of Spaniards living in New York, of the "Americaniards" as he calls them:

"You should write a book about the Americaniards, somebody should-but you have not written for a long time-anyway you could not write any more about your people in Spain-have been too long away, forgotten too much-don't know what it's all about and you could not write about Americans-don't know enough-impossible ever to understand another people. I could not understand them when I first came and every day I understand them less. We meet, we talk, but neither knows what it's all about-total confusion. My English was abominable when I arrived and everyday I speak it worse-impossible; can't understand a damn thing."

It is this request that frames the narrative, the Moor mysteriously taking the reluctant narrator to an old, dark, cockroach-infested basement apartment devoid of furniture (except for a book-filled bookcase), its walls covered by chromos-chromolithographs-"depicting people and scenes that came to life, but more like things remembered or imagined."

From this place, the unidentified narrator of "Chromos" relates his close relationship with the writer Garcia. It is Garcia who provides two narratives within the larger framing story, reading aloud to the narrator from two different works-one the seemingly "corny" and salacious multi-generational saga of the rise and decline of the Sandoval family in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain, the other the cinematic narrative of a Spaniard named Ramos who, in a Mephistophelian bargain, is given the ability to skip through time and emigrates to America in the early twentieth century. All the time, while Garcia narrates the stories contained in his two novels, the larger narrative of "Chromos" provides a first-person account of the day-to-day life of the Moor, Dr. de los Rios, Garcia, and the narrator. And the narrator, too, provides another narration as he sees into the mind-sees the imagination and dreams-of the seemingly forlorn, hapless character Fulano. Indeed, one of the most powerful narrative sequences of "Chromos" occurs near the end, when the narrator details Fulano's sordid, obsessive, sexual and homicidal dreams of a female store mannequin.

"Chromos" is, in short, a complex novel that reminds the reader of the post-modern writings of Borges, Calvino, Coover, Pynchon, and others. It is, in this sense, a remarkable achievement since it was written in 1948, long before such fictions became prominent. And this leads us to the next part of the story, the fact that while "Chromos" was written in 1948, it was not published until 1990, when it was nominated for the National Book Award. For this, we have an editor of the Dalkey Archive to thank. As related in a 1990 article in Newsday, reprinted at the Dalkey Archive web site (http://www.centerforbookculture.org):

"In 1987, Steve Moore, [an editor at] a small publishing company, Dalkey Archive, found a copy of "Locos" [Alfau's 1936 novel] at a barn sale in Massachusetts. He paid $10 for it and after reading it, immediately found Mr. Alfau's number in the Manhattan phone book. Mr. Alfau, living alone in Chelsea, told them to publish the book if they wanted to; he didn't care what happened. When "Locos" did reasonably well, Mr. Alfau told them to use the money for somebody else's unpublished work. He had no use for money. Moore asked Mr. Alfau if he had written anything else. Mr. Alfau took "Chromos" out of the dresser where it had been since 1948."

While a native Spaniard and Spanish speaker, Alfau wrote in English and, for this reason, he has been compared to other writers who adopted another, non-native language for writing their fictions, writers like Conrad, Beckett, Nabokov, and Brodsky. Indeed, the first paragraph of "Chromos" adumbrates the theme not only of the immigrant living in a foreign country, but the way that immigrant experience is further occluded by language:

"The moment one learns English, complications set in. Try as one may, one cannot elude this conclusion, one must inevitably come back to it. This applies to all persons, including those born to the language and, at times, even more so to Latins, including Spaniards. It manifests itself in an awareness of implications and intricacies to which one had never given a thought; it afflicts one with that officiousness of philosophy which, having no business of its own, gets in everybody's way and, in the case of Latins, they lose that racial characteristic of taking things for granted and leaving them to their own devices without inquiring into causes, motives or ends, to meddle indiscreetly into reasons which are none of one's affair and to become not only self-conscious, but conscious of other things which never gave a damn for one's existence."

So what is a reader of "Chromos" to make of all this? If you believe Alfau himself, not too much. When asked in an interview about the sale of his first novel, "Locos," which departed drastically from the commercially accepted novels of the time, he replied: "I got $250 for `Locos.' But you are right. In fact, I don't see how anybody could like my books or could even understand them. They are unreadable."

In that same interview, published in the Spring, 1993, edition of Review of Contemporary Fiction (and reprinted at the Dalkey Archive web site), Alfau-ninety years old at the time and demonstrating his reputation as iconoclastic, opinionated, curmudgeonly, and politically incorrect-is quoted as follows: "I think democracy is a disgrace. Machiavelli was absolutely right: the difference between tyranny and democracy is that in tyranny you need to serve only one master, whereas in a pluralistic society you have to obey many. I always thought Generalissimo Francisco Franco was a trustworthy ruler of Spain, and thus supported him. Since his death, the Iberian peninsula is in complete chaos. In fact, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, I championed Franco's cause in this country as much as I could."

While Alfau's politics and personality may seem anathema, "Chromos" is a remarkable work of literary imagination and narrative structure that should be read by anyone interested in modern and post-modern writing. While perhaps "unreadable," as Alfau says, by those looking for a traditional linear narrative with an unvarnished plot, "Chromos" is a joyride for those who like experimentation, complexity and intellectual pyrotechnics." - A Reader

Locos: A Comedy of Gestures - Felipe Alfau

Reviews:

"I share the puzzlement of the reviewer below over why this isn't considered one of the 20th Century's great works of fiction. I'd go further and say this is probably the most underrated novel of the last 100 years. The most important literature not only blazes a trail, but does so in a way that compares favorably to the books it inspires. This is true for Locos. The book should have had a stronger edit, but what Alfau achieves here - stories that rewrite each other, characters who morph into each other - unleashed new powers from the fictional narrative that have yet to be fully tapped. There's a moment at the end of a story called "A Character" that is one of the very few mindblowing experiences I've had reading fiction. Alfau was probably the first novelist since Laurence Sterne to understand this potential in narration. There's a character in Locos named Fulano who, desperate to get others to notice him, breaks a storefront window. The owner comes out, ignores Fulano and wonders how such a thing could have happened. In a sad way, Locos is like Fulano. Everyone marvels at the glass it shattered, but nobody can see Locos." - A Customer

Dalkey Archive

NYRB

Fantomas - Marcel Allain

Reviews:

"Paris is the grip of fear. One name is at the root of this panic: "Fantomas." In a matter of days, a wealthy heiress is hacked to death in her room. A young guest, Charles Rambert stands accused by his own father of the crime, and commits suicide. A Russian princess is robbed in her room. An English lord, a veteran of the Boer War, goes missing. One detective, Juve, knows that Fantomas is the mastermind of so much misery. Can he unmask the criminal in time? Or is this all a figment of Juve's mind?

Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain's creation "Fantomas" is the pinnacle of pulp brilliance. He's one of the great literary super-villains, a shadowy crime-lord who "spreads terror" for the absolute pleasure of it. He doesn't want to rule the world. He makes his living from crime, but clearly enjoys the notoriety his crimes bring him. In a sense, Fantomas is a break-point between the fantastic qualities 19th century pulp, and the down-to-earth crime fiction of the mid-20th century.

The first novel is a rip-roaring ride of horror and intrigue, as Fantomas layers scheme upon scheme, murdering and stealing for the pleasure of it. A master of disguise, Fantomas moves through the novel as an ambiguity, appearing as various people, usually people he has murdered, forwarding his loathsome schemes. Juve, also a master of disguise, is obsessed with capturing the fiend. He also moves as a shadow, under the guise of beggars and criminals, investigating each lead that might bring Fantomas to the guillotine.

The novel is episodic, naturally, as it was originally serialized. There is an almost maddeningly number of interconnected plot-lines. Juve and Fantomas play a bloody game of cat and mouse, each hidden under impossible disguises. Fantomas' crimes alternate from being dashing and Robin-Hoodesque to terrifyingly violent and bloody. He murders because he can, willingly slaughtering dozens so as to do away with an assumed identity. While the writing is fairly overwrought, it is also quite lush and lurid, sweeping up the reader and leading them to compulsively read the next exciting episode, as cliffhangers abound and plot-twists litter the landscape.

Naturally, the character development is secondary. Each character is drawn in broad-strokes: the dogged, obsessed Juve; the mysterious, malign Fantomas; the hapless Charles Rambert, and; the pitiable victims who find themselves caught in Fantomas' web. Further, the narrative is not a single linear plot, but rather a tangled web of events, some of which are resolved quickly, others which are never adequately followed to their conclusion. More than anything, the authors were interested in excitement, and they give that to the reader in spades.

"Fantomas" is simply the first in a series of over 30 books. Sadly, the first one has only recently come back into print in English. Hopefully, more of adventures of this lurid, prototypical arch-villain will be available soon." - Ian Fowler

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes: His Fortunes and Adversities - Anonymous

Reviews:

"I read this short comic masterpiece as part of a survey course in Spanish and Latin American literature along with more monumental and recognized works of the genre (Cervantes' Don Quijote, Unamuno's Fog, and Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, to name a few.)

To my surprise, this little tome was the liveliest, most engaging, and by far, the most digestible of the lot (although the other three are indispensable reading and highly recommended as well).

Lazarillo de Tormes ranks as one of the true cornerstones of world literature yet (INHO) it is still riproaringly funny and insightful without being heavy-handed or tedious. Even though I read Lazarillo in Spanish and cannot commment on this translation, I imagine the story would translate without much ado into English. As a first-year Spanish student, I devoured it in a single afternoon.

In many ways, it seems to me to be the precursor to Hucklebery Finn. I came away from reading this short tome with the same sense of empathy for the character of Lazarillo as I had had for Huck Finn. Like HF, the tale of Lazarillo de Tormes is episodic in nature with a series of adventures featuring quirky antagonists who are each (the reader later realizes) satiric portraits of the various social classes of the day (the priest, the gentleman, the beggar thief, etc.) Both books inspired laughter, pathos, sympathy, empathy -- and ultimately, an overarching sense of the flawed yet ultimately endearing human qualities that imbue us all-- and transcend the centuries. Even though Lazarillo de Tormes predates Twain's masterpiece by three full centuries, I found it equally accessible, being a delightful and extremely quick read. In short, it is one of the earliest examples of the proto-novel, and to my mind-- still one of the best.

Highly recommended for all readers of all ages." - Robert G.

Fifty-to-One - Charles Ardai

Reviews:

"As a member of the Hard Case Crime Book Club, I get my books just a few weeks before the publication date. This month's selection Fifty-To-One is written by the co-founder of Hard Case Crime, Charles Ardai.

As the fiftieth novel to be published by Hard Case Crime, Fifty-To-One marks a significant milestone in the company's history, and consequently the novel is cleverly structured to mark and also to pay homage to the forty-nine novels previously published. Each chapter bears the title of one of those forty-nine novels, and it's no mean feat that the chapter titles correspond chronologically to the publication of the novels in the Hard Case canon. While it may appear fairly easy to fit titles such as: Say It With Bullets and Kiss Her Goodbye into the storyline, I imagine Ardai tearing his hair out to work chapter titles A Diet of Treacle, and Lemons Never Lie into the plot. But Ardai manages to weave the chapter titles into the plot so seamlessly that I had made considerable headway into the novel before I twigged the strategy.

Also in this commemorative issue, the center of the book includes an insert illustrating all fifty covers of the novels published so far, and that's a bonus for readers who may have missed a title or two.

The novel begins with Tricia Heverstadt, a naive young girl who arrives in New York from South Dakota. Within a few minutes of her arrival, she's fleeced of her savings, and in the pursuit of revenge, she runs head-on into the offices of Hard Case Crime (yes, art does imitate life in this instance) and its shady publisher, Charley Borden. Ever on the lookout for a quick buck, Borden specializes in cheap knock-off titles such as Eye the Jury. Borden's Hard Case Crime titles look like "drugstore crime novels, the covers lurid and peppered with ladies in negligees and men with guns." Borden's goal is to sweep the market with a tell-all expose about the mob, and Tricia decides to write the book. Taking a job as a dancer in a sleazy mob-owned nightclub, she sets out to gather the dirt on mobsters. In spite of eavesdropping every chance she gets, Tricia doesn't pick up any tidbits about gangster life, but she's a creative woman. Fabricating a tale about a disgruntled mobster who rips off his mafia boss, Tricia packs her fantastic story into a confessional bestseller, I Robbed the Mob, supposedly written by an anonymous mobster.

The book's tale of a fictional robbery uncannily mirrors a real-life heist, and soon Tricia and Borden are on the run from vengeful gangsters while they simultaneously look for answers and clues to help them identify the real robbers.

Fifty-To-One is definitely one of the humorous entries in the Hard Case Crime canon. Tricia and Borden's misadventures result in a madcap romp through New York, but with female boxers, hard-edged dames and legions of gangsters, there are still moments of gritty violence and bloody encounters. What's so particularly enjoyable here is the manner in which Hard Case Crime reinvented itself through fiction into the classic noir era of 40s/50s America, and this is achieved smoothly and with a pleasant wry sense of humor, proving that Ardai is quite at home in this era--and probably longs to be there--at least within the pages of this action-packed pulp novel." - anomie

Hallucinations; Or, the Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando - Reinaldo Arenas

For many years Fray Servando had been fleeing the Spanish Inquisition all across Europe, constantly beset by the humiliations and hardships that exile and banishment impose, when one afternoon, in a botanical garden in Italy, he came across a thing which brought tears of despair and dejection to his eyes - a Mexican agave, the yucca, or century plant, which is pervasive throughout Mexico. This specimen was jailed in a little cell, behind a protective picket, and it had attached to it a kind of ID card. - first paragraph

The Peasant Revolts - Gaby Wood

The Mind Crime of August Saint - Alain Arias-Misson

Determined to solve a dual crime - on the one hand an abstract Millenial Conspiracy perpetrated against the conventional "logocentric" mind, on the other a gruesome muder - litterateur-detective August Saint embarks on a most peculiar investigation, one that requires him to unravel the collusion of a dazzling assortment of unlikely characters. In his investigation Saint wanders through a distinctly familiar European landscape, but simultaneously, inexplicably, finds himself traversing parallel media-spawned realities.

He discovers that movies, comic strips, news articles, biographies, and fiction have each captured a channel on some formerly unimaginable, universal, television-like network. There characters and incidents, while indulging in spatio-temporal experimentation and dodging astrogel intervention from outer space, evolve infinitely and cross media with impunity. In this reconfigured universe Saint mingles with celebrities from movies, television, and literature; courts a beautiful Cuban maiden; and witnesses the twentieth century's most magnificent and horrific events. His discovery, after these endless and exhausting adventures? The conspirators in the crime are legion. The include a Belgian comic book hero, an agile "bi-locating" friar, an aristocratic Proustian masochist, a sinister clerical familiar, an NYPD Chief of Detectives, a distinguished Italian film director, the Baader-Meinhof gang, assorted literary luminaries, and possibly even Dr. Spock. At last, the criminal is captured and brought to trial, and in his features Saint recognizes a very familiar face. - Back cover propaganda
...

American Book Review - Tim W. Brown

The "Information Superhighway" has commanded a lot of attention lately. Mainly you hear promises of a better tomorrow: 600 TV stations, interactive video, home shopping, mail-carrying capabilities that one day might rival the U.S. Postal Service. But increasing numbers of leaders in government and industry (Vice President Al Gore among them) are warning darkly of its potential to become a zone of anarchy, where computer criminals prey on you and information spies from every quarter invade your privacy. Alain Arias-Misson shares this latter vision; in August Saint he creates a character who is channel-surfing through a huge cosmic conspiracy.

A self-styled "sleuth of the transcendent," August gets tangled up with a wide range of historical and fictional characters, including Elena, his beautiful Cuban lover; his main rival in solving the case, Chief Inspector Nickastra, a police detective from a TV crime drama; international terrorists Carlos the Jackal and Ali Aga; Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom; Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate; the cast of Star Trek; the Belgian comic book hero Tintin and his Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum sidekicks; and several Roman Catholic clerics who labor more for this world than the next. Everyone travels freely through time and space, showing up in such far-flung locations as the Jonestown Massacre, the Canary Islands at the site of the worst airplane crash in history, Havana during the height of the Cuban Revolution, Joyce's Dublin, and Jerusalem during the first-ever Holy Week. All appear to be involved in a plot that "was vast and comprehended many personages and violent events and synchronicities."
...

The Seven Madmen (1929) - Roberto Arlt

"This is one of the strangest (and greatest) novels of the 20th century. Written by the eccentric Argentinian Roberto Arlt, it explores the tortured inner life of bill-collector Remo Erdosain and follows him as he becomes involved with a bizarre terrorist plot to overthrow the government. Filled with lunatics, pimps, and prostitutes, this novel creates a vivid picture of Buenos Aires in the 1920s, where the lucky few live in luxury and the rest suffer the strain and humiliation of poverty and social impotence. If you are looking for a brilliant and disturbing novel, look no further--there is nothing else like The Seven Madmen. Hopefully we will see the rest of Arlt's work come out in English translation soon, as well as that of his contemporary Roberto Mariani, because this is cutting-edge literature at its finest. Arlt was a true rebel who was way ahead of his time, and The Seven Madmen belongs near the top of any list of great 20th century novels. Its style remains stunningly innovative to this day." - A Reader

Tower Struck by Lightning - Fernando Arrabal

The Quest for Dr. U: Or a Solitary Mirror in Which the Day Reflects - Hans Carl Artmann

Reviews:

Hans Carl Artmann, an Austrian born in 1921, is one of the most remarkable experimental writers of his generation. In the 1950s he was the principal founder of "The Vienna Group": the group's black romanticism, allied to a scepticism partly derived from Wittgenstein, had a widespread influence on German letters.

His works are at once humorous, profound, flippant and stylish. The Quest for Dr. U is no exception, a protean adventure story which sets out to subvert its numerous literary models: Victorian detective fiction, fantastic, romantic, "pulp" and avant-garde fictions. Its hero pursues an ultimate villain, the volatile Dr. Unspeakable, through a bizarre labyrinth of situation and genre. - Back cover propaganda

Mulata - Miguel Angel Asturias

The Young Visitors: Or, Mr. Salteena's Plan - Daisy Ashford

The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster

Amazon reviewer Stone Junction:

How do you discuss a mystery that's not a mystery? More importantly, how do you WRITE three mysteries that aren't? And still manage to create involving, memorable, and deeply disturbing novels? I don't know how, but Paul Auster has figured out. In the space of three short novels, Auster has developed mysteries that are more concerned with ideas than plot, with the style of writing rather than the content. He has, in short, written THE NEW YORK TRILOGY.

Describing the plots does no justice to the novels (they are, after all, practically plotless), but I will endeavor to summarize. CITY OF GLASS tracks Quinn, a frustrated novelist who agrees to accept a detective case, after being mistaken for the detective Paul Auster. GHOSTS follows the exploits of Blue, a detective hired by White to spy on Black, for reasons which remain obscure. THE LOCKED ROOM is centered on an author who has been charged with the task of tending to an old friend's vast literary output, after the friend has mysteriously vanished from civilization.

As mentioned previously, these novels ARE mysteries, on their surfaces. (That's initially what drew me to their pages.) But Auster isn't concerned with the intricacies of the detective genre. He is far more fascinated with the image of the author, that person who creates people out of thin air and smoke. Auster delves into what the make-up of such a person may be, a person who's public character is defined by the artistic output, not by whom the author actually is. Who the author actually may be, or what the author's opinion is as to his or her own writings, is not important. It is a schizophrenic life, to be sure, and Auster knows it. Are we defined by our inner monologue, or do our actions govern our identities? Is who we purport to be as important as how we appear to be?

CITY OF GLASS is an excellent example of Auster's musings on this theme. As Quinn slowly begins to develop his detective persona, he can feel his previous author persona begin to slip away. By his inadvertent creation of a new persona, he erases his past; but as he was only really defined by his novels, it is a far easier task than it first appeared. This culminates in an exploration of the inner workings of personal discovery that reminds me of nothing so much than Arthur C. Clarke's elliptical finale to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.

Is it environment, or public perception, or biology that determines what we turn out to be? Auster interweaves this theme into all three of his novels. The character of Stillman, in CITY OF GLASS, is so obsessed with this idea that he deprived his son of any form of contact, trying to discover the hidden, secret language of God. Fanshawe, in THE LOCKED ROOM, is determined that he distance himself from what he was perceived to be, unwilling to accept anyone's characterization of his psyche. Blue, in GHOSTS, discovers that what he fears the most is true, that his existence is his job; outside of that, nothing he thinks or feels has any effect.

Mind you, none of this would raise the themes above the quality of a academic treatise without Auster's remarkable writing ability. While he may be loathe to be judged by his output, the fact remains that Auster can relate a story with the best of them. His characters, while purposefully vague, still manage to create an empathy with the reader. The quest for identity, that search for the ego, is a universally understandable topic. Auster achieves the feat of simultaneously having the characters understand themselves at the same time that the reader does. Any discussion of the past is irrelevant, it's the NOW that matters. The author in THE LOCKED ROOM gradually understands this in his quest for the missing friend Fanshawe. What he discovers about Fanshawe only serves to confuse. Perhaps he was better off with his own personal memories, rather than try to incorporate the recollections of others.

Auster also realizes that one's opinions about a novel can differ from another's; it makes no difference. What is important is what YOU thought, not what others may tell you to think. The NEW YORK TRILOGY seems designed to provoke different responses, alternate beliefs as to what it all means. I personally haven't been privy to such a possibility as to the ultimate meaning of a thing since witnessing Peter Greenaway's remarkable film THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER. What does it all ultimately mean? Who knows? What's important is that it affected me, on a level I wasn't expecting. It is a pleasant surprise.

The Blue Road - Windy Baboulene

Amazon:

"I first read Windy's book in manuscript, having met the fellow online through the now defunct "studguppies" online writing workshop. For some reason, we had hit it off--likely because he said nice things about my stories, while I couldn't get enough of his Monty Python-ish humor. And while we stayed connected all these years since, I had nearly forgotten Windy's book and how funny I had thought it, and what a shame it was that he hadn't sold it yet.

Except he had sold it and it was finally published, nearly ten years later. I had nearly forgotten about it, except that I finally had an opportunity to meet him in the flesh due to a recent trip to Brighton. "Windy, old boy," I said, "I must beg a copy of your book," neglecting to mention that I have no idea where that original manuscript copy may have been misplaced in my numerous moves. Being the kind of stand-up guy that he is, he not only presented me one gratis, but he also signed it with his real name and not just some pseudonym foisted off on the less-suspecting.

Ten years later, and the book is only better than I remember. First off, the big difference is a title change, to one that is more metaphorical and about the entire book rather than just culled from one of the more hilarious episodes. I suspect there's been some general word-smithing as well, although my memory isn't good enough to be able to pin anything exact down.

Windy was only seventeen when he felt the call of the open sea--the "blue road." Of course, it was either that or jail, given his young prolictivities which had recently centered around attempting to burn down the school chemistry lab. The education he was to receive as a merchant marine was much more practical, and likely more suited to his destructive temperament, than the one behind a desk or in front of a chalkboard. He joins the classroom of the confined space where he discovers the amazing properties of coconut oil. Windy undergoes the crossing-the-line ceremony, not for the weak of stomach (and definitely not to be read while eating dinner). And he learns about the love of the sea, and the sea of love, or at least what sometimes passes for that when one is young and apt to ship out on the next tide.

Like other British travel writers, Windy has the ability to be both self-effacing and courageous, that ability to keep a stiff-upper lip in times of crises. In a manner similar to Eric Newby, Windy strings the reader along on a story that goes for pages to then quickly be undercut by a single line that reveals the narrator hasn't got quite the upper-hand he was telling us about. And, like Redmond O'Hanlon, Windy's travels are the kind that you don't mind joining in virtually but might think twice about if he rang you on the mobile to join in for a quick jaunt next Tuesday.

But mainly, Windy's funny, and that's why you need to read this book. Yes, you can learn about the merchant marines, and yes, there's some bits about places you never heard about before, but the reason you keep reading is because you want that next pain in your side just like the one you got from reading just a few pages back. Not to worry, because Windy's patter is perfect, just as if you were in the audience for one of the better stand-up comics.

I know, you're thinking, "He's a friend--you're just saying these things because you know him." Ahem. I dare you read this book and not laugh. It really is that good, and deserves to be better known." - Glen Engel-Cox

Lives of the Monster Dogs - Kirsten Bakis

SciFi.com Review - John Clute

Amazon reviewer Anne Schneidervin:

The year is 2009, and Cleo Pira has an interesting job - as a free-lance journalist she is able to investigate unusual stories. She comes across a tale most bizare-if it is true-that the 150 self-proclaimed "monster dogs" who have appeared in N.Y.C. are not a hoax.

Cleo is invited to be their biographer and recount the history of their creation, through the efforts of mad Prussian scientist, Augustus Rank. The dogs have been surgically altered to walk upright, speak, use prosthetic limbs and have an intelligence similar to humans. Their own historian, Ludwig Von Sacher, has fallen prey to a malady that seems to be spreading throughout their colony-a type of insanity which has no cure. Ludwig comes to love Cleo, though his mental deterioration causes him to confuse her with Augustus Rank's mother, Maria, whose ghost seems to occasionally enter both of their lives.

The dogs reveal their emigration from Canada to America was precipitated by their destruction of the human scientists/masters who held them captive. The rebellion in "Rankstadt" (the city) occurred after Augustus Rank's death and was lead by a dog Mops Hacker, who had been ill-used. The beautiful Samoyed, Lydia, was the only dog who did not participate; instead, she killed Mops Hacker when the opportunity presented itself, despite the fact she loved him. Lydia is an interesting character, but throughout the book keeps her secrets from being revealed, which is frustrating.

The story is moved forward through three diaries; Cleo's, Ludwig's and the deceased Augustus Rank. Rank was the true monster, rather than the dogs. His diary is revolting as he recounts the horrible and twisted acts of vivisection he performed on numerous small animals- and the enjoyment he received from this. His uncle finds some of his surgical "experiments" and instead of having him locked up (and hopefully throwing away the key) lauds Rank as a child prodigy and promptly enrolls him in medical school as a surgeon.

Rank manages to murder his half-brother and gloat about it in his diary; he also dreams of creating "monster dogs" who would be absolutely obedient to him: "Their minds will be my mind, their hearts will be mine, their teeth will by my teeth, their hands will be my hands." He achieves this bizarre goal, and enlists followers to help him carry on with the so-called glorious work. For some reason, the dogs who learn of Rank (who is long gone by the time of their creation) obsess and long for him as "their father" but hate their actual creators (Rank's scientists.) Part of this stems from the fact that somehow they have lost their love of humankind through the changing process. This is clearly demonstrated in the opera they write and perform, which is quite unusual. Lydia and Ludwig are the only dogs that demonstrate they still retain love for human beings through their behaviour towards Cleo.

This is NOT a "Watership Down" type of novel; it really is closer to an Anne Rice story in style, which at times is both lyrical and haunting. The depths of the dogs' true natures and the obvious loss of love for men (with the exceptions I have noted) is never fully plumbed. Parts of the story are disjointed, and I suspect an over-zealous editor was a factor. The ending is rushed and unsatisfying. However, the writing style is compelling; the plot is unique; the characters leave you wanting to find out more about them.

In the same vein, one may compare "The Monster Dogs" to "Sirius" by Olaf Stapledon, a rather hard-to-find book which has at its core the same theme and issues. The difference is that in "Sirius" the intelligence-enhanced dog is raised by a loving family who strive to understand and accomodate the terrible loneliness which such a genetically-altered being is subject to. In Stapledon's book, the best of the dog's traits,unconditional love and loyalty, are more pronounced. Bakis' dogs have lost this; an irony, since this was the one thing Rank wanted more than anything from his creations, feeling himself an outcast from society.

The question of how dogs would relate to people if they themselves were manipulated into being a semblence of humans is an intriguing one; the theme of psychosis following the dispensation of accelerated intelligence without proper grounding a recurrent one. Compare "Flowers for Algernon" which also has the short and heady rise to genius followed by an abrupt descent into inevitable madness.

The Deadly Percheron (1946) - John Franklin Bardin

Amazon:

"Dr George Matthews, a psychiatrist, encounters a patient who claims he is paid by a leprechaun to wear a flower in his hair. Another, he claims, pays him to whistle at Carnegie Hall during performances. A third pays him to give quarters away. Jacob Blunt wants Dr Matthews to confirm that he's mad. Dr Matthews is curious, so he accompanies his patient to a rendezvous with one of the leprechauns. His name is Eustace and he isn't at all pleased to see the doctor.

So begins the Deadly Percheron. After that it gets strange. First published in 1946 this unique murder mystery transcends the boundaries of the genre. It's noir, it's nightmarish, it's compulsive. John Franklin Bardin drags the reader into a world where the nature of identity is constantly questioned. Is our hero who he says he is? Can he be trusted? Is he, in fact, sane? Reality, as seen through his eyes, is a shifting kaleidoscope of memories.

As the murders mount up the fragments of his shattered psyche are slotted together. Slowly reality stabilises. At the end of the novel, but only then, it all makes sense. Who killed Frances Raye? Well, now, let's start at the beginning..."Jacob Blunt was my last patient. He came into my office wearing a scarlet hibiscus in his curly blond hair. He sat down in the easy chair across from my desk, and said, "Doctor, I think I'm losing my mind.""" - A W BUCHAN

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters - Julian Barnes

Reviews:

"The novelty inherent in Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters is - in part - that it is not really a 'novel.' It is more of a comically tragic reminiscence of Joyce's Dubliners than your standard long-prose work, complete with protagonist, antagonist, and the typical one-plot, one setting structure. Its 10 ½ stories bluntly give us a non-revisionist's history of the world by traveling from a tale of 'unclean' woodworm stowaways upon Noah's Ark to Barnes' conception of Heaven. It is realist and fantastic at once, telling how it was, is, and is to be with such honesty, depth, and sensitivity that its classification should be a sort of jocular Capotesque non-fiction novel.

A History of the World's most curious feature is its division. Ten strikingly different stories and one half-chapter side-note are seem as if they are randomly slapped together until the reader starts to make the connections. The woodworms stowed away on the Ark are in a subsequent chapter tried for the destruction of church property and blasphemous offence against God when their progeny take residence in and consume the Catholic cathedral of Mamirolle. The trial sings with critique of man's distortion of the religious impulse and social commentary. The Ark comes up in nearly every chapter, establishing a sort of nautical theme tied together with the wreck of the Medusa, a 17th century French naval frigate and the theories of the modern human's ascent from the sea from an amphibious state. Barnes also maintains a religious theme throughout the work, adding a discussion of Jonah in the whale, a timely leap into Middle Eastern religion turned politics, and a philosophical treatise on the meaning and purpose of heaven. All of this is weaved together to form a mystical collage of human nature and history.

As one might surmise from the title, the ½ chapter is of great importance to the unity of the narrative. Entitled 'Parenthesis' these 19 pages of side note seem to be a larger version of the 'aside' in which the author speaks directly to the reader. Barnes includes this personal commentary to reveal the main theme of the work: an exploration of love and its value for the human species. Love is the only tool we have to beat down the history of the world and make life plausible, give it some meaning.

History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, a plan, a movement, expansion, the march of democracy; it is a tapestry, a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to another. And we the readers of history, we scan the pattern for hopeful conclusions, for the way ahead. And we cling to history as a series of salon pictures, conversation pieces whose participants we can easily reimagine back into life, when all the time it's more like a multi-media collage, with paint applied by decorator's roller rather than camel-hair brush (240).

Because of the confusion of sentient existence, 'Our random mutation [love] is essential because it is unnecessary.' (238) We don't NEED it, that's why it means something and how it empowers us.

Simply stated, Barnes' novel (alright, I admit, it is a novel - however NOVEL) wants us to be more conscious of what a blessing it is to be a sentient, thoughtful beings capable of reading novels. It wants us to not get tied up in 'historical facts' and to realize that we can get more out of a fictional account of history which admits to this condition than from revisionist histories around the world that disguise themselves in FACT. Or maybe, it just wants us to read it and enjoy it." - Christopher D. Curry

The Hereafter Gang - Neil Barrett Jr.

Interstate Dreams - Neil Barrett Jr.

Sixty Stories - Donald Barthelme

The Teachings of Don B. - Donald Barthelme

Augustus Carp Esq. by Himself - Sir Henry Howarth Bashford

London Review of Books - Thomas Jones

The spoof memoir Augustus Carp, Esq. by Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man was first published anonymously in 1924. Carp is a pious, hypocritical, gluttonous, not very bright and, yes, carping resident of Camberwell, and the narrator of what Anthony Burgess called 'one of the great comic novels of the 20th century'. He begins one recollection of his childhood with a description of how he was 'happily employed combing a grey rabbit, to which I was deeply attached, and which I had named, but a day or two previously, after the major prophet Isaiah'. That use of 'major' speaks volumes. Twenty years ago, Burgess persuaded Heinemann to bring out a new edition, and in the process discovered that the author was Dr Bashford, a Post Office medical officer from Hampstead who went on to become Honorary Physician to George VI. Whether or not this meant he was expected or even allowed to combat the King's diseases I don't know; either way it didn't stop him getting a knighthood. His name doesn't appear on the cover of the most recent edition of Augustus Carp (Prion, £8.99), but he is acknowledged on the title page, and his potted biography is in Robert Robinson's introduction. Carp, unlike his author, has no pretensions to modesty:

It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography, to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when to do so is manifestly unnecessary. In an age when every standard of decent conduct has either been torn down or is threatened with destruction; when every newspaper is daily reporting scenes of violence, divorce and arson; when quite young girls smoke cigarettes and even, I am assured, sometimes cigars; when mature women, the mothers of unhappy children, enter the sea in one-piece bathing-costumes; and when married men, the heads of households, prefer the flicker of the cinematograph to the Athanasian Creed - then it is obviously a task, not to be justifiably avoided, to place some higher example before the world.

I, the Supreme - Augusto Roa Bastos

Reviews:

"There are three great novels about the Latin American dictator and all of them are very different. Miguel Asturias' Mr. President deals with a backwater banana republic where the president for life's presence itself is minor. What occurs instead is the lethal working out of a hideously unjust system which crushes and destroys all who resist and those who are caught in its clutches. Then there is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, an example of high modernism at its most brilliant. In sentences of increasingly serpentine length (in the end consisting of the final chapter of forty-five pages) Garcia Marquez deals with an aged dictator who has ruled for centuries and is capable of every iniquity (such as serving up a cabinet minister for his treacherous colleagues to eat) while living in a world of pretend power and real submission (he has to sell his country's sea to pay off the Americans). This book is also high modernist, but is very different. Instead of the fantastic elements of the Autumn of the Patriarch we have here the story of the founder of Paraguay, Dr. Francia. Dr. Francia consolidated his country's independence by creating a regime of isolation and absolute power. He expelled the Jesuits and set up his own Catholic Church so it would not be beholden to Rome. He was utterly ruthless and the result, according to E. Bradford Burns was an autarky that probably benefited the masses more in terms of literacy and nutrition than any other Latin American country of the time. Its fate, however, was to be crushed by the surrounding countries in the great war of 1870-73 where the male population was almost literally devastated.

No venal tinpot hack, Dr. Francia appears as a man of frightening sincerity, in an account that is of direct revelance to the fate of Castro's Cuba. I, the Supreme begins with a proclamation in which the dicators calls for the decapitation of his corpse and the lynching of all his ministers. It continues with tales of prisoners forced to live in boats travelling down the rivers of Paraguay without ever stopping. We read of Francia's dialogue with a sycophantic Vicar General ("How long did the trial of the infamous traitors to the Fatherland last? As long as it was necessary in order not to rush to judgement. They were granted every right to defend themselves. In the end every recourse was exhausted. It might be said that the case was never closed. It is still open. Not all the guilty parties were sentenced to death and executed."), who then goes on to condemn his priests for siring dozens and hundreds of illegitimate children. Like Lenin and indeed Stalin he rants against the jungle of bureaucracy that he himself has created, he outsmarts the greedy surrounding oligarchies who wish to absorb Paraguay, he reminds his civil servants not to express and exploit the Indian population. We read reports of how school children are indoctrinated to see their great leader ("The Supreme Government is very old. Older than the Lord God, that our schoolmaster...tells us about in a low voice.) The book is a masterpiece of polyphony, filled with many voices and viewpoints, combined with a richness of metaphor and incident and a complexity of moral vision that have few competitors this century. Writing for a country that has possessed only brief and shadowy vestiges of liberty, Roa Bastos deals with its pain in a way that should be required reading for all who care about democracy." - pnotley

The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica (1983) - John Calvin Batchelor

Reviews:

"Writing from the point of view in the early 80's and fresh from the chaos of the 70's oil crisis Batchelor naturally used this experience to build his world which in SF terms would be classified as a "near future" narrative.

More accurately his book is that rare animal in the XX century a political fiction talking about the issues of freedom and personal responsibility in the face of antiutopian fictions like 1984 or The Brave New World and actual political utopian projects like the Soviet Union or Third Reich.

It is easily recognizable that Batchelor is writing from a Libertarian perspective and that would allow me to label the book as a 'Libertarian fable' however this book is much more.

Taking Sweden in the early 70's as the location of his books beginning the writer appropriates the heritage of Norse mythology and epic poems for his flawed hero and this imagery stays with the reader throughout the book in tone, names and a whole chapter that takes place during a 'berserk' war fury during which the Hero Skallagrim Strider commits many crimes.

However Batchelor posits his crimes against the political crimes of those who convicted not just the hero but millions to a fate worse than his. The metaphor of the 'road to hell is paved with good intentions' is aptly used here.

In the end the Hero is given a sort of a political redemption by becoming a "Republic of one" incarnating the libertarian ideal of personal responsibility and freedom in the wastes of Antarctic islands.

Fascinating read that will stay with you, slightly dated due to the basic premise of a breakdown in world social order by Oil crisis, racism and religious fervour. Otherwise, to the point, asking the most fundamental questions about the political animal-Man." - Milos Tomin

Feverhead - Wolfgang Bauer

Reviews:

"Wolfgang Bauer is an incredible oddity, the man must be either insane or the purest form of genius. I don't believe this alone. Malcolm Green must feel the same way to have taken the time to translate this complex, hilarious, amazing piece from the well-known (at least in Europe) Austrian playwright. An out of this world journey, The Feverhead will drag you around the world, maybe even to Heaven or Hell. You might even meet ULF! Imagine it...ULF! Weird and Wacky, but extremely compelling, with twists and turns that will keep you at the tip of seat or wherever you read, this book is a treasure. Being the only in print English work of Mr. Bauer, you will feel priviliged and honored to have it in your collection to return to again and again. A book not only to read and own, but maybe even to live by." - Reid Harris Cooper

The Hospital Ship - Martin Bax

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read - Pierre Bayard

Reviews:

"Pierre Bayard's "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read," translated superbly from the French by Jeffrey Mehlman, comes at a time when a number of experts declare that reading in America is on the decline. Since the 2004 report from the US National Endowment for the Arts documented that Americans are reading less and less, there are more distractions than ever that keep people away from bookstores and libraries. The Internet, cable television, and other forms of entertainment, as well as the pressures of work, family, and social responsibilities quickly gobble up our days. For some people, a lack of erudition presents no problem. However, for those who would like to appear knowledgeable (even if they are anything but), Bayard comes to the rescue.

The author, a Professor of French Literature and a psychoanalyst, assures us that "it is sometimes easier to do justice to a book if you haven't read it in its entirety--or even opened it." Whew, what a relief! In addition, Bayard informs guilt-ridden non-readers that they are in very good company, since "mendacity is the rule" when it comes to reading. Few individuals who wish to be taken seriously by their peers will admit to never having read certain "canonical texts," so they simply lie and pretend to have read them. The whole spectrum of non-reading is covered here: books we've never cracked open, those we've merely skimmed, books that we've never laid eyes on but have heard about from others, and those that we read years ago and have long since forgotten. When books fade from our consciousness, we might as well not have read them at all, Bayard asserts. In many cases, "Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory...." Therefore, if you are a non-reader, fear not; you have nothing to be ashamed of and you are certainly not alone.

The author quotes works both well-known and obscure, such as Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose," Graham Greene's "The Third Man," and Balzac's "Lost Illusions" to support his thesis. He uses intricate and arcane philosophical arguments that are almost mathematical in their precision, to "prove" that one can and should avoid delving too deeply into books. He even uses his own jargon (some of which is borrowed from other disciplines) to describe ways in which non-readers relate to unread books and to one another: screen books, inner books, phantom books, virtual libraries, and the collective library.

Although to the casual reader Bayard may seem to be playing it straight, "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" is brilliant and subtle satire. Amazon reviewers should take special note of the Oscar Wilde quotation that serves as the book's epigraph: "I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so." Comments such as these that demonstrate how foolish it is to actually read the books that we talk about are so absurd (although they appear logical on the surface because they are couched in such ornate language), that Bayard ends up strengthening the opposite viewpoint. Those steeped in literature, even if they do not recall every word they have read, are generally people worth knowing; they are far more interesting to talk to than those who spout empty phrases devoid of precision or depth; people's lives are richer because of their intimate knowledge of books. They do not have to worry about surviving professional and social situations on a wing and a prayter, hoping never to be exposed as frauds who profess to have literary knowledge that they lack. Ironically, Bayard ultimately demonstrates the power of books to evoke passion, sway hearts and minds, subvert the social order, and change our lives. "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" is provocative, thought provoking, and great fun. Rather than pretending to read it, read it!" - E. Bukowsky

The Second Book - Muharem Bazdulj

Amazon:

"The protagonists of The Second Book, are connected vertically and horizontally by their struggles. Nietzsche, on the edge of madness, spends a number of mornings contemplating his sweeping ideas and the tiny details of life through hazes left by "the gluey fingers of sleep." In "The Hot Sun's Golden Circle," the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, discoverer of monotheism, embarks on a search for the only true god of Egypt. Bazdulj's charming and funny "The Story of Two Brothers" examines the lives of William and Henry James from the shadows of the Old Testament and the age-old archetype of conflict between an eldest brother and the "maladjusted impracticality" of the younger.

Muharem Bazdulj has broken from the pack of new Eastern European writers influenced by innovators such as Danilo Ki¿, Milan Kundera, and Jorge Luis Borges. Employing a light touch, a daring anti-nationalist tone, and the kind of ambition that inspires nothing less than a rewriting of Bosnian and Yugoslavian history, Bazdulj weaves the imagined realities of history into fiction and fiction into history. To quote one critic, for Bazdulj history "is the sum of interpretations while imagination is the sum of facts." - Anon

The History of Caliph Vathek - William Beckford

Online text version

"The tale of Vathek is undeniably a wonderful oriental fable, where enlightenment ethics are presented and critiqued. If read in conjunction with Samuel Johnson "Rasselas", Montesquieu's Persian Letters and "Arabian Nights" one may be able to better understand the landscape upon which orientalism (a term used by Beckford himself to illuminate the period's infatuation with the orient, not to be confused with Said's) and enlightenment values where divulged. Beckford's tale however speaks of a more prescient sphere where the author's inner struggles and thwarted tragic desultoriness devolves. As with all literature this compact gem stands on her own; however many have tried to extract a moral import and some have even described a mystique of knowledge and a system of ethics with undue fastidiousness. In a more likely scenario we have a wonton fable whimsical and indulgent, crafted as a parody of "orientalism". Knowledge of Beckford's life may serve the reader well but should not hinder her enjoyment. The author's disquietude trumps an increasing distance from the absurd drive and hedonistic tendencies of the protagonist, while we feel a sympathetic kinship laxed the more into the novella we proceed. The author wrote this fable in French and supervised the translation as best he could. The grotesque and the sublime are here married insolubly but tend to find a balance suspended over a void that derides and insinuates the emptiness of a spiritual fantasy in turmoil.

The ending paragraphs are singed with a sad glow that seems to recriminate as much as it moralizes: much like a father that punishes a child only to feel remorse over the fact that his own blood cannot enjoy what is most enjoyable. He is not convinced and Beckford created a wonderful fable where much is exposed, but the simplicity, the arrogance and the conviction are to be regaled with the same comic grotesque sprightliness with which he infuses his narrative.

A quick fun read that demands little of us, but in degrees can disclose a sensibility we may be dismissive of if we are to package it as a tale where orientalism meets enlightenment values." - Luca Graziuso

Review

William Beckford was an eccentric millionaire; his short novel Vathek is an eccentric novel. It is apparently a morality tale based on some of the stories in the Arabian Nights. It tells the story of Vathek, an imaginary descendant and successor of Caliph Haroun al Raschid. He has two passions: for decadent luxury (vast feasts, beautiful concubines) and arcane knowledge. When an evil looking Indian magician visits his court, his desire for knowldge becomes even greater when he sees something of the magical power of this man. He becomes willing to go to any lengths to discover his secrets, even abjuring Islam and sacrificing the fifty most beautiful children in his realm. However, the episode has been arranged by Mohammed to give Vathek a last chance to repent of his evildoing, and disaster awaits him when he fails to do so.
...

An Embarassment of Corpses - Alan Beechey

"This novel made me homesick for England. But pleasantly so. It opens in London's Trafalgar Square, which lives in my memory as the place to go on Christmas Eve. There would be a huge Christmas tree, sent over from Norway, I believe, all decorated and lit up, and hundreds of people singing Christmas carols. There's no Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square in the opening of this book. There is a body instead. It is discovered by Oliver Swithin, who has hay-colored hair that is straight and floppy. teeth that are too prominent, docile blue eyes behind wire-framed spectacles. He is wearing a tuxedo that has seen better days. Not a macho hero, one deduces almost immediately. Sir Hargreaves (Harry) Random was "floating face-down in a Trafalgar Square Fountain....with a look of mild irritation on his face, mortified in all senses of the word." Listen to this. Far above ... the rising sun was gilding the pigeon guano on Nelson's hat." (For the unknowing, Nelson's column is one of the primary features of Trafalgar Square.) There are a lot of wonderfully visual and fresh images like that throughout this well-wrought novel. Here's a description of a police officer, Sergeant Welkin: "He was an overweight man in his thirties, with a black moustache and a harsh boxer's face, who invariably reminded people of someone else they knew. He bred Burmese cats." Oliver writes a series of books about a "Foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, ex-public-schoolboy ferret named Finsbury.... giving the beast all the vices he had never possessed." The series of course becomes a critical and financial success, though not for Oliver, who isn't getting any of the money. "Hoist by your own pet," Oliver's uncle murmurs. The Finsbury books expose the infants of England to the evils of alcohol, drugs, pornography, promiscuity, soccer hooliganism, smoking, and country and western music." (Ahem! Excuse me?) Mr. Beechey very cleverly, after introducing Finsbury, obeys the dictum that if you show a ferret early in the plot, the ferret should bite someone before the end. If left to myself here, I'd quote the whole book and you wouldn't have to buy it and that would never do. Oliver as sleuth is assisted by, or sometimes desisted by, his Uncle , Inspector Tim Mallard of the Yard. He sleuths by Zodiac signs, following the trail of a serial murderer. He also yearns for Sergeant Effie Strongitharm and fantasizes her response to him with replies that range from a snorted "With *you*?" to a breathless, "At last--take me now, my shy young hero among men." He's not too successful with Effie, which is hardly surprising. There are many surprises in this book so I'm not going to tell anything about the plot progression. One big surprise almost lifted me out of bed, where I was reading. For a few pages, I was really......no that would be a spoiler. There are a lot of puns in this book, and as you've seen--much humor. Not of the slapstick kind, but my favorite kind of understated English humor that depends mostly on a very satisfying use of words. I'm looking forward to reading the next installment. I loved this book And I've decided I have to visit London next year. For sure." - Margaret Chittenden

Seven Men/Two Others - Max Beerbohm

Project Gutenberg

NYRB Introduction - John Updike

In Seven Men the brilliant English caricaturist and critic Max Beerbohm turns his comic searchlight upon the fantastic fin-de-siecle world of the 1890s--the age of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and the young Yeats, as well of Beerbohm's own first success. In a series of luminous sketches, Beerbohm captures the likes of Enoch Soames; only begetter of the neglected poetic masterwork Fungoids; Maltby and Braxton, two fashionable novelists caught in a bitter rivalry; and "Savonarola" Brown, author of a truly incredible tragedy encompassing the entire Italian Renaissance. One of the masterpieces of modern humorous writing. Seven Men is also a shrewdly perceptive, heartfelt homage to the wonderfully eccentric character of a bygone age.

Max Beerbohm at the Victorian Web

Max Beerbohm at the 1890s Society

Confessions of an Irish Rebel - Brendan Behan

The Face in the Frost - John Bellairs

Amazon:

""The Face In The Frost" is a richly imaginative tale of two wizards, Prospero (not the one you're thinking of) and Roger Bacon, who must overcome a third wizard, the evil Melichus before he destroys them, and a lot of other folks as well.

Even if you think you've heard this story before, you've never come across a variation like this one. The closest analogue that I can come up with is "Howl's Moving Castle" for its eccentricity, but 'Face' outdoes 'Howl' in this respect as well as in its fear quotient. The scary scenes approach M.R. James in intensity, and they are always preceded by migraine-like aura. Prospero senses that something is slightly off about the inn where he is staying. He is still trying to figure out what is bothering him at four in the morning:

"Strange thoughts began to come to him now: locked boxes and empty rooms. Four dials and a black hole. Four cards and a blank. And a dead sound on the stroke of four. Why did that mirror bother him?

"Quietly, Prospero got dressed, took his staff from the corner, and opened the door of his room. The hall was dark and silent...He lit [a candle] and tiptoed down the stairs to the place where the mirror hung. Prospero stared and felt a chill pass through his body. The mirror showed nothing-not his face, not his candle, not the wall behind him. All he saw was a black glassy surface."

Prospero explores further and finds his landlady standing fully-clothed in her room, with a butcher knife in her hand. "In her slowly rising head were two black holes. Prospero saw in his mind a doll that had terrified him when he was a child. The eyes had rattled in the china skull. Now the woman's voice, mechanical and heavy: "Why don't you sleep? Go to sleep." Her mouth opened wide, impossibly wide, and then the whole face stretched and writhed and yawned in the faint light."

Prospero manages to escape the inn and town that were nothing more than an elaborate trap set up by Melichus to destroy him. He is reunited with his friend, Roger Bacon and they continue on their quest to find and destroy Melichus's evil magic.

There are delightfully eccentric set-pieces in 'Face:' a king who builds elaborate clock-works of the universe; a monk who collects strange plants; a talking mirror that divulges scores from a 1943 Cubs-Giants baseball game. I suspect the author wove his fantasy out of migraines, nightmares, and a love of mechanical oddities and spells that turn tomatoes into squishy red carriages. Prospero himself has a "cherrywood bedstead with a bassoon carved into one of the fat headposts, so that it could be played as you lay in bed and meditated...On a shelf over the experiment table was the inevitable skull, which the wizard put there to remind him of death, though it usually reminded him that he needed to go to the dentist."

I'd better put an end to this review before I quote the whole book. It's so good, it pulls me in every time I open it---Enchanting, in the original sense of the word, and frightening, too." - E. A. Lovitt

Who is Teddy Villanova? - Thomas Berger

The Other Side of the Mountain (1968) - Michel Bernanos

Jeff Vandermeer:

"With Candide-like brevity and the sanctity of spare prose, Bernanos chills the reader with one of the most quietly horrific accounts of an explorer¿s journey to another place. The book is long out of print¿a situation that should be rectified immediately. This little piece of the alien and the alienated gets under your skin in a myriad of unsettling ways. It begins as a simple Robert Louis Stevenson/Melville story of a youth indentured at sea to a brutal crew¿ who becomes lost¿ who turns to cannibalism¿ who then passes into a strange land:

All around us was the liquid void. The day grew lighter and lighter and on the horizon a curious red hue preluded the sun-a color akin to blood. Slowly it spread. I had never seen anything quite like it and for a moment I imagined I was having hallucinations. I was amazed to see that when the sun finally rose it was entirely speckled with this same strange color, as if it had suffered a wound¿

Until gradually the narrative¿s inexorable and steady pace by itself acclimatizes us to upcoming disaster with image after image that will remain with you long after the last page has been read. Some books are strange fish. They fit no known pattern. Their scales flicker with an emerald and unknowable light. But you¿d be mistaken to throw them back."

Collected Tales and Fantasies of Lord Berners - Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson Berners

Amazon:

"Lord Berners' Collected Tales and Fantasies are six rather bizarre tales or short novellas, filled with dark and mysterious happenings. The characters who inhabit these stories are equally as bizarre and eccentric as the tales themselves, and, although they contain some hilarious satire in the style of Evelyn Waugh or "Saki," the narratives are laced with violence and tragedy. Lord Berners' characters include an assortment of eccentric artistocratic types that he knew between the years dividing the two World Wars. His characters include a mixture of neurotics, paranoids, megalomaniacs, pederasts, parasites, and what Monty Python would call "upper-class twits," all of whom partake in the most amazing adventures. In one of the best stories, "Far from the Madding War," the author himself makes a brief appearance as Lord FritzCricket. Berners admits that his own outlandish personality is that of "the Unstable Peer," an eccentric born into the aristocracy who can act in any way he pleases. Let us look briefly at a few of the stories. "Percy Wallingford," (written in 1914) tells the adventures of a self-assured and talented man who, on the eve of World War I, has his confidence destroyed by his wife, a fantastic woman who can see in the dark and who strips him of his self-assurance. "The Camel," (written in 1936) relates the mysterious appearance of a camel at a vicarage in the quiet British town of Slumbermere, which violently disrupts the easy life there and forces people to confront their own fears, anxieties, and jealousies. It is a deceptively dark and disturbing tale, perhaps influenced by the novels of Thomas Hardy and Anthony Trollope which also dealt with small-town British rustic life. "Mr. Pidger," (1939) takes place on the eve of World War II and is, in reality, a British country-house farce in the best tradition. Lord Berens takes the models of the genre - a dog-hating misanthrope, a missing will, an ill-tempered dog, an over bearing wife, and a reticent husband - and molds them into a bizarre burlesque with tragic overtones. "Count Omega" (1941) is a satire on reincarnation, Freudian sexual psychoanalysis, modern music, and practical jokes, which involves the ego-centered musician Emanuel Smith, maliciously modeled on the British composer Sir William Walton. "The Romance of a Nose" (1941) may be the weakest tale of the collection, a rather plodding story about a Queen with an enormous nose and the chicanery that takes place in international politics. Berners' final story in the collection, "Far From the Madding War" (1941) is in itself worth the price of the book. It is an outrageous reaction to World War II, peopled with whimsical neurotics and eccentrics in the university town of "All Saints." It is Lord Berners' satirical attack on Oxford and Cambridge Universities' reaction to the war, and an intimation of his own nervous breakdown during and after the war years when his private world was shattered. It is a hilarious yet disturbing story. I highly recommend these six stories to those Anglophile readers like myself who enjoy the works of such writers as Evelyn Waugh, "Saki," J.P. Donlevy, George MacDonald Fraser, or John Mortimer. Lord Berners is indeed a talented author who writes stylishly and with a sharp satiric thrust. I have enjoyed his music (now recorded on several CD's) and his excellent memoir, "The Château de Résenlieu," which was recently published. I hope that more of his fine literary work will be published." - Russel E. Higgins

Gargoyles: A Novel - Thomas Bernhard

Woodcutters

Amazon:

"Woodcutters is definitely my favourite novel by Thomas Bernhard. It is Thomas Bernhard at his best. He got sued by former friends of his when he published the book so as in many of his books the narrator is very close to or maybe even identical with Thomas Bernhard himself.

Basically, the book consists of two parts. In the first part, the narrator sits in a chair and watches his hosts plus their other guests waiting for an actor to have dinner. The narrator had bumped into his hosts whom he hadn't seen for many years and they had invited him to join their dinner. A mutual friend of them had just committed suicide so he had felt obliged to join them - much to his regret. The second part describes the actual dinner. However, most of the book consists of what the narrator is thinking about his former friends, about friendships in general and about relationships between people. This nearly endless rant evolves around every possible aspect and like a surgeon Bernhard cuts deep into what everybody takes for granted and lays open treachery, lies, and hypocrisy (If you believe in family values and in a good world, this book might disturb you quite a bit!). As I mentioned before, old friends of Bernhard's sued him when the book was published because it was too obvious he was actually referring to them - and he was showing them in a way nobody would possibly want to be shown. This is not to say that Bernhard is necessarily a misanthrop. Quite surprisingly, when the narrator leaves the dinner table abruptly, he runs back home "through Vienna the city I loved like no other city" - quite a surprise after his Vienna-bashing. To me, Thomas Bernhard always was a deeply disturbed person who hated the world because it wasn't as nice as he wanted to believe it was." - joerg colberg

A Gallery of Eccentrics Or, A Set of Twelve Originals & Extravagants from Elagabalus, the Waggish Emperor to Mr. Professor Porson, the Tippling Philologer (1928) - Morris Bishop

You Can't Win - Jack Black

Reviews:

"I first discovered Jack Black's `You Can't Win', as I suspect many readers did, when I found out that it was William S Burroughs' favourite book. Until I read it, though, I couldn't imagine just how big an influence it was on Burroughs - who drew upon its style, and the code of honour it describes, for the entirety of his writing career.

When you read Burroughs' foreword to this edition of `You Can't Win', it hits you that he didn't (as you might assume with a favourite book) reread the book regularly. Rather, he memorised the book as a boy, and then throughout his life `read' the version memorised in his own mind. Even the passages that Burroughs quotes in the foreword aren't word-for-word precise (I compared them with the text of the book proper), because they've been committed to myth and memory, and are recited in ritualistic fashion.

All of which aside, `You Can't Win' deserves to be known as more than just `the book that inspired Burroughs'. It's written in a plain, unsentimental style which has as much in common with the writing of Charles Bukowski as it does with the Beats - a style of writing which reached its apotheosis with `The Grass Arena', the harrowing autobiography of the British alcoholic vagrant John Healy. (Now, someone should teach a literature class comparing `You Can't Win' and `The Grass Arena' - THAT would be an inspiration.) What these writers have in common is that when you read them, you instantly think: `Now this is good, compelling, uncluttered prose.'

Many of those who have posted reviews below rightly praise Jack Black's memorable language and characterisation, which make `You Can't Win' into a kind of turn-of-the-century lexicon and encyclopaedia of the life of American thieves and hobos. But I was even more struck by Black's remarkable resolve, self-dependency and moral fortitude, and above all his categorical refusal to feel sorry for himself, or to let the reader feel sorry for him.

Three passages in the book in particular, all of which concern prison, are horrific - two passages in which Black is punished by flogging, and an absolutely unbearable passage in which he is tortured in a straitjacket by a sadistic prison warden. If these passages had been written by a lesser writer, I could not bear to read them. But Black takes the reader firmly by the hand, conveys what happened to him, and moves on.

Describing the first flogging: `It would not be fair to the reader for me to attempt a detailed description of this flogging.... If I could go away to some lonely, desolate spot and concentrate deeply enough I might manage to put myself in the flogging master's place and make a better job of reporting the matter. But that would entail a mental strain I hesitate to accept, and I doubt if the result would justify the effort.'

Describing the second flogging: `To make an unpleasant story short, I will say he beat me like a balky horse, and I took it like one - with my ears laid back and my teeth bared. All the philosophy and logic and clear reasoning I had got out of books and meditation in my two years were beaten out of me in 30 seconds, and I went out of that room foolishly hating everything a foot high.'

Describing being tortured in a straitjacket: `Every hour Cochrane came in and asked if I was ready to give up the hop. When I denied having it, he tightened me up some more and went away. The torture became maddening. Some time during the second day I rolled over to the wall and beat my forehead against it trying to knock myself out. Cochrane came in, saw what I was doing, and dragged me back to the middle of the cell. I hadn't strength enough left to roll back to the wall, so I stayed there and suffered.'

Black opens the book with a description of his own face, and fittingly enough, there is a photograph of him near the front of the book. Many times while reading `You Can't Win', I found myself flicking back to look at that careworn, yet amiable face, and picturing Black's exploits in my mind. The afterword to this edition, which outlines Black's life after the book was published, is equally fascinating - I was moved almost to tears to read that he simply vanished in 1932, and was strongly suspected of having tied weights to his feet and thrown himself into New York Harbour.

Of course, `You Can't Win' is a unique and priceless document of a bygone American era. But lest you find yourself feeling nostalgic for this way of life - as readers are prone to feel, whenever they read vivid descriptions of times before they were born, and as William S Burroughs is certainly guilty of feeling in his foreword - Black cautions us against precisely this kind of nostalgia (and ironically, uses an irresistibly romantic description of the past to do so):

`I'm not finding fault with these brave days of jungle music, synthetic liquor, and dimple-kneed maids, and anybody that thinks the world is going to the bowwows because of them ought to think back to San Francisco or any big city of 20 years ago - when train conductors steered suckers against the bunko men; when coppers located "work" for burglars and stalled them while they worked; when pickpockets paid the police so much a day for "exclusive privileges" and had to put a substitute "mob" in their district if they wanted to go out of town to a country fair for a week. Those were the days when there were saloons by the thousand; when the saloonkeeper ordered the police to pinch the Salvation Army for disturbing the peace by singing hymns in the street; when there were race tracks, gambling unrestricted, crooked prize fights; when there were cribs by the mile and hop joints by the score. These things may exist now, but if they do, I don't know where. I knew where they were then, and with plenty of money and leisure I did them all.'" - Sandy Starr

The Aardvark is Ready for War - James Blinn

The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano

Reviews:

"Bolano is a a master storyteller. Best book i've read in years.

THE STORY: Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano are the young leaders of literary movement they call the Visceral Realists, think BaaderMeinhoff Literary Brigade. The movement is part-gag -- a sendup of Andre Breton's surrealist movement and its "purges" -- but also an attack on the old guard of Latin American literature, people like Octavio Paz (who they jokingly/seriously threaten to kidnap) and Garcia Marquez. They show up with their teenage cohorts at literary events and heckle the sacred cows as the old men of letters attempt to recite their poetry! They threaten their critics with duels (as any self respecting man of letters must do)! Some of the Visceral Realists don't even appear to read! The motley group of Mexico City street kids -- Ulises, Arturo, Lupe, Garcia Madero, Maria and Angelica Font, Luscious Skin, San Estifanio -- are bonded by their belief in poetry, the poets life, their alienation, and their youth.

The story follows this gang from their beginnings in 1970s Mexico City through their wanderings throughout the world (Spain, France, West and Central Africa, Latin America, San Diego)and into the 1990s. The realization that the life of a poet is both the happiest and the saddest thing. And it finds Arturo, Ulises, Garcia Madero, and Lupe lost in the Sonora Desert running from an angry pimp and searching for a lost poet, the first Visceral Realist, a woman who disappeared into the desert some forty years before.

Oh yeah, there's alot of sex and drugs, some violence, poignancy and irreverancy. And there's a lot of poetry.

I can't recommend it enough, especially for those who believe that books can offer more than entertainment, for those who dream the naive and true dream that books and the people who write them are revolutionary." - D. Domingos

2666: A Novel - Roberto Bolano

Reviews:

"As any reader would tell you, in America, every reader of literature is in search of the Great American Novel, every reviewer tries to proclaim one work, or another to be almost there, but it always seems to fall short. Post-Modernist of late have been holding the praise, I say this do to the recent death of David Foster Wallace, whose major, nearly unreadable tome Infinite Jest played more like the Emperor's New Clothes to reviewers, than an actual work that examined anything of life and meaning and the world (At least not in the clear and lucid prose that you find here).

Roberto Bolano was a great writer because, unlike the writers in America who take on large scopes, Jonathan Franzen etc., Roberto Bolano believed in the power of the written word. While American writers cried they didn't have an audience and people weren't reading, Roberto Bolano's books delcared the eternal importance of literature, and writing, while at the same time, showing it in both its gritty realism (poverty) and its heaped of forgotteness (writers of importance who may one day become relevant).

This book is brilliant because, even though the paragraphs are long and sometimes laborous, but never are they tedious, never do you feel a word was misused or overused, never, as you do with a lot of books that write in the style that Roberto Bolano seemed to perfect, do you feel that he was ever trying to write in the way he was wriitng. Reading 2666, reading any of his works, you feel as if he sat down and what came out came out, as if you're reading a work right from his mind. A writer once said, "Writing's easy, all you have to do is sit down and open a vein," and that's what Roberto Bolano did.

The Critic Section is entertaining, a high praise to literature. Though many critics have pointed out that its second feels disjointed and a bit awkward, I'd be hard press to find such a book that created an interesting beginning about what potentially could've been an uninteresting subject (this seems to be Roberto Bolano's greatest ability, Nazi Literature in the America's, a fictional encyclopedia of far right authors). The Part about Amalfitano had a beautiful allure and moved quickly.

I don't want to give blurbs for each part, it trivializes this great work, there is no doubt if I were talk freely about each part in this review it would be a second book. When I first found Bolano, I came to him, not without urging, but not wanting to commit myself to a six hundred page brick of a book about Spanish Poets called the Savage Detectives right off the bat, so I decided to get Amulet, only because it was cheap and I had a thirty percent off coupon. I read the book in six hours and thought there couldn't be anything more special. I read his book of short stories Last Evenings On Earth and thought the urgency and brilliance of his words shows an aptitude that I haven't seen in a long time in literature. His works renewed a zeal, that feeling one gets when they're reading something they hadn't known existed. I went to the Savage Detectives quickly, and if there wasn't a great Novel of the 21st century, this was certainly it--Not American, not Latin American, Not French or Asian--but a novel, a brilliant work of fiction, from Bolano's mind to the page. A novel which broke rules that seemed so impossible to break and did it in such a way it was too beautiful to ignore. Now this book, 2666, a behemouth, a dying man's last work, a work he fought hard to get done, and left partially unfinished (though you really can't tell). This work, we can all hope, is the beginning of something, and not the final statement of a dead man, but the awakening statement to a world of writers to stop chasing the Great French or American or Mexican or Canadian or Chinese novel, and start writing the Great World Novel. This is what 2666 is, the first and maybe only great world novel. It eclipses his former works and unites them in a way that no other novel has probably ever done for an authors body of work. It came in the 21st century. It's either a start of something great to come, or the remnants of the end of the 20th century. I hope for the former, fear the latter.

Buy this book, devour it, and enjoy. It deserves to be read by anyone who has ever read a book of literature and found themselves tired with the latest strand of same old same old literary fodder. This book steps out, its a blood letting for the masses, its a speedball ride into the lurid and entertaining, into the frightening and the joyful, into the horrors of this world and into its beauties. It's a portrait and serial, pulp and high form, horrorific journalism and perfected prose, lucid and direct, a work that will have you finish and turn to the front page to start over again." - N. m Oliver

The Far Side of Nowhere - Nelson Slade Bond

The Chronicles of Bustos Domecq - Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy-Casares

The Book of Imaginary Beings - Jorge Luis Borges

Borges Biography - The Modern World

A small child is taken to the zoo for the first time. This child may be any one of us or, to put it another way, we have been this child and have forgotten about it. In these grounds-these terrible grounds-the child sees living animals he has never before glimpsed; he sees jaguars, vultures, bison, and-what is still stranger-giraffes. He sees for the first time the bewildering variety of the animal kingdom, and this spectacle, which might alarm or frighten him, he enjoys. He enjoys it so much that going to the zoo is one of the pleasures of childhood, or is thought to be such. How can we explain this everyday and yet mysterious event? We can, of course, deny it. We can suppose that children suddenly rushed off to the zoo will become, in due time, neurotic, and the truth is there can hardly be a child who has not visited the zoo and there is hardly a grown-up who is not a neurotic. It may be stated that all children, by definition, are explorers, and that to discover the camel is in itself no stranger than to discover a mirror or water or a staircase. It can also be stated that the child trusts his parents, who take him to this place full of animals. Besides, his toy tiger and the pictures of tigers in the encyclopedia have somehow taught him to look at the flesh-and-bone tiger without fear. Plato (if he were invited to join in this discussion) would tell us that the child had already seen the tiger in a primal world of archetypes, and that now on seeing the tiger he recognizes it. Schopenhauer (even more wondrously) would tell us that the child looks at the tigers without fear because he is aware that he is the tigers and the tigers are him or, more accurately, that both he and the tigers are but forms of that single essence, the Will.

Let us pass now from the zoo of reality to the zoo of mythologies, to the zoo whose denizens are not lions but sphinxes and griffons and centaurs. The population of this second zoo should exceed by far the population of the first, since a monster is no more than a combination of parts of real beings, and the possibilities of permutation border on the infinite. In the centaur, the horse and man are blended; in the Minotaur, the bull and man (Dante imagined it as having the face of a man and the body of a bull); and in this way it seems we could evolve an endless variety of monsters combinations of fishes, birds, and reptiles, limited only by our own boredom or disgust. This, however, does not happen; our monsters would be stillborn, thank God. Flaubert has rounded up, in the last pages of his Temptation of Saint Anthony, a number of medieval and classical monsters and has tried-so say his commentators-to concoct a few new ones; his sum total is hardly impressive, and but few of them really stir our imaginations. Anyone looking into the pages of the present handbook will soon find out that the zoology of dreams is far poorer than the zoology of the Maker. We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon's image that appeals to the human imagination, and so we find the dragon in quite distinct places and times. It is, so to speak, a necessary monster, not an ephemeral or accidental one, such as the three-headed chimera or the catoblepas. We have deliberately excluded the many legends of men taking the shapes of animals: the lobisdn, the werewolf, and so on.

A work of this kind is unavoidably incomplete; each new edition forms the basis of future editions, which themselves may grow on endlessly. We invite the eventual reader in Colombia or Paraguay to send us the names, accurate description, and most conspicuous traits of their local monsters. As with all miscellanies, as with the inexhaustible volumes of Robert Burton, of F razer, or of Pliny. Zoologia Fantastica is not meant to be read straight through; rather, we should like the reader to dip into these pages at random, just as one plays with the shifting patterns of a kaleidoscope. The sources of this collection are manifold; they are recorded in each piece. May we be forgiven any accidental omission. - Preface to 1957 Edition

The complete series of illustrations for The Book of Imaginary Beings was done by the graduate students in the Department of Illustration and Art of the Book at the Vakalo School of Art and Design in Athens,xi Greece. The project was carried out under the Art Direction of Hector Haralambous and Dimitris Kritsotakis and started with a few selected students. As it went on many more students insisted that they had fallen in love with the theme of the book and that they would like to do it as well.
...

The Book of Fantasy - Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, eds.

In 1937 three friends in Buenos Aires sat talking one night about fantastic literature. This was a half century before the literature of fantasy became a sub-genre unto itself - or should I say literary ghetto? Anyhow, the three - Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo - started talking, according to Casares:

`... about fantastic literature ... discussing the stories which seemed best to us. One of us suggested that if we put together the fragments of the same type we had listed in our notebooks, we would have a good book. As a result we drew up this book ... simply a compilation of stories from fantastic literature which seemed to us to be the best.'

The result was originally published in Argentina in 1940 as Antologia de la Literature. Revised editions were published in 1965 and 1976, with the first English language edition published in Great Britain in 1988. The U.S. edition of The Book of Fantasy is of course now out of print. After all, who would want an anthology of fantastical short stories chosen by one of the great authors of the last century (from his vast reading of the literature of the previous half-millennium) when they could buy another fat, worthless fantasy trilogy chock full of vowel-less, boring trolls, elves, and various other mythological creatures standing in for the dead horse.

The version I've got is a trade paperback and contains over 70 stories in its 384 pages - Borges preferred the short in reading as well as writing. There's an introduction by Ursula Le Guin and a list of sources for all the stories (although most are long, long out of print and, I'll bet, damned hard to find and damned expensive once you find them). Each story begins with a short bio of the author, many of which are as intriguing as the stories themselves, e.g.

I. A. Ireland, English savant born in Hanley in 1871. He claimed descent from the infamous impostor William H. Ireland, who had invented an ancestor, William Henrye Irlaunde, to whom Shakespeare had allegedly bequeathed his manuscripts. He published A Brief History of Nightmares (1899),

Spanish Literature (1900), The Tenth Book of Annals of Tacitus, newly done into English (1911).

Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919) studied law at the universities of Moscow and St. Petersburg but, after depressions which led to several suicide attempts, turned to writing, encouraged by Gorki. His sensational themes, treated in a highly realistic manner, made his reputation; amongst his works are In the Fog (1902) and The Red Laugh (1904), as well as numerous plays.

A corking good read. - S. Baum

The Ascent of Rum Doodle and The Cruise of the Talking Fish - W. E. Bowman

Reviews:

"Mount Everest is a mere planetary pimple compared to Rum Doodle, the fictional 40,000 1/2 foot mountain in "The Ascent of Rum Doodle," a hilarious spoof of mountain climbing expeditions. Perhaps the reason why Rum Doodle was not previously conquered was "because it is there"--way out "there"--in the remote Central Asian Kingdom of Yogistan. The Yogistani language alone crippled many expeditions. The language, a branch of the aneroid-megalithic tongue, contains no verbs and is spoken entirely through the stomach. Over 95% of Yogistanis understandably suffer from gastritis. Altitude deafness often compounds the problem. The ascent begins inauspiciously enough with two great circles until Jungle, the route-finder, releases the safety catch on his compass. Risibility rises with altitude as the intrepid six Rum Doodle dandies and their 3,000 porters overcome one embarrassment after another in their quest for mountaineering immortality. No praise is too high for the men who could go no higher. Or could they have? Why are there no photographs at the top? What about the Atrocious Snowman? And then there's the question inquiring minds most want to know: "Can I see my house from there?" Read this book at your own risk--of laughing aloud! But "The Cruise of the Talking Fish" was a mediocre book at best." - Mark J. Rhomberg

Killoyle - Roger Boylan

Reviews:

"Any book subtitled "An Irish Farce" is worth a thorough reading, and Killoyle was no disappointment. The story alternates between despair and hilarity - this is Ireland, after all - as it follows the lives of the inhabitants of Killoyle. Among many other folks, there is the aging editor of a glamour magazine, a waiter who is something of a poet, and the resident nutcase who likes making prank phone calls as much as he likes books by or about God. Of course, being a novel about Ireland, there are the requisite problems: drinking, sex, God, and Ireland itself.

The real genius of the novel is the footnotes, including gems like this one: "This round-buying will be the death of the Irish nation, you mark my words. Once I was conned into buying eleven rounds in the space of a single wet lunch, with no one else in the bar!" The persona of the footnotes provides comic relief, criticism, rude comments, and seemingly random filler throughout the text. However, from driving directions to snappy comebacks, the footnotes provide, as they should, the details that flesh out the story.

Besides being just plain fun to read, Killoyle is worth a look because Boylan rose to the challenge of doing something 'new' with the novel. I applaud him and his witty footnotes, and I highly recommend Killoyle if you are in the mood for a good yarn." - piratebean

Dr. Criminale (1993) - Malcolm Bradbury

The Daily Channel - George D. Girton

This is a comic novel about philosophy in Europe today, or shall we say ten years ago?

You may ask, how is this possible, to have a comic novel about Philosophy. And it would be a good question, with perhaps only one definitive answer: this book.

Written as an entertaining and evocative travelogue of the places Frances Jay must visit (London, Budapest, Lake Como, Geneva, Brussels, Buenos Aires and of course Paris) in search of the famous philosophe and 20th-century intellect Bazlo Criminale.

Well, actually it's written as a mystery and a love story, but the travel writing is great. And of course it's serious, too. After all, no book about love, life, and philosophy can be funny all the way through, especially when a great deal of money is involved. And so many wives.
...

My Strange Quest for Mensonge : Structuralism's Hidden Hero - Malcolm Bradbury

Amazon:

"I lent my copy to so many people that I don't know where it ended up. I was looking this up to order a copy, and I was horror striken to learn it is O.P.

Let me put it this way: this is the funniest book ever written about academia, and the best academic parody ever written. The book is the recounting of an attempt to gather concrete evidence concerning Mensonge, who is the deconstructionist's deconstructionist. In "What is an Author?" Foucault argues that in the creative act, it is not the individual who write the work, but all of society that writes the work through the individual who serves merely as the nexus for society. Mensonge is the fictional author of one of the most difficult of deconstructionist classics, of which only a few dozen copies exist, and each one of which differs from all the other copies, because the type was changed randomly by the incompetent printers who produced the final copies. The title of the work in English would be (I can't remember the French title precisely, which is the only title given in the book, and I can't double check this, because I don't know where my copy is) FORNICATION AS A CULTURAL ACT. Mensonge takes the Foucaultian insight a step further, and argues that in the act of fornication, it is not the individual but society as a whole that is engaged in the act.

This book is a priceless jewel for anyone who has studied any literary theory in the past thirty years or even heard the name Derrida. Bradbury's comments about academia are hysterical, the near-encounters and Mensonge sitings he describes are delightfully surreal, and the style in which he pursues his subject unyieldingly real in an obvious absurd situation. The bibliography is worth the cost of the book, with, for instance, genuine writings by Barthes alongside patently made-up articles on Mensonge.

If no publisher takes this book up again, the MLA should print it and distribute it for free." - Robert Moore

At the Gates of Commonsense - Lidia Vianu

...
The one book that gives Bradbury the status he probably always hungered for, that of an ironist of the intellect, is My Strange Quest for Mensonge, Structuralim's Hidden Hero (1987). As one who has put Structuralism and Deconstruction both behind and aside, subscribing to intelligible criticism, I am delighted with Malcolm Bradbury in this small book. It ought to be forcefully fed to many academics. It offers such relief from the incomprehensible theories that lead nowhere, the babble of minds which have lost all love for and sense of everyday language. It mocks at all those who attempt to deprive literature and criticism of relaxed, unpretentious readers, who merely want to enjoy a text, not hack it. It is subtle humour for a very good cause. Actually, Mensonge may be Bradbury at his best.
...

Encyclopedia of Superfictions

A little known French philosopher whose biography was written by Malcolm Bradbury. The following quote from this great work sums up its tone:

"As Francois Mitterand was heard to say the other day, teasing at a shrimp vol-au-vent at some Quay d'Orsay reception to do with the Channel Tunnel,'Aujourd'hui, mes amis, et les anglais, nous sommes tous de necessite structuralistes.'

"And we may take it Mitterand's statement was true, or as true as true is in a time when, thanks to deconstruction , truth is very much an open question. For it is quite certain that these two separate yet related tendencies (structuralism and deconstruction ) are our philosophy, our condition, our crisis and our promise, and we cannot say nay to them. Whether we realise it or not, they dominate the flavour of life and thinking in the last quarter of the 20th century just as existentialism did in the third quarter. They are, in the realm of cognition, what Texas is to California in the realm of growth potential and property values, but with the added advantage of not being directly oil related. Where existentialism was intense and heavy, strong on plight and anguish, structuralism-deconstruction , in keeping with the times, is clean absurdism or cool philosophy; it is laid back, requires no weighty black gear, and goes very well with Perrier water and skiing."

Why Come to Slaka?: The Official Guide to an Imaginary, Mysteriously Mobile Piece of Europe - Malcolm Bradbury

Amazon:

"What? You not been to Slaka ? Not yet, you say ? Don't know how to ? Why go ? Where it is ? All your questions and answers are available in "Welcome to Slaka", a guidebook to the land of Slaka, a guidebook translated from native Slakan by the late Malcolm Bradbury, Professor of English and expert on Eastern Europe.

Bradbury keeps the spirit of Slaka and the original Slakan in his amazing translation. Chapters with headings such as "Slaka : how was?", "Slaka: how to?" and "Slaka: how is?" cover her history, travel routes and current affairs. Creative photographs and statistics help the reader imagine the country, as do the collection of very useful phrases translated to Slakan; these include "Help! Help!", "Police!", "You mean this is the police?", "Let me go." and "Take me to the Consulate".

With intimate details of restaurants and the night life, the recommended spots for tourists, and Slakan customs, "Welcome to Slaka" is my favourite guidebook beating the Lonely Planet for its sheer inventiveness. As Slaka is ignored by most map-makers and guide-books ( even the Lonely Planet does cover Slaka - Not yet, Not yet!), as if it does not exist, "Welcome to Slaka" is a remarkable book, helping us understand the life and times in Slaka. On my bookshelf, it stands next to that other classic "Photographs of Greeneland".

For those who love to travel, while sitting at home, for those who love laughter cloaked in seriousness (and vice versa), for those who have missed out on this unique world, "Welcome to Slaka" is a must-read, a remarkable document that stands unparalleled in English literature." - surajit basu

Kai Lung's Golden Hours - Ernest Bramah

Reviews:

"I tried to write my comments on Ernest Bramagh's Kai Lung's Golden Hours, which I just finished, in the same style:

In the opinion of this lowly reader, the esteemed author before our unworthy eyes has created a gem of the highest quality, polished by fine craft.

But you can only do this so long before you get frustrated, which is why you have to admire Bramagh, because he could maintain this oblique and ornate style throughout and still manage to tell a compelling and, more than often, extremely humorous story.

The titular character, Kai Lung, is a storyteller who runs afoul of the local authorities, in particular a rather nasty advisor. The problem is that Kai has set his eyes on a most beautiful young woman who is also highly desired by the advisor, and the mandarin in charge is quite corrupt. The one saving grace for Kai Lung is that the mandarin also likes a good story. Like Scherazade, Kai Lung is therefore in the positive of entertaining for his life, and that he is able to accomplish this is not due to the fragment of 1001 stories available to him, but also the help of his beloved (a fairly strong female character given the situation and the date this was written, 1922).

Not everyone will care for this book, because a style as circular and dense as this doesn't lead itself to the short-attention-span-generation (only James Branch Cabell has a more elaborate, yet beautiful, prose form in fantasy). I don't know what it was about the 1920s that enabled the creation of such great comedy (Bramagh, Cabell, P.G. Wodehouse [who first became popular as a novelist in the 1920s], Thorne Smith). Maybe it was the post-War jubiliation, the underground of prohibition, or the pre-Depression stockmarket? Not ours to wonder why, but just to enjoy and laugh." - Glen Engel Cox

The Wallet of Kai Lung - Ernest Bramah

Reviews:

"Bramah sure can spin a phrase. The book is a collection of stories told by Kai Lung, and as such is excellent. You are transported back into this fictional China, where introductions can take hours as the two people flatter each other & humble themselves endlessly. The stories are very amusing, but be forewarned; the language takes some time to read through & comprehend. Not a book to breeze through (but oh so rewarding when you do read it!)" - David C. Johnson

The Mirror of Kong Ho - Ernest Bramah

Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat - Ernest Bramah

Best Max Carrados Detective Stories - Ernest Bramah

The Ship of Fools - Sebastian Brant

Stultifera Navis: The Medieval Satire of Sebastian Brant

In 1494, humanist Sebastian Brant published Das Narrenschiff, or The Ship of Fools, a long, moralistic poem written in the German language. Born in Strasbourg, Germany circa 1457, Brant earned degrees in philosopy and law at the University of Basel, then continued there as a lecturer. He wrote a law textbook and several poems prior to Das Narrenschiff, as well as editing books and broadsides for local printers. Brant was a loyalist to the Holy Roman Empire, and when Basel joined the Swiss Confederation in 1499, Brant returned to imperial Strasbourg. There he worked for the city in various administrative capacities until his death in 1521.

In Das Narrenschiff, Brant describes 110 assorted follies and vices, each undertaken by a different fool, devoting chapters to such offenses as Arrogance Toward God, Marrying for Money, and Noise in Church. Some of the chapters are united by the common theme of a ship which will bear the assembled fools to Narragonia, the island of fools. Das Narrenschiff proved so popular that it went through multiple editions, and was translated into Latin, French, English, Dutch, and Low German.
...
Brant's message was enhanced by a set of stunning woodcuts, most of them believed to have been carved by a young Albrecht Dürer during a short stay in Basel in 1494. Each woodcut illustrates a chapter from Das Narrenschiff, giving either a literal or allegorical interpretation of that particular sin or vice. Most of them feature a fool in a foolscap decorated with bells engaging in the activity being ridiculed. Dürer's detailed backgrounds show interiors furnished with slanted desks and diamond-paned windows, and hilly landscapes dotted with rocks and plants. Additional woodcuts are the work of the Haintz-Nar-Meister, the Gnad-Her-Meister, and two anonymous artists.
...

Review - Duchan Caudill

Egalia's Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes - Gerd Brantenberg

Amazon:

This book is both hilarious and makes you think. It's subtitled "A satire of the sexes", and that basically says it all. It's an upside-down society, in which men are repressed and taken advantage of, and women have all the power. There men wear the skirts and have to cover their unattractive, flat chests, while women wear the pants and can walk around topless if they want to. And the men take care of the kids, once the woman has decided she wants to have one. The whole language reflects this society's views, e.g. by referring to humanity as Woman, rather than Man. It's written in Norwegian originally, and I really feel sorry for the translator who had to find culturally and linguistically comparable expressions. I've read the original, and the language "switch" is even more successful there. (... that "history" was left in the original form, which it should rightfully be, as this has nothing to do with the pronoun "his") It does lose a bit of the wordplay-effect of the original, which is inevitable. Still I think the translation is good, considering the differences between the languages.

Because of the "creative" language it's a bit heavy to read, especially in the beginning. At least I found myself trying to "translate" back to the usual way of saying things - the patriarcaic way. But if you're looking for a book out of the ordinary and don't mind the effort, this is an interesting read.

The Schimmelhorn File: Memoirs of a Dirty Old Genius - Reginald Bretnor

The Death of Virgil - Hermann Broch

Amalgamemnon - Christine Brooke-Rose

Amazon:

"To give a plot synopsis of this novel would be almost pointless because the book is all about voice. The narrator spills out words and puns and jams them together (as in the title) to make new words, thus forcing the reader to think in new ways about how the words relate. It is also a novel of ideas, and in many ways, a novel about power. The narrator posits herself as Cassandra to the various Agamemnon's (thus amalgamemnon) that ignore her. Technnology, capitalism, and Wester, male-dominated society are all forces that she struggles with. Interestingly, Brooke-Rose also foresees the power of terrorism and the threat of fundamentalism that responds to these same sources of powers. To be sure, though, this is mostly a novel about language, and if you don't enjoy playful, postmodern punning, then skip this one." - Russ Mayes

From These Ashes: The Comlete Short SF of Fredric Brown - Fredric Brown

Night of the Jabberwock - Fredric Brown

Black Snow - Mikhail Bulgakov

Reviews:

"Bulgakov is certainly one of the best Russian writers, and 'The Theatre Novel' is certainly among his best works. Unfortunately, it's been translated in English as 'Black Snow', which changes the idea of the book quite a great deal - 'Black Snow' is the title of the novel written by Maxudov (the main character), but in this case Bulgakov doesn't mean that we are reading THAT novel. It is quite misleading; Maxudov's 'Black Snow' is NOT 'The Theatre (or Theatral) Novel'.

The novel itself is quite hard to understand; I believe it could be best understood by those who have a good deal of knowledge about the situation Bulgakov is describing. I cannot say I have that, therefore it is not as easy to read this novel as it is to read other works by Bulgakov. However, the novel is definitely a masterpiece - the descriptions, for example, are overwhelmingly vivid and warm, which stands out even more considering that most modern (and pre-modern) novels do not depict that warmth and depth of feeling. The strikingly accurate descriptions of human emotions seem to be a thing that can most often be found in good Russian literature (Bulgakov, Dostoevsky, Chekhov...), and that's why you need Bulgakov to use almost half-a-page to list different kinds of people, for example...

The plot of the novel is quite hard to follow - which only illustrates how much of a genius Bulgakov is, as he manages to brilliantly reveal the confusion Maxudov experiences and the absurdity of his world. The feeling of uncertainty never leaves Maxudov. Nor does it leave the reader...

I'd have given this book 5 stars if Bulgakov hadn't also written 'The Master And Margarita'. 'The Theatre Novel' is a great book, but it simply cannot be as great as that one..." - anybody else

The prolific and fascinating Burgess is unfortunately known to most only as the author of that book on which Kubrick based "A Clockwork Orange." Herein we'll laud the neglected stuff.

The Complete Enderby - Anthony Burgess

Reviews:

"The first thing to say about these books is that they're very funny. - They're very funny! - I spent several nights during the reading of them chuckling myself to sleep over the Enderbian maladventures I had ingested during my day's reading. They're also an uproarious satire of (and I'm sure to be leaving several things/groups/people out):

Postwar England
Poetry Awards
Women's Magazines
Magazines of any sort
Rome
Papism
Avaricious-Papist-Magazine editing women
Poets who sell out
Modern avant-garde film
Psychiatry (Big one here)
Psychiatrists (Even Bigger)
Pop Music
Pop Music Stars
Selenologists
Randy women Selenologists
Beat poets
The film industry in general
America
The American Bicentennial
Creative writing students
Women Creative Writing students
Black (Or, er, Afro-American) Creative Writing students
Talk shows
Subways
New York City
American women -"These American women were very straightforward people, quick to disclose their madness." P.534
American men - "The men were a bit slower." P.534
Spiritualist sessions
Hiberno-American Anti-Anglo sentiments
Theatre people
The American spelling of "Theater"
Anyone who dares to mess with Shakespeare

Well, that will do for starters. What makes all this satire, um, digestible, so to speak, is there is really no vitriol in it (or, well, not very much) and, further, what makes it actually palatable is that one is so busy pitying poor Enderby, in the first two books at least, that the verbal cuts, often hidden among Enderbian musings, hit us so often at unawares. Also, the old-fashioned poet trying to heed his Muse and not sully himself with the modern world catches it the most.

There is, though, a problem that another reviewer has pointed out - The problem of identifying with either Enderby or Burgess - or perhaps Enderburgess. The first two books, Inside Mr. Enderby and Enderby Outside, are much superior, in my mind, to the last two books. Here, Enderby is a character separate from Burgess. Yes, it's still partly autobiographical, but not SO autobiographical that one feels one is reading about Burgess himself, which is the sense that overwhelmed at least this reader while poring over (still chuckling, mind you) The Clockwork Testament and Enderby's Dark Lady.

Finally, there is something more to all this than just laughs (though these certainly help things along). Enderburgess truly believes in the sacredness of poetry and the poet's mission. He heartily defends them against the slings and arrows of the modern world, much to his sadness and discomfiture, it must be said.

The girl who comes to Enderby at the end of Enderby Outside, and serves, more or less, as his Muse incarnate, intones:

"When Shelley said what he said about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, he wasn't really using fancy language. It's only by the exact use of words that people can begin to understand themselves." P.358 This is the Enderburgessian motto, the recurrent theme throughout the book. I can think of no better one with which to laugh and learn or relearn the poet's mission." - Daniel Myers

Tremor of Intent - Anthony Burgess

The Wanting Seed - Anthony Burgess

Reviews:

"Your bookstore is stocked full of novels predicting mankind's future, but none quite like this. With the Wanting Seed, Anthony Burgess turns the typical dystopian novel on its ear. Instead of a methodical, technorganic world, Mr. Burgess presents a smelly, macrobiotic mess of overpopulation and disharmony. Instead of a more stringent emphasis on rightwing ideals, the aforementioned overpopulation has caused an enthusiastic governmental endorsement of homosexuality and opposition to typical family ideals. Instead of a grim, foreboding atmosphere, Mr. Burgess employs a lighthearted, quirky tone, allowing readers to smirk at the ridiculousness and incongruity to which the world of the Wanting Seed has been driven. It is obvious that Mr. Burgess, the same literary practical joker who filled his best-know book, A Clockwork Orange, with make-up slang, meant to poke some well-needed fun at the dismal 1984/Brave New World genre.

But just because the Wanting Seed is a work of playful parody and dark comedy does not mean there is nothing profound about it. In fact if I had to pick the one dystopian novel towards which our society is most surely leaning, it would be this one (which is pretty amazing considering it was written in 1962). As counties like China and India are regulating procreation and instituting their own versions of Mr. Burgess' "population police" and the value of human life wilts ever downward, I wonder how close we are to vision of the Wanting Seed. The novel stands as a warning that repressing man's natural urges and diminishing his worth is not the answer to the problem. Your bookstore is stocked full of novels predicting mankind's future, but few as startling and important as this." - P. Nicholas Keppler

The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-yezdi - Sir Richard Francis Burton

Reviews:

"The word Kasidah can be translated Testament, and here it conveys several of the meanings of that word. It is a statement about what the author believes and what he does not, it is concerned with the authority and veracity of scriptures, and it is deeply concerned with the meaning and consequences of death.

Burton here melds his broad knowledge of Western philosophy and religion with a deep understanding of Eastern philosophical and metaphysical thought, and he presents it flawlessly in the poetic idiom of the Sufis. This work stands alone, incomparable, for it is truly a unique work of genius. The Way of the Sufi is here presented in Western thought, clothed in poetic Sufi garb.

The Kasidah is an Agnostic Gospel. It calls for an abandonment of argument over what can never be known an acceptance that death is a mystery that we cannot penetrate, and a shunning of bribes of heaven or threats of hell. Burton offers instead his code for living the life before us - "Do what thy manhood bids thee do/ from none but self expect applause;/ He noblest lives and noblest dies/ who makes and keeps his self-made laws."

The Kasidah expresses Burton's life philosophy, stark, with a terrible beauty. It has been called his spiritual autobiography. More than any of his many other works, it reveals the heart and mind of this brilliant and amazing man. That is more than enough reason to read this powerful book.

This book should be read by anyone with an interest in Sir Richard Burton, Sufi poetry, the philosophy of applied Agnosticism, or works of unique and powerful vision. It has my highest recommendation." - Theo Logos

Vikram and the Vampire or Tales of Hindu Devilry - Sir Richard Francis Burton

Reviews:

"1893. This volume is Volume V of the Memorial Edition of the Works of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton. This translation contains eleven of the best tales surrounding the legend of a huge bat, vampire or evil spirit which inhabited and animated dead bodies. They are old and thoroughly Hindu legends composed in Sanskrit, and are the germ which culminated in the Arabian Nights. The stories turn chiefly on a great king named Vikram, the King Arthur of the East. There is not a dull page found within and this work will please those who delight in the weird and supernatural, the grotesque and the wild life. Illustrated." - Anon

The Anatomy of Melancholy - Robert Burton

Reviews:

"Don't be misled by the title of this book, nor by what others may have told you about it. In the first place, it isn't so much a book about 'Melancholy' (or abnormal psychology, or depression, or whatever) as a book about Burton himself and, ultimately, about humankind. Secondly, it isn't so much a book for students of the history of English prose, as one for lovers of language who joy in the strong taste of English when it was at its most masculine and vigorous. Finally, it isn't so much a book for those interested in the renaissance, as for those interested in life.

Burton is not a writer for fops and milquetoasts. He was a crusty old devil who used to go down to the river to listen to the bargemen cursing so that he could keep in touch with the true tongue of his race. Sometimes I think he might have been better off as the swashbuckling Captain of a pirate ship. But somehow he ended up as a scholar, and instead of watching the ocean satisfyingly swallowing up his victims, he himself became an ocean of learning swallowing up whole libraries. His book, in consequence, although it may have begun as a mere 'medical treatise,' soon exploded beyond its bounds to become, in the words of one of his editors, "a grand literary entertainment, as well as a rich mine of miscellaneous learning."

Of his own book he has this to say : "... a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgement, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, phantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry; I confess all..." But don't believe him, he's in one of his irascible moods and exaggerating. In fact it's a marvelous book.

Here's a bit more of the crusty Burton I love; it's on his fellow scholars : "Heretofore learning was graced by judicious scholars, but now noble sciences are vilified by base and illiterate scribblers."

And here is Burton warming to the subject of contemporary theologians : "Theologasters, if they can but pay ... proceed to the very highest degrees. Hence it comes that such a pack of vile buffoons, ignoramuses wandering in the twilight of learning, ghosts of clergymen, itinerant quacks, dolts, clods, asses, mere cattle, intrude with unwashed feet upon the sacred precincts of Theology, bringing with them nothing save brazen impudence, and some hackneyed quillets and scholastic trifles not good enough for a crowd at a street corner."

Finally a passage I can't resist quoting which shows something of Burton's prose at its best, though I leave you to guess the subject: "... with this tempest of contention the serenity of charity is overclouded, and there be too many spirits conjured up already in this kind in all sciences, and more than we can tell how to lay, which do so furiously rage, and keep such a racket, that as Fabius said, "It had been much better for some of them to have been born dumb, and altogether illiterate, than so far to dote to their own destruction."

To fully appreciate these quotations you would have to see them in context, and I'm conscious of having touched on only one of his many moods and aspects. But a taste for Burton isn't difficult to acquire. He's a mine of curious learning. When in full stride he can be very funny, and it's easy to share his feelings as he often seems to be describing, not so much his own world as today's.

But he does demand stamina. His prose overwhelms and washes over us like a huge tsunami, and for that reason he's probably best taken in small doses. If you are unfamiliar with his work and were to approach him with that in mind, you might find that (as is the case with Montaigne, a very different writer) you had discovered not so much a book as a companion for life." - tepi

The Tartar Steppe - Dino Buzzati

Reviews:

"On first thought, this is a overwhelmingly desolate book. It is the life of Giovanni Drogo who, after graduation as military officer, is sent to Fort Bastiani, located on "the Northern frontier", and beyond which the Tartar steppe lies for miles and miles. At Fort Bastiani, nothing ever happens. Holding the absurd hope that some day something will happen that will bring him military glory, Drogo consumes his life amidst the boredom and the rutine of the site. But his hope never dies: as another reviewer correctly noted, it acts like a drug on him. I haven't spoiled anything about the plot: some day, something will happen.

This novel is pure literary magic, and it is a shame and a pity that it is so ignored, especially in English-speaking countries. Note: Enlgish-language literature is certainly one of the best corpus of literature in the world, but their ignorance of many other literatures is in their own detriment, unfortunately.

"The Tartar steppe" is a masterpiece which, with an ironic and subtle sense of humor, talks about the desolation, the apparent uselessness of living, the futility of existence. It talks about it, but in a subtle yet powerful manner contradicts those theses: Drogo will show the reader that, no matter how dull and empty your life is, there is ALWAYS something about life that makes it worth living. Fort Bastiani and the Tartar Steppe are both real and symbolic: they may be an office, a shop, a house or a city.

Read this novel and you will love it forever, not only for its content but for Buzzati's excellent handling of words. He showed he was a great writer. But beyond the style, you'll remember it every other time, when you feel you are Giovanni Drogo, eager for something to happen." - Guillermo Maynez

Jurgen - James Branch Cabell

Reviews:

""I have finished Jurgen; a great and beautiful book, and the saddest book I ever read. I don't know why, exactly. The book hurts me -- tears me to small pieces -- but somehow it sets me free. It says the word that I've been trying to pronounce for so long. It tells me everything I am, and have been, and may be, unsparingly...I don't know why I cry over it so much. It's too -- something-or-other -- to stand. I've been sitting here tonight, reading it aloud, with the tears streaming down my face..." -- Deems Taylor, in a letter dated December 12, 1920.

What can I add to that? Jurgen is on my short list of very favorite books. It wrestles, in its odd way, with the fundamental tragedy of human life in general and male life in particular: We are doomed to age and die; meanwhile happiness will prove elusive. Wow, I'm making this sound awfully depressing, aren't I? But that's not right. Jurgen is humorous and fun and weirdly uplifting. Jurgen's strange adventures manage to represent all that a man may pursue and aspire to. The tale burns, but in a wonderfully brilliant way. (I made that comment about the tragedy of "male life" because Jurgen is, among other things, the quintessential rogue. His notion of how happiness might be ideally pursued differs somewhat from the ideas of the females he holds discourse with. Thus does Cabell illustrate a reality that we can either acknowledge or deny; take your choice. Enlightened people will prefer the latter.)

Jurgen isn't for everyone. Some will "get it" and some won't. I once handed a copy to a person who returned it with the comment that he wasn't a fan of the S&S ("swords & sorcery") genre. This surprised me; the book can only be described as S&S by someone who does not look below the surface. I mention this not to mock but to warn. Jurgen may be better appreciated by those who are stirred by symbol and metaphor. We may not be prancing through a magical world as Jurgen does, but some of us will see echoes of our own dreams and nightmares in his story. If you're such a person, then Jurgen may hit you like a ton of bricks. Otherwise you'll chuck the manuscript against the wall.

It's worth noting that Jurgen, in its circumspect way, managed to offend the contemporary powers-that-be. The book is obscurely suggestive without being explicit; it went over the heads of some, but others saw what was going on, and they either guffawed or objected vigorously. There were serious attempts to suppress it, which of course only made the text notorious. It was (and still is) politically incorrect, and it garnered something of a counter-cultural following for all the wrong reasons. Well, so be it. The book is great, and that's all there is to say.

The tale incorporates supporting characters and environments rummaged from myth and history. You won't need to know all these background details to understand or enjoy the plot; however if you should want to follow up, some rabid fans (of which there were many) put together a collection of footnotes way back in 1928. It's long out of print, but you'll find an Amazon listing on it (Amazon lists everything!); search Amazon books for ASIN=B00085DJ0A. A copy of the notes is also posted online; search the web on the phrase "Notes on Jurgen".

If you buy the book, you'll want the Dover paperback edition (ISBN=0486235076), which is a trade paperback and includes the wonderful old illustrations. Holding this edition in my hands just feels right. There's also a great unabridged audio cassette (ISBN=1574534505), rendered by a troupe of actors. They do a very nice job, switching to the most appropriate character to read the text as the book progresses.

Cabell was a prolific author, with "Jurgen" being his best-known (and probably his greatest) work. If you're unfamiliar with Cabell, "Jurgen" is the book to start with. If you want to follow up, look for "Figures of Earth"." - David Rolfe

"Early in his journey, Cabell's Jurgen comes to a place known as 'The Garden Between Dawn and Sunrise.' In the garden live all the imaginary creatures that humankind has ever created: centaurs and sphinxes, fairies, valkyries, and baba-yagas. Jurgen is surprised when he sees his first-love wandering around the garden, but his guide replies "Why, all the women that man has ever loved live here...for very obvious reasons."

Moments like this, simultaneously jaded and genuine, sentimental and cynical, are the most delightful parts of 'Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice.' Nominally the story of a medieval pawnbroker's quest to find his lost wife, 'Jurgen' becomes a bildungsroman in reverse as, on the way, its hero regains his youth and visits the lands of European myth, from Camelot to Cocaigne (the land of pleasure) -- each land shows Jurgen a way of life, and he rejects each in favor of his own sardonic stoicism, for he is, after all, a "monstrously clever fellow."

That phrase describes Cabell as much as it does Jurgen: the author is remarkably erudite, and, like a doting parent hiding easter eggs, drops in-jokes through the book on subjects as far-ranging as troubadour poetry and tantric sex. Cabell corresponded with Aleister Crowley in his day, and, in ours, is an influence on Neil Gaiman ('The Sandman,' 'Neverwhere,' etc.). The book itself caused quite a splash when it became the centerpiece of one of the biggest censorship trials of the early 20th century: something to do with Jurgen's very large *ahem* sword.

Social satire and an idiosyncratic cynicism in the guise of a scholarly romance-fantasy, 'Jurgen' is what would have happened if J.R.R. Tolkien and Dorothy Parker had gotten together to write a book." - A Customer

Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday - Italo Calvino, ed.

Amazon:

"The brilliant Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985) compiled Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday, a historical overview of great fantastic literature of the 19th century. Many of his 26 selections are from well-known authors (Sir Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Ivan Turgenev, Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells), but Calvino largely avoided their best-known stories; the only inclusions likely to be familiar to many Americans are Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," and H.G. Wells's "The Country of the Blind." The remaining contributors range from moderately well-known to obscure. So the reader who purchases Fantastic Tales gains not only an intelligently annotated anthology of superb fiction, but, in one pleasant sense, a collection of mostly new stories.

Interestingly, some of the finest stories are by authors least known in America. Théophile Gautier's beautifully written, wrenchingly ironic "The Beautiful Vampire" establishes the traditions for romantic vampire fiction. Mérimée's "The Venus of Ille," a tale of culture clashes (Parisian and rural, ancient classical, and contemporary Christian), is sharp, well-written, and uncommonly horrific. With the gorgeous "A Lasting Love," the sole woman contributor, Vernon Lee, paints the most vivid portrait of obsessive, transcendent, destructive love.

Caveat: Calvino's introductions sometimes reveal more of the plot than readers will like." - Cynthia Ward

The Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino

Amazon:

"Calvino never fails to mesmerize. His books suck you in and don't let go until the final word (and that final word always seems to include a touch of sadness that the novel is over). This is one of Calvino's earlier works, written in 1957, the same year he left the communist party (his reason is summed up in: "my decision to resign as a member of the party is founded on the fact that my discrepancies with those of the party have become an obstacle to whatever form of political participation I could undertake"). "The Baron in the Trees" does include some passages about disappointed political ideals (e.g., about the French Revolution), but the book touches on far too many topics to reduce it to a mere "political" novel.

The story begins, as the first line of the novel tells us, on the fifteenth of June, 1767. Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò is a member of a family whose father has sights on climbing the aristocratic ladder. In the very first chapter there is a family scuffle, during dinner, which results in Cosimo going into the trees and vowing never to come down ("And he kept his word" Cosimo's brother, who narrates the story, states). Cosimo then resigns himself to a life in the trees. After some initial mishaps (dealing with rain, bathing, food, etc), he proves himself very adaptable to living off the ground. Human adaptability seems to be at the back of the story (along with many other things); his family and town almost grow accustomed to Cosimo's darting amongst the branches. Cosimo even makes a name for himself "up in the trees" (Voltaire asks about him, and Napolean insists on meeting him). Of course the big question that comes from this action, in the very opening of the novel, is why did Cosimo go up into the trees? Why didn't he simply run away? One possible answer is that he wanted to make an example of himself. Living in the trees (especially in the 18th century) would likely make one into a spectacle. Running away wouldn't make as strong of a point, and would sever ties to his family which Cosimo does not want to do (this becomes more obvious as the novel moves on). And why does he stay in the trees? One possible answer is that which his brother gives to Voltaire: "My brother considers that anyone who wants to see the earth properly must keep himself at a necessary distance from it." Another possibility is, close to the novel's end, Cosimo is speaking with a Russian officer, who says, right after some members of his unit present him with the severed heads of some hussars, "You see.. War... For years now I've been dealing as best I can with a thing that in itself is appalling; war... and all this for ideals which I shall never, perhaps, be able to fully explain to myself..." Cosimo answers in like: "I too have lived many years for ideals which I would never be able to explain to myself; but I do something entirely good. I live on trees." Rambunctous and impetuous youth led Cosimo into the trees (he was only twelve when he took to the branches), but his ideals, once established, kept him there the rest of his life. All of us make descions in our youth that we either follow through with or abandon. Cosimo never abandoned his decision, for good or ill.

The novel reads like an adventure in places (e.g., when the feared, or imaginary, "Gian dei Brughi" is terrorizing the countryside, but evetually becomes addicted to novels - which in and of itself makes for a hilarious few chapters - Cosimo is there for almost every move); in other places it reads like a heartbreaking love story (e.g., Cosimo's nearly lifelong affair with Viola, which becomes so intense it's almost painful to read). A lot of action goes on in the trees, and the reader will likely not conclude that Cosimo has "missed something" as a result of his decision. Overall the novel is so readable that it's hard to put down (it could probably be completed in one long sitting). It has that mix of reality and fantasy that Calvino is famous for (it's easy to find references to Calvino as "one of the world's best fabulists"). Like other Calvino it's funny (Cosimo's sister serves bizarre arrangements of food to the family), heartbreaking (did Cosimo find true love in the trees or did he fail miserably?), poignant (he finds a great comrade in a small daschund he names "Ottimo Massimo" but the dog ultimately belongs to someone else), and a great read. The decisions one makes in life have impact on oneself and others, and in Cosimo's case his decision had vast impact on his immediate surroundings, regardless of the reasons why. Make a good decision for yourself and read this book." - ewomack

Cosmicomics - Italo Calvino

Amazon:

I have never read a book quite like this one. It is definitely not a novel, in as much as there is not a set beginning, middle, climax and denouement, nor one or more characters that we follow throughout the book in a series of adventures and incidents. While the book contains a dozen short stories with a common link that may be described as science fiction, I would not call it strictly a book of this genre.

"Cosmicomics" may instead be described as a series of beautifully and imaginatively written poetic fables that defy time and space. They take place prior to, during and after the galaxies and the universe were formed, throughout myriad evolutionary cycles, prior to the birth of mankind, and even ante-dating the beginning of what is commonly called life. These tales concern atoms, molecules and other worldly beings interacting, almost interacting, and even repelling one another while travelling between gravitational and anti-gravitational forces. They may be floating around in space, chasing each other or being chased at one and the same time. There is a story of betting on the chance occurrances of historical, pre-historical, and pre-planetary incidents, and of lovers living in a time before colors, when black, white and shades of gray were the natural order of things. There is a wondrous tale of a time during the formation of the universe, when the earth and the moon abutted one another and people utilized a ladder to climb from the earth to the moon to spoon out milk. One of the most beautiful of these parables concerns the last dinosaur to survive on earth and his relationship and near love affair with one of the new ones. This is truly a book to cherish.

Auto-da-Fe - Elias Canetti

Reviews:

"The history of Canetti's odd, inventive novel provides clues to its understanding. According to his memoirs, Canetti originally conceived the "Human Comedy of Madmen," a fictional cycle portraying eight characters. Of these, only one character lived on in his imagination: Brand the Book Man. Inspired by Gogol, modeled after Stendhal's "The Red and the Black," and informed by Jacob Burckhardt's "History of Greek Civilization," Canetti's surviving portrait is an allegorical odyssey of a recluse who lives only for his books.

Yet those already familiar with "Auto da Fe" know that there is no character named Brand in the book. During the year (1930-31) that Canetti finished his novel, he changed the main character's name from Brand [German for conflagration] to Kant and the novel's title to "Kant Catches Fire." Canetti explains in the second volume of his memoirs that the lingering emotions he felt from his presence when a mob burned down Vienna's Palace of Justice in 1927 made this new title "hard to endure." And so "Kant became Kien [German for resinous pinewood]; the ignitability of the world, a threat that I felt, was maintained in the name of the chief character." Likewise, he changed the title to Die Blendung [The Blinding], a reference to the biblical legend of Samson. It was under this title that the book was published in 1935, but it was soon banned by the Nazis.

The main character is a leading Sinologist whose meticulous scholarship and linguistic expertise make him famous among an elite group, but Kien's lack of social skills ultimately defines him: he refuses to be part of the crowd (the dynamics of which is one of Canetti's real-life intellectual preoccupations). Kien's 25,000-volume library overtakes his entire apartment, the 40,000 characters of the Chinese alphabet challenge his intellect, and his only human relationships are daily contacts with a housekeeper of eight years and morning ventures to the bookshops that dot the city of Vienna. His cloistered life is shattered, however, when he decides to marry the housekeeper; her conniving greed is eventually wedded to the brute force of the building's superintendent, a retired police officer whose nascent fascism finds full expression in his treatment of Kien. Eventually, Kien conflates his fear and hatred of his wife with the misogyny he has learned from his vast readings.

Simultaneously bizarre and uncomplicated, the story reads like a 450-page Homeric epic filtered through the psychoses of the Brothers Grimm. Expelled from his book-dominated oasis, Kien descends into the underworld of Vienna, a journey that results in the destruction of the world as he knows it. Dwarfs, prostitutes, blind men--each of the major and minor characters develops his or her own perspective of the events through which they live; when their internally consistent yet outwardly incongruent worlds clash, the results alternate between absurdity and madness. What it is all supposed to mean will engage the patient reader's imagination for weeks."- D. Cloyce Smith

The Memoirs of Elias Canetti : The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes - Elias Canetti

Reviews:

The uncompromising achievement of Elias Canetti has been matched by few writers this century. Canetti worked brilliantly in many forms, but the three volumes that comprise his autobiography are where his genius is perhaps most evident. The first volume, The Tongue Set Free, presents the events, personalities, and intellectual forces that fed Canetti's early creative development. The Torch in My Ear explores his admiration for the first great mentor of his adulthood, Karl Krauss, and also describes his first marriage. The final volume, The Play of the Eyes, is set in Vienna between 1931 and 1937, with the European catastrophe imminent; here he vividly portrays relationships with Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, among others. - Amazon

Crowds and Power - Elias Canetti

Reviews:

"Canetti's book is somewhat strange; it is also gripping and often uncannily accurate about the nature of power. At the same time it is full of conceptual nodes and holes that reflect the peculiarities of his own life and the times in which he lived (e.g., can the world's wide array of political arrangements be reduced to the narrow spectrum of paranoid rulers, their enablers, and the preponderant human majority of quasi-slaves that Canetti presents as typical throughout all of human history?) Taking into account his own early life as an "undesirable element" (a Jew) who was not fully welcome in the land of his birth (Bulgaria) and who was then cast out of the society of his adolescence and early manhood in Vienna (where he acquired his higher education and the language of his thought and writing) his focus in Crowds and Power makes sense in a very personal way -- had you led his life with all of its insults you too might have arrived at similar conclusions about the dismal nature of "power relationships" among people, especially if you came of age during the pan-European turmoils of the first half of twentieth century, a very bad time for the human race.

The work is "Nietzschean" in its construction and often in its tone (and, from the light shed on human thinking, there are shades of Kafka in the work as well - man as beset, mortified and made anxious by the social walls that surround him and metastasize in growth and shape in his mind.) As in Nietzsche, there are idiosyncratic topic groupings and unexpected leaps between groupings. Canetti illuminates his central point by setting intellectual bonfires in a circle around it. There are strikingly original chapters that deal with topics such as "transformation" (the key to understanding totemism), "the mask", and the blatant intrusiveness of asking any but the simplest question. The style is often aphoristic, and many of its aphorisms are slaps in the reader's face, prodding us gently with the message that it's time to wake up.

Unusual typologies and word-usages abound (e.g., "increase pack", "lamentation pack", "crowd crystals", "command stings", "paralytic sensibility", and, most importantly, his catholic terms "Crowd" and "Survivor", each of which embraces a wealth of pathologies.) These oddities are not a product of faulty translation, since Canetti knew English well enough not to allow his key terms to be misrepresented by a lazy choice in that language. The work ranges widely through history, cultural anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary theory as these analytical frameworks were applied in his day to the explanation of specific behavior patterns in men, monkeys, and other animals, all within his general interpretation that discrete pieces of evidence from these disciplines fall under the heading of "the crowd phenomenon", either literally or metaphorically.

We are left with considering men to be either Survivors or Slaves. The only "free" man who avoids the "sting" built into every command and its acceptance or rejection is the man who altogether evades situations in which commands are given and responded to. By avoiding the normal situation of playing a part in a social hierarchy he becomes free; such a man has to be, by definition, marginal, perhaps even a social isolate. (Canetti was well-known for his individualism and his prickliness, brutally self-illuminated in Party in the Blitz - one wonders if he considered his behavior to be the tokens of such a hypothetical "free man"?) There is something in Canetti's typology that is akin to Raul Hilberg's Holocaust-studies classification of hundreds of millions of Europeans as either perpetrators, victims, or (not entirely innocent) bystanders - for Canetti seems to see human history as a sort of continuous political holocaust, a repetitive nightmare of power relations from which we cannot awake.

Canetti's Survivor runs the gamut from the winner of a duel or contest through the warrior (especially the warrior as a general or commander of troops) through the ordinary king to the most paranoid (and therefore bloodthirsty) absolute ruler -- undoubtedly the unsavory careers of Hitler and Stalin were prompting him in this typological direction. The ultimate Survivor best differentiates himself from the Crowd by standing alone amid a pile of corpses his commands have created; yet he remains anxious that the vast majority of humanity (i.e., the dead) will still try to interfere in his life, control his thoughts, and suck him into their bleak vortex. Canetti lived long enough to entertain the cases of Mao or Pol Pot, and these could only strengthen his conviction about the correctness of his analysis of power and its recurring tendency to manifest itself in psychotic demi-godly rulers.

In spite of the level of Germanic abstraction and reification in the presentation of his ideas about power, much of the evidentiary material he draws upon is still useful in the analysis of contemporary social and ideological phenomena. Some of the material is surprisingly germane today -- who could have guessed the present temporal consequences of the basic outlook of Shiite Islam, which, sixty years ago, he characterized as a wounded and resentful cult of lamentation that could only be soothed and healed by a yearned-for apocalyptic ending of human history? Wounded beasts are dangerous, especially when new-found wealth is coupled to old resentments.

He summarizes his equations by his closing comments on the case of Daniel Paul Schreber. (On a parenthetical note, reading of Schreber's father's exploits -- inventing devices to physically restrain his own children -- goes a long way toward explaining not only the substance of many of Schreber's delusions, but also the popularity in 19th century Germany of illustrated childhood discipline manuals, some of them presented in darkly comical form, e.g., Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter. What dark roads this mania led to, hardly comical, is left to the reader's imagination.) Schreber became the demented sounding-board of Kraeplein, Bleuler, Freud and many other observors who wished to generalize about something (and even everything) important about all of us, based on minute examination of the delusions of this most famous, and most eloquent, late Victorian madman. The correct medical diagnosis of Schreber's condition was that he suffered from "paranoid schizophrenia" accompanied by florid delusions of grandeur. According to Canetti it is these attributes which also characterize history's great men, and what delusional power over man and the universe Schreber wielded in his fantasies, those great men have wielded over our bodies and minds. It's a grim picture and may even be an accurate one.

The work concludes with a brief epilogue in which hope of escape from our almost biological thralldom to power might be based on our understanding the roots of our craven condition as they are diagnosed by the author. If the success of the "talking cure" in psychiatry is taken as our model, then we're still in for a long and gloomy night." - Robert T. O'Keeffe

Scream for Jeeves: A Parody (1994) - P. H. Cannon

Amazon:

Cannon parodies P.G. Wodehouse and H.P. Lovecraft by combining the two, and brevity, clean prose and a good ear make it work. Bertie Wooster retells three Lovecraft tales in the manner of the ``Jeeves'' stories, and the humor comes from Bertie's cheery, puerile voice describing Lovecraft's horrors, interspersed with doses of Lovecraft's overwrought prose. The best is ``Cats, Rats, and Bertie Wooster,'' which sticks to ``The Rats in the Walls,'' although sometimes too many Lovecraft elements threaten to capsize this fragile craft. ``Something Foetid'' adds Lovecraft's Randolph Carter to ``Cool Air.'' ``The Rummy Affair of Young Charlie,'' mixing The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and ``Arthur Jermyn'' with ``The Music of Erich Zann,'' seems disjointed and the climax is muddled. Occasional anachronisms jar, and it seems inconsistent, even in the world of ``H.P.G. Wodecraft,'' that Bertie should be so familiar with the lore that in Lovecraft's stories is exotic and abstruse. In the sometimes stilted closing essay on Lovecraft, Wodehouse and A.C. Doyle, Cannon strains after connections among the three, to no apparent purpose. But, quibbles aside, the book is clever and fun. One needs to have read some Wodehouse and a lot of Lovecraft to get all the jokes, but fans will be tickled.

Tales from Two Pockets - Karl Capek

War with the Newts - Karl Capek

The Book of My Life - Girolamo Cardano

NYRB

A bright star of the Italian Renaissance, Girolamo Cardano was an internationally-sought-after astrologer, physician, and natural philosopher, a creator of modern algebra, and the inventor of the universal joint. Condemned by the Inquisition to house arrest in his old age, Cardano wrote The Book of My Life, an unvarnished and often outrageous account of his character and conduct. Whether discussing his sex life or his diet, the plots of academic rivals or meetings with supernatural beings, or his deep sorrow when his beloved son was executed for murder, Cardano displays the same unbounded curiosity that made him a scientific pioneer. At once picaresque adventure and campus comedy, curriculum vitae, and last will, The Book of My Life is an extraordinary Renaissance self-portrait--a book to set beside Montaigne's Essays and Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography.

I Been There Before - David Carkeet

Sarto Resartus - Thomas Carlyle

Reviews:

"The greatest neglected book in cultural history, endlessly complex, subtle, always self-critical, ironic, mysterious, beautiful and powerful. Not a book to read through from beginning to end, but one to dip into, explore, examine from different angles. As in the book itself, the so-called Editor attempts to piece together the shards of the hero Teufelsdrockh's identity, so the reader needs to enter this book in-medias-res, striking into its magical maze of ideas. - A Customer

The Hearing Trumpet - Leonora Carrington

Amazon:

"The Hearing Trumpet is deliciously funny and irreverent; Surrealist painter/author Leonora Carrington's apocalyptic tale is filled with gems such as "Darling, don't be philosophical, it doesn't suit you, it makes your nose red." Filtered through the eyes and ears of Marian Leatherby, a 92 year-old inmate of a Spanish old folk's home (run by the cultlike Well of Light Brotherhood), the tongue-in-cheek tone and hilarious chracters make this book a refreshing surprise. Every copy I've ever owned has been stolen! From the first paragraph, the reader will see that Marian Leatherby and her friends are NOT LOL's (Little Old Ladies), and Leonora Carrington is not your average author. (She's truly hilarious, for one!) Read this book for its wacky imagery (a trompe l'oeil "furnished" tower, a pair of murdering religious quacks, termite engineering, wigs, marijuana-stuffed needlepoint pillows, and a 92 year-old lady swarming down ten stories of rope, for starters), then hide your copy from your well-read friends...or buy them their own!" - maui

The Land of Laughs - Jonathan Carroll

Amazon:

"Thomas Abbey leads an undistinguished, unsatisfying existence. He teaches English at a boy's prep school, but is chiefly known as the son of a glamorous 1940's film actor. He bitterly resents this constant association but feels unable to escape it. For his entire life he's lived in the shadow of his late father and their conflicted relationship. When he was a child, his greatest solace was found in the fanciful books of Marshall France, a reclusive writer who died at forty-four. One day, in an antiquarian bookshop, the doleful teacher meets an eccentric woman, Saxony Gardner, who is equally obsessed with France and together they travel to the writer's adopted hometown in Missouri to start work on a France biography. But almost nothing in the sleepy town of Galen is what it seems and slowly their idyllic existence turns into an inescapable nightmare.

Like Neil Gaiman , I am a huge fan of Jonathan Carroll, but of all his works, this novel has particular resonance for me. It suggests that our lives, our selves, even, to a great extent, our world, are largely products of our influence on them. That we are the authors of our own story; we collaborate with our histories to create ourselves and thus the past is as mutable as our relationship with it. The book is chock full of symbolism that deftly illustrates its twin themes of self-invention (e.g., Abbey is a collector of masks) and self-determination (e.g., his lover, Saxony, a maker of elaborate marionettes).

This is a vigorous, engaging read told in a naturalistic, matter-of-fact style that belies the tension and horror lurking just beneath the surface. The characters are well-fleshed out and human with relatable, believable motivations. And despite a shocking climax, at least the denouement allows Thomas Abbey to finally make peace with his past and even find ways to make use of it." - Blake Fraina

Nights at the Circus - Angela Carter

Reviews:

"The beginning of Nights at the Circus is filled with descriptions that question the identities of the characters rather than offer clear descriptions of them. The characters transform themselves, but not in the typical way that fiction creates characters through an explained process of development; but rather, it is one of mutation. The character's presentation of themselves is an act of subterfuge. All the narrative voices that are encountered assert their position as authoritative and dominant in a way that seeks to undermine all the rest, but remains questionable. As Lorna Sage writes in her examination of narrative voices in Nights at the Circus, All of these voices are generously endowed with the kind of dubious plausibility that comes from the suspicion that they are making it up as they go along, just like the author, so that the reader is often treated to the uncanny feeling that he or she is being addressed from behind masks by characters who know they are on stage. It is in the hands of the questionable narrators that the author has placed us as an act of subversion to point out that, while the characters are fictional constructs, they are also entitled to a kind of creative freedom in the identity they choose to present to the reader. This is a technique that blurs the character's identities to create a space of historical disharmony. If the reader is to believe that the characters have an actual past, it is one that we will never feel entirely secure about. It is implied in this that the past is created out of a single personal perspective, one that is largely based on imagination, rather than a line of uncontestable facts. This narrative technique pushes the reader into the chair of an audience member. The spectacle that ensues frames a number of questions about the construction of identity. Is identity solid or fluid? Are the assumptions made about the character's identities formed from a personal perspective or that of an observer? Rather than offer answers to these questions, the narrative of the characters offer a sense of being that is constantly maintained within the present and not subject to a sense of inevitability based on history.

Biographical facts are distorted through a voyeuristic presence upon a character's identity. When Walser comes to interview Fevvers he is more ambitious about dismantling and destroying the identity that is presented to him than trying to understand it. This is a condition of his journalistic ambition, but it is also an act of misogyny to align Fevvers to his own image of what a woman (or a proper bird) should be. Considering her actions in the rest of the narrative, it appears that her ability to transform what people believe to be her identity is what saves her from the many attempts to destroy her sense of being (both physically and mentally). Her vibrant character and profession as a performer enables her to dodge any idea that she is only what the external perspective perceives her as. Through her ability to constantly maintain a performance, the reader and other characters that view her are forced to question their sense of her identity. Through this she is able to maintain an unstifled sense of identity because it is one based upon transformation and elusiveness. Walser deliberates on her motives of presenting herself in the way she does: he (Walser) was astonished to discover that it was the limitations of her act in themselves that made him briefly contemplate the unimaginable - that is, the absolute suspension of disbelief. For, in order to earn a living, might not a genuine bird-woman - in the implausible event that such a thing existed - have to pretend she was an artificial one? He smiled to himself at the paradox: in a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world. The distinction between what is genuine and what is false is invalid if a perception of another is made with total acceptance. The reason why Fevvers encounters so many hardships is that people cannot suspend their disbelief. However, the question of whether she really is a bird-woman is suspended in favor of the idea that an unconditional perception of another is what should be made rather than asking a plethora of unanswerable questions about another's identity. If this is the standpoint the reader maintains while reading Fevvers' account of her life, then emotional involvement will take precedence over any logical objections. Any secure sense of being can only be made if there is a certain amount of faith. Fevvers' sense of her own identity is large enough to undo any grounding perception others may have of her and this is why she is able to fly.

The communities in Nights at the Circus are counterpoints to the closed, highly formed communities found in novels like To the Lighthouse and the stories of Katherine Mansfield. They allow identity to be individually created rather than socially arranged. The identities always remain in control and under the ownership of the characters themselves. This technique of writing resists any attempt to marginalise the character's position in their social environments because they create identities outside of a hierarchy scheme. Rather, the characters inhabit a fantasy zone composed of mobile symbols intended to poke fun at and undermine the ideas they represent. Nights at the Circus is never allowed to submit to any particular ideological scheme, but point to dreams which are the hinder side of thought's boundaries. It is a novel not intended to platform any particular ideology like feminism (a common belief of this novel), but champion a general philosophical outlook that can undermine conventional moralistic and limited systems of belief." - Eric Anderson

The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman - Angela Carter

Reviews:

"This is one of Angela Carter's wildest and best novels, a verbal feast served up by the late writer's seemingly inexhaustible imagination. Erotic, picaresque, complex, surreal, and humorous only begin to describe the pleasures contained herein. The story revolves around Desiderio, who as a young man sets out to assassinate Dr. Hoffman, a genius waging war against an unnamed city by means of hallucinations or dreams produced with the "eroto-energy" of 50 copulating couples in his Wagnerian mountain castle. In his very Swiftian travels, Desiderio encounters a deserted seaside town, is arrested for a murder he didn't commit, and escapes with a bullet wound; is taken in by the river people with their strange, seductive ways who eventually try to sacrifice him; escapes again to sojourn with a traveling circus where he is raped by nine Moroccan acrobats who later fall off a cliff with the rest of the circus and a town of puritans (imagine that conflict); meets a megalomaniacal Count whose travels take him and Desiderio to Africa where the Count is boiled in a pot by a cannibal chieftain; spends time in a curious, religiously rigid culture of centaurs (Carter's most obvious homage to Swift). The novel is a satire of sexual mores, restrictions, fetishes, and hang-ups that only a writer as gutsy and opulently talented as Angela Carter could have attempted. As a work of art, it's all over the place, and you might not enjoy it unless you let it take you along for the ride. It makes a very suitable companion to her later, more disciplined novel, The Passion of New Eve." - Andrew Rasanen

Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories - Angela Carter

Reviews:

"In 'Notes From the Front Line', Carter said that she was not in the remythologizing business but in the demythologizing business. Anna Katsavos asked Angela Carter what she meant by that. Angela said, 'Well, I'm basically trying to find out what certain configurations of imagery in our society, in our culture, really stand for, what they mean, underneath the kind of semireligious coating that makes people not particularly want to interfere with them.'

Simply stated, Angela Carter has taken icons and myths we were all raised with and given them back to us in a form we know and trust. In stories. Her stories are adult fairy tales; lush, penetrating, uninhibited and dark.

An introduction by Salman Rushdie sets the perfect tone for the reading ahead. It is the closest to gushing the man has ever come. He says, these stories are also a treasure , to savour and to hoard. They begin with her early works, from 1962-6. The Man Who Loved the Double Bass tells the story of a musician in madly love with his instrument. Could he live without her? In the section called Fireworks; Nine Profane Pieces from 1974, Carters work begins an ethereal exploration on of the psyche in achingly beautiful prose. Her ability to write fantastical tableaus is showcased. In The Executioners Daughter, an executioner is told to execute his only son. The setting, itself, becomes a character. In Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest, a brother and sister are nudged into exploring the a dark forest and its hidden fruit tree. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is next, featuring writings from 1979. These are fairy tales retold for adults and contains some of the most stunning and psychological erotic written. Black Venus contains writing from 1985 and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, work from 1993. Uncollected Stories contains work from 1970-81, featuring The Scarlet House, about a woman trapped in a house by a master of Chaos.

These short stories are profane, wise, surreal, unrepentant and brilliant. The Tiger's Bride alone is worth the price of admission in to this magical world." - Jennifer Jordan

The Invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares

Amazon:

The Island of Doctor Moreau inspired this 1940 novella. Set on a mysterious island, The Invention of Morel is a story of suspense and exploration as well as an unlikely romance, where every detail is both crystal clear and deeply mysterious. Susan Jill Levine's revision of Ruth Simm's translation offers a new experience of an uncanny work of genius.

Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand D. Celine

Amazon:

"For the uninitiated, Journey to the End of the Night is a 450-page chronicle of anger, bitterness, hopelessness, despair, disillusionment, and resignation. It is one of the most pessimistic, negative books ever written. It addresses almost every base and negative aspect of the human experience: warfare, cowardice, lies, corruption, betrayal, slavery, manipulation, exploitation, perversion, persecution, cheating, greed, sickness, loneliness, madness, lust, gossip, abortion, disease, vengeance, and murder. In a book that explodes with adjectives, there is hardly a cheerful word to be found.

But don't let that stop you from reading it. It is also a weird and wonderfully written mix of prose, philosophy, rant, and slang. At times it is hilarious. It is also sad, moving, and deeply insightful. Celine's voice is unique, and his dark vision changed the face of twentieth century literature.

True to its title, the book is a metaphorical journey into the dark side of humanity. It doesn't really have a plot. In a nutshell, it follows Ferdinand Bardamu (who is telling the story), who joins the army on a whim, entering World War I. The fear and madness of his war experiences leave him shell-shocked. He spends the remainder of the war convalescing in a hospital, where he spends his time avoiding the front, laying nurses, and pulling himself together. After the war, he yearns to escape, so he travels to the French African colonies to run a trading post deep in the jungle. There, he contracts malaria and is sold into slavery by a Portuguese priest, only to be dumped in a quarantine facility in New York.

He eventually winds up in Detroit, where he works a dead-end factory job at Ford and falls in love with a prostitute. Restless, he leaves his love behind and returns to France. There he completes his medical studies, and begins a practice in a Paris slum. After enduring abject poverty for several years, he leaves his practice in disgust; eventually he winds up working in a private mental hospital in Paris.

Throughout the story, and at each major stop of his journey, Ferdinand encounters Robinson, a fellow traveler and nihilist. As the book progresses, Robinson lures the unwilling Ferdinand into a series of misadventures, taking him deeper and deeper "into the night."

I first read this book about 15 years go, in my mid-twenties. I had a stultifying corporate job, and I thought the next 40 years of my life were going to be nothing but empty and meaningless drudgery. In short, I thought my life was already over. So when I first read Journey, I was immediately hooked. It perfectly voiced all of the loathing and emptiness I was feeling. And sadly, it reinforced every dark, evil, vile thought I had about life and humanity. In retrospect, I realize it inspired and fueled my depression, which dogged me for another two and a half years.

I finally scraped up the courage to make some changes in my life, and my own "night" faded into daylight. And for the most part, the darkness has stayed away. So, 13 years later, it is with very different eyes that I finished reading Journey for the second time.

So how was it the second time around? How has this poisoned wine aged? It has aged beautifully. It is a tremendous book, and I still love it. Celine perfectly voices the world-weariness and despair that accompany hopelessness. And he captures the restless urge to escape when there is no meaning in your life. It wasn't as funny as I remembered, but it seemed more insightful, more devastating, and even more sweeping in it vast range of observations.

I also found it slowly pulling me back into my own dark place-but only momentarily. With a bit of effort I was able to keep things in check. But it's good to look back now and again, to remember where you came from and how you've grown. Celine's world is a sad, bitter, and lonely place. But it's a place we all visit from time to time. Sadly, some are trapped there, never ending their grim journey. Read this book and enter their world." - John M. Lemon

Guignol's Band - Louis-Ferdinand D. Celine

Amazon:

"It's almost impossible to break Celine's works down into the usual category of "books." Basically everything he wrote, his entire oevre, is one metabook. If you want to get sequential, start with Death on the Istallment Plan and work your way up from there. DOTIP deals in large part with "Ferdinand's" childhood and we are treated to descriptions of a surreal upbringing (an entire neighborhood enclosed in soot-encrusted glass, a mother and father depicted as slightly less than imebeciles). I would then suggest reading Journey to the End of the Night (primarily about WW1 and his trip to America), Guignol's Band, London Bridge (Guignol's Band II), Rigadoon, Castle to Castle and North. All have been well translated. Don't be put off by puffy readers who say that these texts can only be appreciated in French. This is one author who comes through loud and clear (probably just as biting and clever in Swahili) in translation. Celine deals in high comedy and his novels move at the pace of a Mack Sennet or Charlie Chaplin film. The energy is always frenetic and he seldom allows you any lulls. The descriptions in this book of "The Leicester Boarding House," lorded over by Cascade, Dr. Clodovitz, the wounded-in-the-ass Joconde, Boro - master of the keyboards, but most of all Titus Von Claben, will leave you howling if Celine strikes a responsive chord. If he doesn't, then you have a different sort of sensibility than mine and should probably avoid this author at all costs. There is nothing Keilloresque about Celine. He came up out of the Paris slums and witnessed some of the most horrific scenes the 20th century produced. That he came out of it all with a sense-of-the-ridiculous intact is a marvel in itself. He was on the wrong side of most issues his entire life. He made some stupid choices. But those who maintain that he wallowed in self-pity are way off the mark. He always points to himself as his own worst culprit. He never pretends to heroism. He is, like Chaplin, always the fall-guy, but is also, in the same light, a survivor. He gets up after his prat-falls, dusts himself off and heads on towards the next chapter." - Bruce Kendall

"Like his Bulgarian pianist-pimp boro, Celine enters the house of the gangster novel, hurls a grenade and flees, recording the pieces. This is an underworld novel Lautreamont might have written - indeed, the first third reads like an update of 'Maldoror', less narrative chapters than prose poems of war, urban fever and mental breakdown, imploding under the simultaneous tension of concentration and fragmentation. The opening sequence is thus very difficult to read, the air attack on a traffic-jammed bridge imaged in a verbal bombing, which, while undeniably brilliant and exciting is very exhausting.

if you are understandably tempted to give up, persevere - the novel 'settles' into a relatively conventional (and hilarious) plot, divided into three sequences dominated by three larger-than-life father figures who take the hero under their wing - a ganglord, a pawnbroker, a magician.

Despite a vibrant vision of London rarely experienced in literature, Celine constantly pushes material normally associated with generic materiality into the realm of magic, farce, fairy-tale, pantomime, the Guignol of the title - the novel's complex allusiveness includes Shakespeare and the Arabian Nights. This conflict, between realistic content and fantastic/theatrical form gives the novel its feeling of being on the brink of collapse; its eruptions into brawls (both narrative and verbal) looks forward to Pynchon's 'V'.

Be warned - although you wouldn't know it from the information on this edition, this is only the first part of a two-volume novel (the second is translated as London Bridge). I didn't know this when reading, which was obviously affected." - darrah o'donoghue

North - Louis-Ferdinand D. Celine

Moravagine - Blaise Cendrars

Amazon:

"As one commentator has said, this disturbing book, with its two anarchist lead characters, is Cendrars' view of the artistic process, viewed from the destructive perspective; to recall Michael Bakunin (1814-76), "The passion for destruction is also a constructive passion," a famous utterance which is like a watermark behind everything which occurs in _Moravagine_.

There is no fun or point in giving away the picaresque plot of this extraordinary work. I have no idea how this reads in the original french, but the english translation by Alan Brown (Penguin) is clear and compelling. Apart from the disease imagery, present from the first to the last, there are many luxuriant images and, on the whole, an intensity which retains power even when people today have read or seen so much about terrorists and murderers. As the narrator and Moravagine make their way across continents, the pace flags, notably in the Blue Indians section, but Cendrars' vision, and the slow, inexorable unwinding of the narrator's previous self-confidence and enormous conceits become more interesting than Moravagine's own nature. Anticipating postmodernist writers, Cendrars includes a snapshot (a fake one, to be sure) of himself as a minor character whose path crosses the two killers.

A convert to Cendrars, having just finished _Moravagine_, would best follow it with the Dan Yack books (_Dan Yack_; _Confessions of Dan Yack_), and then the uneven but exhilirating tetralogy comprising _The Astonished Man_, _Planus_, _Lice_ and _Sky_. If one can forget Nina Rootes' interference with Cendrars' own presentation of his material, then these hard to obtain books (most out of print) are well worth reading. An excellent critic on Cendrars (and more respectful translator) is Monique Chefdor.

Blaise Cendrars is a neglected Modernist who does not make a big enough blip on english radar, partly because he was not affiliated with any political group or -isms. He rarely receives extensive mention in anthologies or reviews of french letters written in english. His daughter, Miriam, has published a biography which is at present only in french. University libraries are the most reliable places to find a good selection of his works." - Jeff Bursey

The Troika - Steven Chapman

Infinity Plus:

Three travellers are crossing a desert under the intense glare of three suns. They don't know why they're crossing the desert and they don't know what they'll find on the other side. They've been crossing the desert for a long time, too: for centuries. They can't even escape by killing each other, although they try often enough.

Alex is a man who has always wanted to be a machine; when we first encounter him in the desert he is the guiding intelligence of a jeep (but things change in Chapman's strange fictional world, things never stay the same). Eva is an old Mexican woman, although she has been a fish-priestess and later a whore. Their daughter, Naomi, is a brontosaur who was once a military corpsicle.

If this is starting to sound weird, then that's because it is. And it gets weirder...

The story of their journey across the desert is interspersed with dream-sequence flashbacks, returning us to various transformed versions of the 20th Century. Some of these vignettes are rather dense in imagery and language, others are striking and powerful: there's a wonderful horror scene where a young man who'd been frightening his girlfriend by recounting incidents from a splatter movie is confronted by a far more immediate, personal horror; there's a brilliant sequence where Alex recalls the extreme methods he employed when he worked as a pest control robot.

The dreams and flashbacks are often meandering and full of contradictions and delusions. Their effect is subtle and the picture they build up is slow to form, yet nonetheless relentless.

In The Troika, we have three unreliable narrators in an unreliable world, each taking turns to tell us their unreliable histories.

And Chapman's great achievement with this novel is that not only does he deliver a strange and surreal melange of imagery, not only does he work at language and form, teasing and pulling about his sentences and scenes with playful artistry ... not only does he do all that: he does it without ever really losing touch with the kind of narrative momentum more familiar to thriller readers. Yes, some of the dream sequences threaten to tie you up in knots of illogic and, yes, sometimes the language is too tricksy and florid, but regardless, you just have to keep going, have to keep building up Chapman's mosaic in your head, have to get to the end.

It's the kind of book you read, and somewhere in the back of your mind a little voice says: He's not going to pull it off. He's not going to pull it off. He's not going to pull it off.

In novels like this ("novels like this" - what am I saying? There are no novels like this!)...

But anyway... in novels like this, there comes an inevitable point where some kind of underpinning logic has to emerge from the weirdness: too little explication and the reader is liable to feel let down, betrayed; too much and all that has gone before is liable to look just a little silly. Chapman gets it right, he delivers. Somehow he's managed to write a novel of the weird with the narrative drive of something far more conventional. Little wonder that it has been praised by John Shirley, Brian Stableford, Paul McAuley and others. Little wonder that it rapidly seems to be acquiring cult status.

If you spot it in a bookshop, buy it -- you won't find another novel like it in a long time. You'll recognise it by the stunning cover art by Alan M Clark. Or you could always order it from one of the addresses below, just to be sure." - Keith Brooke

The Man Who Was Thursday (1907) - G. K. Chesterton

Amazon:

"For a book that's only about a hundred pages long, "The Man Who Was Thursday" is pretty packed.

G.K. Chesterton's classic novella tackles anarchy, social order, God, peace, war, religion, human nature, and a few dozen other weight concepts. And somehow he manages to mash it all together into a delightful satire, full of tongue-in-cheek commentary that is still relevant today.

As the book opens, Gabriel Symes is debating with a soapbox anarchist. The two men impress each other enough that the anarchist introduces Symes to a seven-man council of anarchists, all named after days of the week. In short order, they elect Symes their newest member -- Thursday.

But they don't know that he's also been recruited by an anti-anarchy organization. And soon Symes finds out that he's not the only person on the council who is not what he seems. There are other spies and double-agents, working for the same cause. But who -- and what -- is the jovial, powerful Mr. Sunday, the head of the organization?

Hot air balloons, elaborate disguises, duels and police chases -- Chesterton certainly knew how to keep this novel interesting. Though written almost a century ago, "The Man Who Was Thursday" still feels very fresh. That's partly because of Chesterton's cheery writing... and partly because it's such an intelligent book.

He doesn't avoid some timeless topics that make some people squirm. Humanity (good and bad), anarchy, religion and its place in human nature, and creation versus destruction all get tackled here -- disguised as a comic police investigation. And unlike most satires, it isn't dated; the topics are reflections of humanity and religion, so they're as relevant now as they were in 1908.

But the story isn't pedantic or boring; Chesterton keeps things lively by having his characters act like real people, rather than mouthpieces. From Symes to the Colonel to the mysterious Sunday himself, they all have a sort of friendly, energetic quality. "We're all spies! Come and have a drink!" one of the characters announces cheerfully near the end.

And of course, once the madcap police investigations are finished, there's still a mystery. Who is Sunday? What are his goals? And for that matter, WHAT is Sunday -- genius, force of nature, villain or god? The answer is a bit of a surprise, and as a reflection of Chesterton's beliefs, it's a delicate, intelligent piece of work.

"The Man Who Was Thursday" is a wacky little satire that will both amuse and educate you. Not bad for a book often subtitled "A Nightmare."" - E. A. Solinas

Fancies and Goodnights - John Collier

His Monkey Wife or Married to a Chimp - John Collier

Reviews:

Every other summer or so I reread "His Monkey Wife" by John Collier and urge others to do so, too. The stumbling block has been that the book has been out of print for years. I, of course, am far too wise in the ways of the world to lend anyone my own copy. ("Never lend books," advised Anatole France, "for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those that other people have lent me.") So, I am happy to report that Collier's work has just returned to print thanks to Paul Dry Books .

The novel is one of the great idiosyncratic comedies in English - a designation, incidentally, that is a literary category in my mind. To it belong other such noble curiosities as Stella Gibbons's "Cold Comfort Farm," Flann O'Brien's "At Swim Two Birds," G. V. Desani's "All About H. Hatter," J. R. Ackerley's "Hindoo Holiday," L. Rust Hill's "How to Retire at Forty-one," and - well, we'll leave the full list for another day [DAMN!!! Ed.]. Suffice it to say that what distinguishes the books in this category is not only that each is so idiosyncratic as to be sui generis, but also that the fulcrum of their comedy is cultural piety and the Western literary tradition. (It may be, alas, that in this day of enlightenment, the works can be enjoyed only by readers of "a certain age.")

"His Monkey Wife" is written in high-flown, often urgent, prose. It is a love story and concerns Mr. Fatigay, a schoolmaster, and his "petite, dark and vivacious" disciple, Emily: the toast of the British Museum Reading Room and a chimpanzee. As in most love stories there are moments of passionate jealousy, longing, and fierce romantic intrigue, all conveyed with such a fine and delicate sensibility that one should, perhaps, be ashamed of oneself for laughing. But then, as P. G. Wodehouse observed, comedy is "the kindly contemplation of the incongruous." - Katherine Powers

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (1499) - Francesco Colonna

A Great Place to Die - Sean Connolly

Gerald's Party - Robert Coover

Reviews:

""Gerald's Party" depicts a single evening in the life of Gerry, a married man who has opened his home to a flood of strange friends, and describes the chaotic string of strange events which occur. The book is written in real time, its 300 pages comprising a single narrative, unbroken by chapters, from the party's beginning to its end. Gerry is the narrator, proceeding from event to event, unable to control anything, and hardly able to understand anything, including himself.

The book is experimental, but does have a plot, concerning a murder-mystery at Gerry's party of strange guests. The story is told in the tradition of surrealists, however, and not a straightforward narrative. Once the reader settles into understanding how the story works, it becomes a joyful romp through mad times.

The theme of the book is very simple: life is a major mess, and it just keeps going. People eat and drink, sleep and sex, live and die, digest and waste, kill and protect, mate monogamously and share polyamorally, control themselves and let themselves go, have children and have fun, grow up and act childish, dirty and clean, dress and undress, lie and speak true, think scientifically and think artistically, fantasize and live pragmatically, search for philosophical meaning and live hedonistically for today. And they never stop! Robert Coover pushes all the buttons in the psyche of the human animal, as if writing a reference manual for an extraterrestrial, telling it: "Here's humanity. Welcome to it!"

This book is experimental and surreal, but arguably more accessible than Beckett, and certainly more earthy and explicit. (This is so Coover can push all your buttons.) It uses an interesting form of dialog occasionally: two or three different conversations interweave their lines, making it a joyful challenge to follow along, and creating interesting intersections at times. There are two dozen characters, all with their own independent dynamic, and Coover mixes them with entertaining effect. Some are consistent, such as the wife, the son, the mother-in-law, and others, who exercise their own unique idiosyncracies steadily throughout the book, like pschological points of reference interweaving with the other characters.

This book is very well done. I cannot praise it highly enough. Coover deserves immense credit for pulling it all off. Once the reader understands the story is meant to be absurd, not literal, it becomes great fun, very vivid, and memorable. Coover is extremely imaginative, and "Gerald's Party" is a fantastic riot." - Hovig J. Heghinian

Pricksongs and Descants: Fictions - Robert Coover

Cronopios and Famas - Julio Cortazar

Reviews:

Saturated with the starkness of the pampas, Cronopios and Famas is at once a disturbing and exhilarating collection of short, short vignette-proclamations. Containing little to do with anything and yet much to do with everything, I'd call this a surrealist's fairy-fragments, a lazy Sunday afternoon sundae that at once calls to be slurped in a gulp and teases us into enjoying it languorously. - Subir Grewal

Divided onto four sections, Cronopios and Famas offers an enjoyable introduction to the mind of Julio Cortazar.

The first section is an Instruction Manual, offering precise and sometimes far-fetched instructions on a number of unlikely subjects -- "How to Comb the Hair", "How to Cry", "How to Wind a Watch" (instructions that come with their own preamble), and "How to Kill Ants in Rome". Not necessarily the most useful advice, but these are clever pieces, going off on small (and sometimes obscure) tangents as Cortázar sees fit. Varied and short, one would not mind more of these instructions. - Complete Review
...

""Cronopios and Famas," by Julio Cortazar, is one of those wonderful books that stands in a class by itself. It has been translated from Spanish into English by Paul Blackburn. The book is a collection of interconnected short pieces that often blur the distinctions between the short story and the essay; some of the pieces further share aspects of poetry and drama. Cortazar also incorporates elements of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and comedy into this work. Call "Cronopios and Famas" a novel, if you prefer; or simply label it "experimental literature." But whatever you call it, read it!

The book is divided into four main sections, each of which is further subdivided into several short pieces. The first section, "The Instruction Manual," contains such pieces as "Instructions on How to Cry" and "Instructions on How to Climb a Staircase." Cortazar invites us to look at everyday things and actions from a radically altered perspective; in the process, he seems to point towards an occult, or metaphysical, wisdom.

The second section, "Unusual Occupations," details the antics of a bizarre family (think TV's "Addams Family" as drawn by Dr. Seuss, with input from Franz Kafka). The third section, "Unstable Stuff," is the most varied and chaotic section of the book, and is rich in fantastic and absurd elements.

The final section of the book has the same title as the entire book: "Cronopios and Famas." In several short vignettes Cortazar draws a portrait of an alternate society populated by three different types (races? castes? species?) of beings: Cronopios, Famas, and Esperanzas. Cortazar describes the individuals of each group, and details many instances of social interactions between the groups. This final section of the book is reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," but more cryptic. Along the way we witness the invention of the "wild-artichoke clock" and get a glimpse of "GENITAL, the Cigarette with Sex."

"Cronopios and Famas" is not for the lazy reader. I must admit that after my first reading of the book, I didn't really like it that much. But the second time I read it, I said to myself, "This is brilliant! What was wrong with me the first time I read it?" I wonder what my reactions will be on my third and fourth readings. This book, rich in irony and remarkable images, is truly a remarkable achievement by one of the most innovative masters of 20th century literature." - Michael J. Mazza

Hopscotch - Julio Cortazar

Reviews:

"It has taken me years to sit down and finally make a serious commitment to read Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch/La Rayuela." I cannot think of a better companion to devote a few weeks to, maybe even a bit longer - hey, whatever it takes! It depends on your reading speed and the time you take to savor the poetry of the author's language. So, be willing to make a small personal investment in this very special novel, and the reward you reap will be a worthy one. Julio Cortazar will take you to places you have never been before in literature, and may never experience again. I read "Hopscotch" over this past summer, after a thirty year delay. I can be real stubborn about putting off what is good for me!! Cortazar's imagination is boundless, his prose rich and luminous, his wit and sophistication rare, the dialogue brilliant, the plot...I won't attempt to describe that with a few adjectives. Wander through the extraordinary labyrinthine plot on you own - the way is yours to discover. I promise, you won't get lost!

My introduction to "La Rayuela", (which means hopscotch, like the children's game), is a personal story. I will make it quick. About 30 years ago, while living in Latin America, a friend told me that I reminded him of a character in a novel. The character, La Maga - the book "La Rayuela/Hopscotch." With personal interests at stake and much curiosity, I bought a copy in Spanish, which I read with some fluency at the time. After experimenting with which way to approach the novel, and trying both ways, I gave up...and just read the parts about La Maga. I was too impatient at that point in my life, and needed to become a mellower person, to read slower, with more of a sense of play and participation. And Cortazar wants his readers to participate - to make reading his book an interactive experience, not a passive one. I was and still feel touched when I remember my friend's comments regarding La Maga. She is a magnificent character and Cortazer's prose, his language, (Spanish), is exquisite. So, I thought I'd give it another try, in English, perhaps with better results. None! I just wasn't ready, I guess. That happens to me with fiction sometimes. I have to be open to the experience. However, after all these years, I still thought of Horacio Oliveira and La Maga from time to time. And why not? They are truly unforgettable. As I wrote above, I did make time, at last. For an adventure of a lifetime, I recommend you do the same.

When Julio Cortazar published "La Rayuela" in 1966, he turned the conventional novel upside-down and the literary world on its ear with this experiment in writing fiction. He soon became an important influence on writers everywhere. "Hopscotch" is considered to be one of the best novels written in Spanish. This is an interactive novel where readers are invited to rearrange its sections and read them in different sequences. Read in a linear fashion, "Hopscotch" contains 700 pages, 155 chapters in three sections: "From the Other Side," and "From This Side" - the first two sections are sustained by relatively chronological narratives and so contrast greatly with the third section, "From Diverse Sides," (subtitled "Expendable Chapters"), which includes philosophical extrapolation, character study, allusions and quotations, and an entirely different version of the "ending."

The book has no table of contents, but rather a "Table of Instructions." There, we learn that two approved readings are possible: from Chapter 1 through 56 "in a normal fashion", or from Chapter 73 to Chapter 1 to... well, wherever the chapters lead you. The instructions are all in your book and are extremely clear. At the end of each chapter there is a numeric indicator to lead the reader to the next chapter. One never knows where one will be lead. Due to its meandering nature, "Hopscotch" has been called a "Proto-hypertext" novel. Cortázar probably had this work in mind when he stated, "If I had the technical means to print my own books, I think I would keep on producing collage-books."

What is most important, as a reviewer, is to give you, the prospective reader, an idea of the narrative and the characters...and to tell you why reading this novel was such an extraordinary experience for me. Horacio Oliveira, our protagonist and sometimes narrator, is an Argentinean expatriate, an intellectual and professed writer in 1950's bohemian Paris. He and his close friends, members of "the Club," do lots of partying, drinking, and intellectualizing, discussing art, literature, music and solving the world's problems. Oliveira lives with and loves La Maga, an exotic young woman, somewhat whimsical, at times almost ephemeral who leaves behind her, like the scent of a light perfume, a feeling of poignancy and inevitable loss. La Maga refuses to plan her encounters with Oliveira in advance, preferring instead to run into each other by chance. Then she and Oliveira celebrate the series of circumstances that reunite them - although he knows well the places she frequents and is capable of causing at least a few planned surprises. Eventually, he loses La Maga, who loses her child. With her absence, Oliveira realizes how empty and meaningless his life is and he returns to his native Buenos Aires. There he finds work first as a salesman, then a keeper of a circus cat, and an attendant in an insane asylum.

As Oliveira wends his way through France, Uruguay and Argentina looking for his lost love, "Hopscotch's" narrative takes on an emotionally intense stream of consciousness style, rich in metaphor. Back In Argentina, Oliveira shares his life with his bizarre double, Traveler, and Traveler's wife, Talita, whom Oliveira attempts to remake into a facsimile of La Maga. The game of hopscotch is only developed as a conceit late in the narrative. It is first used to describe Oliveira's confused love for La Maga as "that crazy hopscotch." The theme develops as a metaphor for reaching Heaven from Earth. "When practically no one has learned how to make the pebble climb into Heaven, childhood is over all of a sudden and you're into novels, into the anguish of the senseless divine trajectory, into the speculation about another Heaven that you have to learn to reach too." The variations on the children's game are described as "spiral hopscotch, rectangular hopscotch, fantasy hopscotch, not played very often." The allusions continue and include some beautiful passages.

"Hopscotch" is much more than a novel. Ultimately, it is best left for each reader to define what it is for himself/herself. Pablo Neruda in a famous quote said, "People who do not read Cortazar are doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease." I don't know whether I would go so far. Remember, I put off the experience for many years. But this is one novel that should be read during one's lifetime. It is brilliant and it is fun!" - Jana L. Perskie

The Complete Wandering Ghosts - F. Marion Crawford

Reviews:

"At the beginning of the twentieth century, F. Marion Crawford was one of the most prolific, widely-read novelists of the English-speaking world--a sort of Sidney Sheldon of the Edwardian era. Now, his novels are banished to the musty shelves of old-fashioned romance and historical fiction, but his supernatural tales live on, most especially "The Upper Berth" and "The Screaming Skull."

Lee Weinstein has collected all eight of Crawford's supernatural stories, some of them gothic in the extreme, others oozing pathos. But this author was at his best when writing of the sea and its unforgiving dead. Many of his stories retain a place of honor in ghostly anthologies for their atmosphere of slowly-building horror. I am in agreement with Lee Weinstein when he says, "One can only regret that he did not write more of them."

"The Dead Smile"--A gothic tale of forbidden love and vengeance from beyond the tomb. We 21st century readers are a bit more used to dealing with the theme of incest, but when Crawford published this tale, it must have shocked many Victorian sensibilities. Incestuous hints abound. The evil, dying Sir Hugh Ockram, his son, and his son's fiancée all have the same hellish smile: "...She smiled--and the smile was like the shadow of death and the seal of damnation upon her pure, young face." The best scenes are in the vault below the castle, where the Lords of Ockram lie in burial shrouds, but not entombed.

"The Screaming Skull"--A doctor murders his wife by pouring molten lead in her ear. He dies mysteriously with his throat torn out. The old seaman who inherits the doctor's cottage also inherits a skull in a hat box. Something inside the skull rattles when he shakes it. When he tries to get rid of the skull, the screams begin.

"Man Overboard!"--This story was worth the price of the book for me, because I'd never seen it before, and it's a great ghost story. Just let the obscure nautical language flow past you, e.g. "I coiled down the mizzen-topsail downhaul myself, and was going aft to see how she headed up..." This is a story of identical twin brothers who both love the same woman. When they go to sea on the 'Boston Belle,' one brother is swept overboard during a storm and drowns--but somehow remains part of the crew. As is true in most supernatural stories featuring a wedding, the innocent bride meets a horrible fate.

"For the Blood is the Life"--I don't much care for vampire stories, but this one is wonderfully eerie. Two men are dining on the roof of an old tower-fortress on the Southern Italian coast. After moonrise, the guest sees a figure lying on a mound of earth near the tower and goes to investigate. When he returns, his host tells him the story of the grave-mound.

"The Upper Berth"--A business traveler who makes many Atlantic crossings secures a berth on the 'Kamchatka,' bound for Liverpool. He requests a room with a double bunk and is disappointed to learn that he will have a roommate in the upper berth. The first night of the voyage, his roommate runs screaming out of the small room and throws himself overboard. The business traveler learns that three other men who booked into room 105 have killed themselves in the same fashion, and he is determined to investigate.

"By the Waters of Paradise"--A gothic tale that has a happy ending for a change. A melancholy young man is raised by his superstitious Welsh nurse in an ancestral castle, surrounded by gardens and fountains. One night the old nurse sees "One--two leaden coffins, fallen from the ceiling!" Sure enough, his parents die, and the nurse tells her charge the story of the Woman of the Water. Will the new lord of Cairngorm be able to escape the curse?

"The Doll's Ghost"--An old man repairs a rich girl's doll and becomes so fond of it he can hardly bear to part with it. Finally, he instructs his young daughter to return the doll to its owner. The daughter doesn't return, but the doll does.

"The King's Messenger"--A man is seated between a lovely young girl and her beloved at a dinner party, and learns that his right-hand neighbor is the King's Messenger. After the girl disappears, he discovers what the man really does." - E. A. Lovitt

Gascoyne - Stanley Crawford

Reviews:

"Stanley Crawford's 1966 novel "Gascoyne" is the sort of book that hooks you on the first page. Not only that, it grabs you and runs away with such momentum that, at least for the first 100 pages of the novel, you almost don't want to blink. The bizarre anti-hero of the book, Gascoyne, at first appears to be a private detective but then, maybe, a fiendish uber-capitalist bent on something like world domination. Not only that, Gascoyne seems to be not entirely human. He passes weeks at a time in his car, contrives to always go double the speed limit in a traffic-choked city, runs a huge company with only a handful of employees knowing him by sight, and manages to thrive on a diet of Ritz crackers, sardines, and chocolate bars.

The book is a dark, modern satire on the order of "Dr. Strangelove" or DeLillo's "White Noise." The doggedly-bleak, burlesque tone sometimes becomes wearying, but usually you'll go ahead and laugh at the jokes (whether you feel good about it or not) because Crawford allows you no choice in the matter. Take the following passage in which Gascoyne spies on a misbehaving wife, just recently widowed. Gascoyne climbs a ladder, looks in a window, and:

"First there's the Widow Roughah stretched out on the bed naked as all hell and second more or less on top of her is the hairy-chested fake giant tree sloth, and I think some people sure like to butter their bread funny. I always thought there was more than meets the eye in that woman and now I know what. But I really feel sorry for the poor b*stard inside the sloth suit which must smell like twenty-nine jockstraps in a pressure cooker. But maybe he likes that, you never know."

As wild a ride as "Gascoyne" is, there is something that brings it down in the end. Crawford's error comes in allowing his deep cynicism to infect his storytelling technique. It really seems that Crawford felt that things weren't worth tying together, even in a marginal way, and that he just stopped writing when he got bored with the character. So, when all is said and done, the book leaves enough loose ends cluttering up the landscape to make you feel not only irritated but a bit ripped off. If a little more care had been taken with the ending, the novel might have ranked with other counter-culture classics of the period, such as the novels of Rudolph Wurlitzer and Richard Brautigan." - A. C. Walter

The Pooh Perplex - Frederick Crews

Reviews:

"I ran across a reference to Postmodern Pooh about a week ago, and I decided to read Crews' first Pooh satire before reading the latest. What a gas! Crews takes the prevalent methods of literary criticism leading up to the 1960s and apes them with a deft touch. One of my favorite moments was when "C. J. L. Culpepper, D.Litt., Oxon.," after determining the Christic nature of Eeyore, declares that Christopher Robin is a stand-in for God the Father. He proves this simply: "Christopher Robin" is an anagram for "I HOPE CHRIST BORN. R." ("I take this to be a decree in the hortatory imperative, dispatched to the Heavenly Host, urging the speedy fulfillment of the Incarnation and signed 'R' for REX.")

Admittedly, the book does drag at times, but only rarely, and probably due to Crews' too perfect mimicry of the rather dry literary personae being roasted over the flames. Not many books make me laugh out loud on every page -- this is one of them." - Chris Tessone

A Feast of Snakes - Harry Crews

Reviews:

"Only Harry Crews could write a novel filled with unlikable charcters who have no redeeming qualities and make it work. That Crews is an outstanding writer should be a given to those familiar with his work. That his writing is often angry and depressing should come as no surprise. But I never would have thought he had a book like "A Feast Of Snakes" in him. This is the written equivalent of a shotgun blast to the belly.

"A Feast Of Snakes" is more than an angry book; it boils over with rage. Joe Lon Mackey isn't just a Southern redneck stereotype, he is the embodiment of the frustration and desperation of America's rural poor. "Deliverance" reads like a fairy tale in comparison to this novel.

The tone of "A Feast Of Snakes" is vile and hateful. It feels like Crews' most personal work, perhaps written at a time when Crews was going through a living hell of his own. Like Joe Lon Mackey, Crews comes from a poor, rural area of Georgia. Unlike Joe Lon, Crews' skills afforded him the opportunity to break away from the endless cycle of violence, ignorance, hatred and self destruction that is Joe Lon's life. But Crews hasn't forgotten. As detestable as Joe Lon is, it is obvious that Crews has a certain respect for - or at least feels a kinship with - the character.

You will likely feel unsettled after reading this novel. You may feel angry. You will certainly feel something and you will feel it intensely. This book grabs you by the throat and bangs your head against the wall for seemingly no reason. But maybe there is a reason. Maybe someone finally realized that in order to properly convey the impotent fury of the Joe Lon's of the world, the story must be written with cold, hard, unflinching honesty. Love it or hate it, you simply can't deny the truth that Crews has the guts to tell with a defiant pride." - M. Langhoff

Little, Big - John Crowley

Amazon:

"You don't have to like science fiction or fantasy to love Little, Big. Anyone who appreciates beautifully crafted writing and books that touch the deepest part of soul should find what their looking for here. John Crowley is one of the most wonderful writers in existence and Little, Big is certainly his best effort to date. His wonderful (and wondrous) books do unfold without a lot of John Grisham action, so if that's your idea of great literature, Little, Big probably wouldn't be for you.

About half of this gorgeous story takes place in New York City, although Crowley never actually calls it that, he just writes, "the City," while the other half takes place at Edgewood (you will find as you read that none of the names in this book are chosen at random, each has a special significance that eventually becomes crystal clear). Edgewood is an unsurpassingly complicated house, built around the turn of the century, by an architect whose wife could see...faeries.

Although we never meet the faeries directly in this novel, their presence is felt through almost all of the book. They are the faeries of A Midsummer Night's Dream, embodying the qualities of mischievousness, whimsy, capriciousness and untrustworthiness. The faeries are also an odd mix of power and vulnerability, but their spirit is in decline. Much of what happens in Little, Big happens because the faeries must rejuvenate the old with the new. Far from being a simple tale of magic or fantasy, this a highly complex one; Little, Big is a mammoth work of more than 600 pages in length.

The story begins with Smoky Barnable, an ordinary man who marries into an extraordinary family (the architect's great-granddaughter). It is Smoky who introduces us to Edgewood and to the subtle, but fantastic presence that his wife's family seems to take for granted. Smoky has a difficult time adjusting and sometimes he feels as though he's the only sane person in an otherwise insane world. The other residents of Edgewood see it differently; they somehow realize that a grand scheme is being played out and that once it is, their lives, as well as the lives of the faeries, will take on a luminous new meaning.

As we near the end of the century, Smoky's son Auberon leaves Edgewood for the City. It is, however, not quite the magical city that Smoky knew. There is a depression, nothing runs quite like it should and a feeling of dread looms over all. Against this background of dread, Auberon meets and falls in love with Sylvie. It is her disappearance that provides the catalyst for the final act of the faeries' scheme.

Despite Little, Big's length, not a word in the book is wasted. Everything is essential, everything is perfect and everything is perfectly placed. There are digressions and detours, but they all have their purpose. And, even if they didn't, they are a joy to read, in and of themselves.

This is a book that unfolds slowly, like new Spring leaves or roses on a perfect summer's day, but slowly is just right for Little, Big. Crowley conveys so many emotions in this book: joy, sorrow, loss, lust but most of all, love. By the time you reach the end, you come to a slow but perfect understanding of why the faeries' rejuvenation is so crucial. This is a beautiful and beautifully-told tale and one that lingers...like a lover's kiss or the end of that perfect summer's day." - A Reader

Astra and Flondrix - Seamus Cullen

House of Leaves (2000) - Mark Z. Danielewski

Reviews:

"This postmodern, typographically chaotic novel is a monstrous book, both in page numbers and ambition. It is the literary equivalent of "The Ring." As we learn in the introduction, Johnny Truant, a tattoo parlor employee, has come into possession of a trunk full of bizarre scraps of paper once owned by an old blind man, Zampano, now dead. The papers comprise an exploration of a cult film called "The Navidson Record" and its sub-films, documentaries about an ever-expanding house that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside and which consumes the lives of anyone who enters its dark hallways or watches the tapes. Johnny becomes himself obsessed with Zampano's papers and, in turn, with the Navidson house. He is haunted by the beast he smells and the descending madness he had no inclination to stop. The book itself is the melding of Zampano's papers, Johnny's footnote digressions into his own life and its troubles, and the debate among academics as they struggle to make sense of a film that probably never existed. The result is a dark, wild, often hilarious, sometimes excruciatingly boring foray into the meaning of home, family, love, and self.

The structure of the novel is innovative, with Johnny Truant's story unfolding in footnotes and in the appendices, while Zampano describes the film and the academics bicker over its meaning in the body. The most riveting narrative thread in this novel is of Navidson's and others' descents into the smooth walled, dark cavern of the mysterious hallway. The consequences on Navidson's marriage and on those he loves are devastating, and the reader is swept into both the horror and the need for hope. Johnny's story is less compelling, especially as the house fades into the background and his story takes over. The academic over-analysis is tons of fun - as long as you have the patience to get over the dryness to find the kernel it has been working toward. For example, early in the book, Danielewski (in the writings of Zampano) provides a lengthy academic discussion of the myth of Echo and its scientific and literary significance, only to derail it with a Johnny Truant footnote telling the reader that "Frankly I'd of rec'd a quick skip past the whole echo ramble were it not for those six lines . . ."

Even more bizarre than the telling of Truant's tale in footnotes is the typographical methods used to visually evoke the house in the Navidson Record. The words become their own labyrinth, with "hallways" of text enclosed in blue boxes; they sometimes inhabit corners only, or skip up and down the pages, one or two words at a time. When the characters don't know which way is up, the reader is twisting and turning the physical book to read upside down and sideways. You have to see the book to fully appreciate the visual hijinks Danielewski uses. It can take a long time to read certain sections, only to find that you can flip through several pages with just a glance at each.

Despite the suspenseful plot, HOUSE OF LEAVES is anything but a quick read. Its satisfaction is derived more from its individual parts than as a whole since it ends, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, not with a bang but a whimper. I recommend this for patient readers and for those who delight in experimental turns in fiction." - Debbie Lee Wesselmann

"Nor will you find your way out of Danielewski¿s House of Leaves, with its stories within stories, its devious subterranean measurements, its extra dimensions. Footnotes stumble through the text like wayward explorers: sometimes a little closer to home, sometimes completely lost-and losing the reader too. Additional text at the coda of the book serves only to provide some lovely epistolary entertainment that, alas, cannot, under questioning, justify its presence in the narrative. Nonetheless, the Blair Witch-meets-Kierkegaard main story of a family that moves into a house only to find that their house is bigger on the inside than the outside¿namely, an extra six feet of corridor, leading down into a potentially endless series of labyrinths¿is brilliant, meshed as it is with the idea that the photographer head of the family filmed the horrible happenings¿and these film fragments are distributed to folks who think it is a fictional horror movie. Apparently, the house, or the space where the house currently exists, has been around for a long time...

The fractured narrative, the narratives within narratives, the changing points of view, all create a believability that would have been lacking using a traditional narrative structure. Of small import but of great glee to the reader: Danielewski leavens his story with quotes about the film from famous artists, filmmakers, etc., but in such a way that the text absorbs them¿70 years from now, when no one knows who Dr. Joyce Brothers is, her quote will still resonate in this book. The first, joyous, utterly absorbing outburst from a writer who will, one day, write books that are not so much outbursts as beautifully intricate works of art, each element in its proper place.

Motor through the footnotes and the typography experiments as they are but juvenilia next to other such experiments by Alasdair Gray, et al. Instead, focus the meat of your attention on the meat of the text, that it and you may feast on each other in equally ravenous fashion. - Mark VanderMeer

The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy - Avram Davidson

Reviews:

"Long before the words "magical realism" ever cropped up in literary criticism, Avram Davidson was quietly creating a spectacular body of erudite, eloquent, evocative history-as-myth. The Dr. Eszterhazy stories, along with the Vergil novels and "Adventures in Unhistory", are the pinnacle of his accomplishment.

No one has ever had a better ear for dialect, a better sense of the self-importance of minor officials, a better notion of how Balkan politics play out in the back-alleys of minor capitals. And certainly no one has ever had such a perfect (and reverent) sense of the ridiculous, when it comes to the probable behavior of the Vicar-at-Large of the Unreconciled Zwinglians, or the demands of the Frores for an independent Bureau of Weights and Measures, or the universal value of a glass of shnopps, wudky, or St. Martin's." - A Customer

The Other Nineteenth Century - Avram Davidson

Reviews:

"In stories, magic books have the decency to advertise themselves. They come with disturbing skin bindings and huge forbidding clasps, and faded gilt lettering warning the reader not to open this one. Sadly, this is real life, and I have been captured by a magic book disguised as a perfectly ordinary hardback: Avram Davidson's The Other Nineteenth Century. It's grabbed me and sunk itself into my brain, and it's not even as if there were any spells. There are only short stories, but they are living stories. They act like simple, well written tales until the end, when every one of them leaps up to surprise and snatch the reader.

The first story, "O Brave Old World," shows a world nearly our own. The faces in it grow increasingly familiar, until by the end a history that never was seems inevitable and true. "The Singular Incident of the Dog on the Beach" features some familiar characters, on loan from another imagination. "Summon the Watch" tells of the heroism of two old ladies who are just unimportant enough to have lived unnoticed by history.

Avram Davidson plainly studied the history of the real nineteenth century, and there are several stories here seemingly designed to send readers themselves on research trips. "One Morning With Samuel, Dorothy and William" features the heartbreak of broken inspiration. "Traveler From an Antique Land" and "The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon" give a new view on two scandals of the day, one now largely forgotten and one famous. "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire" might be described as an almost-war story, and captures carefully a moment on its way to changing history. These mysteries were closed, but the last turn of these tales opens them up again.

Another story inspired by true history, "Buchanan's Head," deals with a possibly evil piece of sculpture and more properly belongs in the category of Things That Should Not Be. It is joined there by the goddess Diana ("Great is Diana"), a monster of the Americas ("The Peninsula") and a being from either outer space or the demon dimensions ("What Strange Stars and Skies"). In their luggage they carry a demonically possessed camera ("The Montavarde Camera"), and a sort of television tuned to a frightening channel ("The Account of Mr. Ira Davidson"). These louder monsters are joined by the quietly cursed family of "Twenty Three." Davidson writes them all with the same sense of offended order and rationalized hysteria that made the great Victorian horror writers so wonderful.

Perhaps the oddest presentation of a story here is "Mickelrede; or the Slayer and the Staff." It's presented as an outline of a novel by Davidson, who thus posthumously collaborates with Michael Swanwick. It deals with alternate realities, arcane and obsolete technology, and the contestants in the human race who didn't quite reach the finish line. While the knowledge that such a lovely story wasn't completed is teeth-gnashingly frustrating, the outline form is compelling on its own. Like an artist's gesture drawing, it captures a spontaneity that would have been lost in a more complete form.

All this leaves out the more benign and unique oddities roaming these pages; the moderately unfortunate time traveler, strange cryptozoological discoveries, and tragically lost technological advances. There are immortal warriors, scheming witch doctors, and proud tax frauds. Each one tells their story eloquently, and with more shine than I can give them. And they all latch into the brain, leaving their own reality after their pages have stopped.

Even the Afterword following each story is interesting. If the stories are living creatures, then the afterwords are trail guides, indicating where they live and where more of them might be found. I intend to follow, and hope to be held captive by such good company more often." - Sarah Meador

The Avram Davidson Treasury (1998)

Avram Davidson died in 1993, 70 years old and too young. He was, as is so often said, one of the great originals. His writing was elegant and complex, always adapted to the voices of his narrators and characters, and always at some level humorous even when telling a dark story. He was one of those writers whose stories were consistently enjoyable for just wallowing in the prose, with its sprung rhythms and fine, out of the way, images. His stories also were enjoyable for wallowing in atmosphere, with their evocation of exotic place-times, whether it be late-50s New York City or early-70s Belize, turn-of-the-century Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania or far-future Barnum's Planet, and for their evocation of exotic world-views, and the packing and repacking of wondrous, seemingly inconsequential (though rarely truly so) background tidbits of history and unhistory. His best stories took these characteristics and harnessed them in the service of well-honed themes or (sometimes) clever plots.
...
Davidson was at the same time an instantly recognizable writer, with an eccentric and lovable prose style, and a writer of great range. He could do straight comedy, quirky horror, mystery, social criticism, pure fantasy, mainstream, and at least relatively hard SF. (OK, pretty squishy, but real SF for all that.) He's shown in all these phases in this anthology (and of course, many stories combine several of the above features). So read "Author, Author" for comedy, "Dagon" for eerie horror, "The Necessity of His Condition" for bitter social commentary, and "Now Let Us Sleep" for SF (and also bitter social commentary).
... Rich Horton

Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy (1991)

The Deptford Trilogy - Robertson Davies

Reviews:

"I had read some Robertson Davies in the past--Murther and Walking Spirits and The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks--and thought him a fine curmudgeon and a fine Canadian writer, but I had not given him much thought beyond this. I find this to my detriment now, for I remember friends who always had a copy of one or other of his novels about, and I faintly recall many recommendations in the past. So, what made me finally pick up one of these and read it? The recommendation, passed to me second-hand, by my favorite writer, Jonathan Carroll, given as one of his influences for conceiving novels with interlinking characters.

Fifth Business is a marvelous book, and while it doesn't have quite the same mystery or horror of Carroll, it does have an excellent style, and there is indeed a twist or two along the way to keep most any reader sated. Basically the autobiography of Dunstable Ramsay, born around the turn of the century in the small Canadian town of Deptford, Fifth Business details not only Ramsay's life, but also the life of his oldest friend, Percy "Boy" Staunton. What makes this novel so remarkable is how realistic the portrayal is, without bogging down in pages of mundane description. Over the course of the novel, one's understanding for Dunstable grows, both in positive and negative turns, and by the end, he is as an old friend of one's own.

Based on some of the cover blurbs, I had expected a little more magic realism, or at least an edge of the fantastic, to this book, and while it may be there, it is consistently down-played. Normally I am not one to go in for fiction without at least a feeling of the extraordinary, but Davies writing style kept me glued to the page, reading longer into the night than I would ordinarily wish during the work week. And I learned many things, including what the term hagiography refers to, and some feeling for Canada and their strange ties to Britain and the world.

But it is the aspect of Fifth Business itself where this book receives full credit for its recommendation. "Fifth Business" refers to, as related in the novel:

"You don't know what this is? Well, in opera in a permanent company of the kind we keep up in Europe you must have a prima donna--always a soprano, always the heroine, often a fool; and a tenor who always plays the lover to her; and then you must have a contralto, who is a rival to the soprano, or a sorceress or something; and a basso, who is the villain or the rival or whatever threatens the tenor.

So far, so good. But you cannot make a plot work without another man, and he is usually a baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business, because he is the odd man out, the person who has no opposite of the other sex. And you must have Fifth Business because he is the one who knows the secret of the hero's birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of somebody's death if that is part of the plot."

Dunstable is indeed Fifth Business, for he does know the secret of the hero's birth, and does come to the assistance of the heroine, and keeps a woman in her cell, and may even be the cause of Boy Staunton's murder. The trick is discovering who exactly is the hero, and the assistance only lasts for a short time, and being locked in a cell is not always advantageous, and who exactly did murder Boy Staunton? These and more questions are brought up in Fifth Business, some of which are answered.

The Manticore picks up almost where Fifth Business lets off, but quickly reverts to flashback to tell some of the same story from the point of view of Boy Staunton's son, David. David's recollection of some of the events as told by Ramsay are colored by his own life, including the fear introduced by his sister that David is not actually Boy's son, but Ramsay's. Whereas Ramsey was fifth business to Boy Staunton, David is a star in his own story, which is told by a journal that he writes to discuss with his psychotherapist.

It sounds dull, and at times it slows due to the conceit, but Davies has a way of interjecting interest right as you are about to put away the novel. Two-thirds into the novel and it breaks away from the psychotherapy, returns to the "present" of the trilogy, and reunites us with Ramsay and some of the other characters from Fifth Business. The problem with The Manticore is that it is the middle novel, without the refreshing newness of the opening and lacking the rush towards the climax of the concluding novel.

And what a rush World of Wonders is--once again, it covers some of the same ground of the two previous novels, filling in detail about magician Magnus Eisingrim (nee Paul Dempster of Deptford) that also provides additional insight into Ramsey and, in the end, Boy Staunton. Of the three novels, World of Wonders is closest to Carroll. Rather than tell the story from Magnus viewpoint, Davies switches back to Ramsay. However, the story Ramsay tells is of the biographical confessions of Magnus. This way Davies can tell the story from a new viewpoint while retaining the mysterious nature of Magnus (who is the closest to the unreliable narrator used by Carroll) to keep the secret of Boy Staunton's death until the closing minutes. Magnus' history isn't pretty, and the World of Wonders is as a carnival sideshow, full of flash but hiding a seedy underbelly. However, Magnus is not unhappy with his lot, looking back over his life, which is one of the aspects of the story that haunts Ramsay, who feels somewhat responsible (along with Staunton) for Paul Dempster's early life. The philosophical aspect of this is interesting--Davies implies that, while taking responsibility of one's actions is important, there is a statute of limitations on guilt.

The Deptford Trilogy is a strong suite of novels, cunningly wrought and well worth your time. I regret that I had waited this long to discover them." - Glen Engel Cox

The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks - Robertson Davies

Harry Dean at Prep - S. F. X. Dean

Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe - Walter De La Mare

Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delany

The Dynamics of War and Revolution - Lawrence Dennis

Reviews:

_The Dynamics of War and Revolution_ was written by American interventionist capitalist Lawrence Dennis in 1940 just before the involvement of the United States in World War II on the side of the Allies. In this book Lawrence Dennis predicts the coming war in which America was to be immersed and shows why fighting this war will ultimately be not in the best interests of the American people. World War II was sold to the American people on the grounds that it would "make the world safe from fascism" - in which the United States fought against Germany, Italy, and Japan - but as Lawrence Dennis shows by instituting an Industrial Mobilization Plan as well as the New Deal legislation, FDR in effect was able to bring about the fascist revolution here in America. Lawrence Dennis sees in fascism (and national socialism, of course) as well as in the communism of Stalin the revolution and the birth of socialism. According to Dennis, capitalism and democracy were brought about by revolution (the Industrial Revolution) and once this revolution has taken effect the subsequent socialist revolution (resulting in "dictatorship of the proletariat" as predicted by Karl Marx) is inevitable. Dennis argues that Hitler had been able to bring about the revolution in Germany by capturing the capitalists through anti-communism, the nationalists through anti-Versailles rhetoric, and the masses through the anti-Semitic delusion. (Indeed according to Karl Marx, anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.) Rather than preserving capitalism as the bourgeois in Germany had hoped, Hitler in fact had destroyed it and brought about socialism and thus the revolution. Dennis notes how the existence of usury through finance capitalism makes possible interventionist involvement overseas, by the Americans. By issuing fiat money the capitalists force industry to increase production and that this excess must be sent overseas. In times of peace, this is easy enough to do through foreign aid. However, eventually it becomes necessary to do so through war. This is indeed what the elite have intended. Dennis writes this book for the elite and not the masses, having naturally little faith in the mass man or in democracy itself. For the in-elite, the contents of this book are already known and are being used to bring the country into a war. But for the out-elite, this knowledge may prove valuable in their attempt to remain afloat during the subsequent revolution (brought about through the war). Dennis seems to have sympathy for socialism as opposed to liberalism (capitalism plus democracy), although his remarks are largely intended to be merely prophetic and factual without actually taking a side on the whole issue of morality. To Dennis, the current capitalist system fueled through finance capitalism is not in the best interests of the people of the United States and thus will be toppled. Dennis argues that a new "folk unity" among the American people will be made necessary through the subsequent war and the coming revolution in America.

Lawrence Dennis was an early writer who saw the development of socialism within America subsequent to the Second World War. At the time, his comments were greeted with much disapproval from the elite (including FDR and his minions) and he was subsequently tried for sedition. While Dennis wrote in the interests of America, he noted that while he personally was opposed to the coming war, he would do what was in his power to defend America after the war had started (either through propaganda writing or otherwise). This book is one that bypasses the usual Left/Right divide and takes a look at the capitalist situation from a third perspective. Republished by Noontide Press, this book promises to open some eyes to the immorality of the capitalist system which fuels revolution within the United States and across the world. In an era in which a war has been declared on "terror" these writings by Lawrence Dennis are all the more important today." - Prometheus "zosimos"

The Ten Thousand Things - Maria Dermout

NYRB

The Ten Thousand Things is a novel of shimmering strangeness--the story of Felicia, who returns with her baby son from Holland to the Spice Islands of Indonesia, to the house and garden that were her birthplace, over which her powerful grandmother still presides. There Felicia finds herself wedded to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the present. First published in Holland in 1955, Maria Dermout's novel was immediately recognized as a magical work, like nothing else Dutch--or European--literature had seen before. The Ten Thousand Things is an entranced vision of a far-off place that is as convincingly real and intimate as it is exotic, a book that is at once a lament and an ecstatic ode to nature and life.

All About H. Hatter - G. V. Desani

Reviews:

'all about h. hatterr', by the indian author g.v. desani is a novel whose popularity is a bit like the rain in some parts of india - either there's not a drop to be seen or there's a monsoon. when the book first appeared in 1948, it was greeted with a flood of critical acclaim and rare enthusiasm by many distinguished literary critics, including the poet t.s. eliot. a few years later it sank into obscurity, dismissed by the previously enthusiastic west as "just a little savoury from the colonies" - going out of print in 1951 - only to emerge in the seventies as a 'modern classic', with a laudatory introduction by english author anthony burgess (author of 'the clockwork orange' and many other novels, as well as a scholar of james joyce), who called it 'capacious hold-all of a book'. it then again vanished (and went out of print) for another decade, mouldering in crates, until salman rushdie - fter receiving the booker prize for 'midnight's children' in 1981 - acknowledged desani as his literary predecessor and brought 'all about h. hatterr' back into the spotlight. sometime in the mid-eighties it predictably submerged once again and is presently out of print (even in india). but one can still find copies floating about (on the ebbing flood of its 80s popularity); recently, I quite easily located a nice hardback - the first Indian edition (from 1985!)

Bas! Enough of printery-shimentery! So, if you'll kindly allow me to adopt the lingo of H. Hatterr (more on this below) for the nonce, or, to put it most specific, for this paragraph - one might quite understandably be wondering at this moment in time: - Damme, who is this Desani bloke you're on about? And H. Hatterr, what's that feller's obsession with twices, vis a vis, his orthographical peculiarities? What the hell does he need two H's for, much less two T's, and two R's is sheer bloody extravagance. Well, now, I'll tell you all about...

... our friend H.H., who is a charming clever-naïve Anglo-Indian seeking [1] wisdom from the seven sages of India, [2] a bit of ready lucre and [3] the elusive charms of certain females, including a lion(ess)-tamer. Mr Hatterr's 'autobiographical' (as it is presented) recounts the various misfortunes and humiliations he undergoes on his quest for the aforementioned goals: wisdom, capital and carnal knowledge [interjection: I just realised that H.H.'s pursuits match nicely against those set down in the ancient Sanskrit 'Dharma Shastras' ("Law Codes"): the 'Manusmriti' (social philosophy), the 'Arthashastra' (wealth, material gain & kingship) and the well-known 'Kama Sutra' (love & pleasure) - sorry, back to the story...¦]. These punishments include being run out of the European club, getting tricked by dubious swamis, his wife leaving him, having an 'evil spirit' forcibly 'exorcised' and coming damn close to being devoured by a 'tame' beast. His only true friend is his 'Indian pal; Banerrji, who annoys H.H. by quoting to him from the Bible, Shakespeare and the Kama Sutra, and who inadvertently causes many of Hatterr's misfortunes. - Dooyoo
...

Jacques the Fatalist - Denis Diderot

Reviews:

"Two centuries or so before "modern" writers began writing experimental novels, Denis Diderot, the force behind the Encyclopaedia effort, wrote this strange and indeed very "modern" novel in which the author leads a conversation with the reader, asking him where he (or she, of course) would want to go and what to do with the characters and the story. Here we see the author in the very process of creation, exposing his doubts, exploring his options, and playing with the story.

There is really no plot as such. Jacques, a man who seems to believe everything that happens is already written "up on high", but who nonetheless keeps making decisions for himself, is riding through France with his unnamed master, a man who is skeptic of Jacques's determinism but who remains rather passive throughout the book. Fate and the creator-author will put repeatedly to test Jacques's theory, through a series of more or less fortunate accidents and situations, as well as by way of numerous asides in the form of subplots or stories.

The novel is totally disjointed and these asides and subplots blurb all over the place, always interrupted themselves by other happenings. The most interesting of them is the story of Madame de Pommeroy and her bitter but ultimately ineffectual revenge on her ex-lover.

Diderot confesses to having taken much from Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" and Cervantes's "Don Quixote". This last novel's influence seems obvious at two levels: Cervantes also talks to the reader, especially in Part Two, and also reflects abundantly on the creative process. Moreover, the tone and environment of the book is very similar to the Quixote: two people engaged in an endless philosophical conversations while roaming around the countryside and facing several adventures which serve to illustrate one or antoher point of view.

Diderot's humour is bawdy and practical and the book is fun to read. The exact philosophical point is not clearcut, but it will leave the reader wondering about Destiny, Fate, and Free Will." - Guillermo Maynez

On the Psychology of Military Incompetence - Norman Dixon

Reviews:

"As an active duty officer, I found this book to be not only highly entertaining but highly enlightening as well. Dixon could have ground an axe here, but he didn't. His writing is clear, concise, logical, eminently readable, and very accurate in a depiction of what actually goes on in the minds of some officers. While his emphasis is on character development, there is some discussion of unit character as well. A great book for those interested in why we think the way we do, and we can only hope someday, somewhere, someone will publish a second, updated version which includes organizational behavior which reinforces incompetence. His allusions to "The General" by C. Forester are quite appropriate. Definitely a book to be read by active duty as well as civilians." - A Customer

Fup - Jim Dodge

Reviews:

"We once read exerpts at a college Thanksgiving dinner and discovered that while most of us were soon gasping for breath from laughing so hard at that one part where..., our friends from Germany, Sweden, and Japan thought it was amusing, but didn't react at the same deep level. So although this is the book I give to all my new friends, I know it doesn't work for everyone. It also doesn't work for people who have never had dirt under their fingernails. For the rest of us, it's short and funny and deeply real.

It's a book about a duck. And a boar. And Tiny, who builds fences. And Grandaddy Jake Santee, with his Ol' Death Whisper whiskey.

It's a book about livin'." - Amy A. Hanson

The Obscene Bird of Night - Jose Donoso

Amazon:

"The mutations of characters, the non-linear style in which this story is told, the repetitions, shifts in perspective add to make this work a remarkable book. Without a doubt not only one of the finest magical realist works I've ever stumbled upon, but one of the finest novels I have ever read.

As the work has multiple foundations, one of the major ones about Humberto Penaloza, who as a child & adolescent was always told by his father that he must become something, it doesn't matter what, as long as Humberto doesn't go through the same social obscurity that he endures. Later on, he becomes the assistant to Jeronimo, a wealthy politician who is trying to lengthen the family tree. His wife, Ines de Azcoitia is unable to bear him children. Then through either an act of black magic, or Humberto's intimacy Jeronimo is given his child. The child, simply called Boy, is horribly deformed. Jeronimo decides to build the child it's own world, entirely secluded from anything outside of it and surrounded by other people with monstrosities. Humberto is put in charge, and becomes the abnormal one in this newly formed world where deformities is not the exception but the rule. Humberto's abnormality is his plain everyman look, social obscurity. He ends his days in a former catholic church, now peopled by elderly women, either nuns or former servants waiting to die.

This book works on so many different levels & they're always communicating to one another, effortlessly the past becomes the present, it is a hallucinatory poetic parade of the grotesque and the beautfiul, of the grotesque as the beautiful. It is also a commentary on domination in its many forms- husband & wife, father & son, the elderly & the young, master & servant. Sometimes the dominant position is usurped & the roles are reversed.

It's no wonder that both Carlos Fuentes & Luis Bunuel considered it to be a masterpiece." - Scott M. Eaton

The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books - Hal Dresner

Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn

Reviews:

"Lovers of language and readers looking for a unique experience, take note! Ella Minnow Pea is the fascinating story of an independent island nation off the coast of the U.S. (fictional, of course) named after their national hero, Nevin Nollop, originator of the renowned sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Known to all novice typists, this "pangram" contains all letters of the alphabet, with very few repeats.

Nollop has been exalted to saint status for his achievement, and when the monument to his memory--and his memorable pangram--begins to lose letters, town leaders interpret it as a sign from the afterworld that each lost letter must be successively eliminated from all oral and written communication. It is a challenge that is progressively difficult for residents to meet, and they must find creative ways to stay within the law or join the rebels who risk public punishment or even exile. Author Mark Dunn also accepts the challenge of eliminating each letter successively from his novel, which is written entirely as correspondence between two young women in their late teens and other island inhabitants.

Not only an intellectual exercise (although an amazingly successful one), Ella Minnow Pea is an engrossing story as well--both a biting condemnation of a government fanatically self-righteous in its enforcement of the increasingly impossible laws it has imposed, and a hilarious account of the residents' antics in the face of absurdity.

A quick but enthralling read, the book reaches an eminently satisfying conclusion that will leave readers shaking their heads in admiration and struggling to create their own pangrams." - Margie Bunting

Lady Addle Remembers: Being the Memoirs of Lady Addle of Eigg - Mary Dunn

Wikipedia:

"Lady Blanche Addle was a fictitious character created by the British author Mary Dunn (1900 -1958) First published in the 1930's Dunn's Lady Addle books amusingly parody and satire of the then British upper classes, and paricularly the works of Walburga, Lady Paget; Daisy, Princess of Pless and Adeline, Countess of Cardigan and Lancastre. It could also have mentioned Lady Sybil Grant.In her two books Mary Dunn traces the life Lady Blanche Addle nee Coot daughter of the 13th Earl of Coot from her Victorian childhood until World War II.

The books are written in the first person in the form of "memoirs". Lady Blanche details in gushing tones the daily and mundane details of her and her family's uneventful life in such a fashion that she believes they will be of great interest to future generations. written with a subtle humour of which Lady Addle is seemingly unaware. Lady Addle fancies herself a poetess and author whose literary works are of high merit when in fact they are banal, and she gives hilarious suggestions on cookery and entertaining as serious fact.

A second character detailed in the books is "Millicent, Duchess of Brisket", commonly known as "Mipsie." She is Lady Blanche's much married sister, a nymphomaniac, black marketeer, brothel keeper and gold digger, facts which Lady Blanche unwittingly details while concentrating only on the tragedies of Mipsie's life, and how misunderstood she is.

The books are illustrated by genuine Victorian photographs of members of the British upper class that have been hideously altered. For example, Lady Blanche's mother is heavy-browed and cross-eyed, yet the photograph is captioned "My beautiful Mother", Mipsie always shown with wild hair and protruding teeth is captioned "Mipsie at her loveliest"

Lady Blanche symbolises in a humorous way those females of the early 20th century, British aristocracy who subconsciously felt themselves more talented and intelligent than those of less exalted birth encouraged by a period when it was not uncommon for the pronouncements and literary efforts off upper class women to be eagerly consumed by an aspiring bourgeoisie."

Piano (2005) - Jean Echenoz

Amazon:

"Goncourt-winner Echenoz offers a cheeky take on the dubious pleasures of the afterlife in this slim, sly novel, which tracks the adventures of a musician after he dies. Max Delmarc is a talented Paris concert pianist burdened by a terrible case of stage fright, unrequited love for a vanished woman named Rose and a weakness for the bottle. On the way home from a benefit concert, Delmarc is mugged and stabbed; he wakes in an afterlife "Orientation Center," part hospital, part hotel, part jail. In his weeklong stay, he gets plastic surgery to repair his stab wound; enjoys a romantic interlude with Doris Day, a nurse at the facility; and is then assigned to "the urban zone"â¿""I mean, to Paris, you understand," he's told. There's a brief side trip to South America, but soon Delmarc is back in the City of Lights, under orders not to contact anyone from his former life or play music. Delmarc quickly violates both rules by leaving his job as a hotel bartender to take a position as a lounge pianist in a more upscale hotel and by embarking on a search for Rose, whom he saw as the love of his life despite his inability to connect with her. Echenoz's satiric style makes the somewhat limited afterlife concept work, and he includes some surprisingly effective plot twists. The result is a quirky, slight novel that offers an original take on human potential and folly." - Publication Weekly

When Gravity Fails - George Alec Effinger

The Restorationist Text One: A Collaborative Fiction by Jael B. Juba - Joyce Elbrecht & Lydia Fakundiny

Reviews:

"This witty, labyrinthine postmodernist kaleidoscope is, among other things, a complex murder mystery, a feminist discourse and a metafictional riff on the possibilities of language and imagination. Elizabeth Harding, a strong-willed, divorced professor from upstate New York, buys a run-down historic house on Florida's Gulf Coast, planning to renovate it over the summer of 1977. On the day she takes possession, she stumbles on the corpse of the previous tenant. An old Creole woman rumored to practice voodoo is a suspect; her grandmother was the original owner of the house now believed to be haunted. The plot thickens when the body of a private eye dressed in a KKK robe is discovered--impaled on the fence surrounding Harding's property. Retired philosophy professor Elbrecht and Cornell English professor Fakundiny have created a fictive authorial persona, "Jael B. Juba," who interjects comments on the unfolding action. With referents ranging from Freud to Foucault to Greek myth and Hamlet , the text, a dazzling riot of exfoliating prose, deconstructs eros, selves and archetypes as it probes such themes as the trivialization of desire in a consumerist culture and the loss of individuality within a group." - Publisher's Weekly

Two Strange Tales (2001) - Mircea Eliade

Amazon:

"This book contains two extraordinarily vivid and dramatic stories. The first one, "Night at Serampore", describes an episode (probably containing some amount of autobiographical experience) involving some strange kind of time travel or "fall into the past" whereby one night while staying as a guest in an old rural indian mansion the main protagonist becomes in most misterious circumstances an involuntary witness to long past events. This extraordinary experience could seemingly be due, as the story tends to suggest, to the influence of advanced tantric meditators who presumably had been involved that same night in some kind of secret powerful yogic-tantric rituals in a nearby area...

The second story, "The Secret of Dr. Honigsberger" is based on a real character, an indologist scholar who dissappeared in somewhat mysterious circumstances quite a long time ago. Eliade takes this fact as a starting point for a most thrilling story narrating the experience of a student that is called by Dr. Honigsberger's widow in order to review and order the personal notes and papers left by her late husband in the hope of finding some clues regarding his dissapearance. The facts given by the story indicate that the dissapearance had taken place quite some time ago in the scholar's own house and in unexplainable circumstances. ...The rest is a masterful narration of a most exciting investigation dealing with occult yogic practices in a haunting environment... As to the real Dr. Honigsberger, there are some hints about this most curious event in a book containing a long interview to Eliade whose exact title in the english version I can't recall but that probably goes as "The Test of the Labyrinth",...or something close to this.

It is important to note that both stories contain serious and authoritative information and details concerning yogic practices. After all, we must keep in mind that Mircea Eliade was a top world authority in the History of Religions and a most knowledgeable expert in Indian Religion. Must be read by those who search for the mysterious and extraordinary,...and for good and well documented literature as well." - Marcos A. Gallardo

The Specialty of the House - Stanley Ellin

Carmen Dog - Carol Emshwiller

Amazon:

"Something strange is going on as the psychiatrist explains to his new patient Pooch the dog that "the beast changes to a woman and the woman changes to a beast". Pooch the dog turned woman worries about the baby as the mother has become a snapping turtle while the father seems mystified about the changes, but not overly concerned. Things come to a head or perhaps a bite when the turtle-mother bites the baby and refuses to let go until Pooch takes a lit match to the neo-beast's neck. Since the father remains uninvolved, pooch decides to flee with the baby for the infant's sake.

However, pooch has to reconsider her decision when they arrive in New York City when the Central Park Wolverine gang threatens them and the scientists at the Academy of Motherhood want to test her and throw away the baby. Men do what they do best; ignore the goings-on as dogs make better companions than women.

Using personification to satirize relationships, especially gender stereotypes, Carol Emshwiller provides an amusing look at acceptable societal roles that stifle people. The story line is at its best when it skewers how humans behave and how we assume "beasts" behave. When it spins into mad scientists on the loose conspiracy, CARMAN DOG loses some of its acerbic bite as the bark becomes louder not keener. Still this is a deep swift satire that will have the audience laughing yet also thinking about its underlying warning that labeling and classifying negatively oversimplifies everyone." - Harriet Klausner

Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry - H. C. Engelbrecht

online version

Anti-Imperialist's Reading List - Joseph Stromberg

War, Peace and the State - Joseph Stromberg

Manual for Apprentice Book Burners - James J. Martin

God's Country - Percival Everett

Amazon:

"It is this reviewer's opinion that Percival Everett's God's Country is nothing short of a mini-masterpiece. Set in 1871 and narrated by a very unlucky cowpoke, Curt Marder, the book shows the good, bad, and ugly aspects of life in God's Country (the proverbial Wild West).

The story opens with marauders burning Curt's ranch, kidnapping his wife, Sadie, and committing the ultimate indiscretion of shooting his beloved dog. Curt, a spineless coward and ardent racist, does nothing to stop them and watches from a distance as his home is destroyed. He hires Bubba, the best tracker in the area (who happens to be African American), to lead him to the culprits (and subsequently Sadie) in exchange for half the ranch. It is in the journey to save Sadie that Curt constantly witnesses and benefits from Bubba's selfless acts of benevolence and humanity, but is blinded by racism, stupidity, and ignorance to realize the errors of his ways. Instead, he consistently lies, steals, and cheats, largely driven by greed and his own self-interests.

Mr. Everett is an excellent writer having pulled off such a spoofy odyssey. Through his words, the reader experiences the sights, sounds, and smells of hard living in hard times. It is a relatively short novel that is richly saturated with dark humor and unforgettable, wonderfully imagined characters with names like Wide Clyde McBride, Pickle Cheeseboro, and Taharry whose speech impediment causes him to preface every word with "ta," thus earning him his unusual name. The book even includes a "cameo" appearance of "Injun killin'" George Cluster and bank robbers reminiscent of the James/Younger Gang.

This book touched on so many issues (the "isms") on a number of levels. Through the misadventures of Curt and Bubba, the author covers the institutionalized racism and social injustices that Native, Asian, and African Americans endured. There are painful scenes of an Indian tribe massacre and a lynching of an innocent black boy. The sexism exhibited against women in the West was evidenced in the Jake and Loretta storylines, and the emerging socio-economic strata (classism) between western landowners was touched upon as well. However, for me, the most powerful messages were saved in the last few pages of the novel's surprise ending. Without revealing too much, I thought it was clever in the way that the author paralleled Bubba's "dream" to live freely without fear or judgment to MLK's desire to be judged by the content of one's character and not by skin color. Curt comments that Bubba's dream did not sound like much of a dream summed up the underlying arrogance and indifference toward his fellow man that resonated throughout the story.

This is the second book I have read by this author and I have not been disappointed yet. I am looking forward to picking up his other works as time permits." - Phyllis Rhodes

Venus on the Half-Shell - Philip Jose Farmer

Reviews:

"The following is excerpted from Edger Chapman, The Magic Labyrinth of Philip Jose Farmer, (San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1984) 64-65.

Farmer's most important parody and fictional author story is Venus On The Half-Shell (1975), published by Dell books under the byline "Kilgore Trout." Trout is Vonnegut's itinerant, impoverished science fiction author, a prophet despised and without honor in his own country. A strong admirer of Vonnegut, Farmer has also confessed to a deep identification with Trout (who was actually suggested by Theodore Sturgeon). The identification was strengthened by many things: Farmer's own years as a struggling science fiction author in the early and middle stages of his career; Farmer's experience as a misunderstood social critic; and Farmer's identification with pornography as an Essex House author, a fate that plagued Trout. Finally, not long after Farmer had returned to Peoria, he was accused in 1970 of having written a letter signed "Trout" in the Peoria Journal Star criticizing President Nixon's Vietnam policy-another ironic identification of Farmer and Trout. (The letter is believed to have actually been penned by a college student.)

At any rate, Farmer, when afflicted with a temporary writer's block, conceived the idea of writing one of Trout's nonexistent novels and publishing it under Trout's name. He obtained Vonnegut's permission and went to work. When Venus on the Half-Shell was published by Dell, with Farmer wearing a false beard and a Confederate hat as a disguise on the back cover, the book was a ninety-day wonder, until Farmer's authorship, which Farmer made little effort to conceal, became known. Although the novel brought Farmer some unaccustomed notoriety (and made Vonnegut regret giving his permission to the project), the revelation of Farmer's authorship created a tendency to dismiss the work as simply an amusing parody and literary hoax. An additional irony in this episode has been Vonnegut's claim in a recent interview with Charles Platt (recorded in a book published in 1980) that Farmer failed to avow his authorship of Venus for a long period, presumably in the hope that sales would be increased by association with Vonnegut's reputation. This allegation, however, is not borne out by fact: Farmer told numerous friends, colleagues, and fans of his authorship; in fact, he informed the present writer of it when Venus was appearing as a serial in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Vonnegut's reaction is perhaps not surprising, since Trout is his invention. But when Vonnegut professes to feel anxiety that Farmer's book may somehow have harmed his literary reputation, it is hard to take him seriously. Such concern might have been better devoted to the effect of Vonnegut's self-indulgent seventies novels, Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick.

Divorced from topicality and controversy, Venus On The Half-Shell can be read as a lively satirical anatomy, an absurdist novel that manages to parody Vonnegut while ridiculing human pretentiousness and our persistent search for metaphysical answers in an irrational universe. . .

As a satire, Venus On The Half-Shell has many excellent moments, but it contrasts sharply with Vonnegut's work. Whereas Vonnegut is Juvenalian or Swiftian in his tone, his work suggesting genuine misanthropy, Farmer is a genial Horatian satirist here. There seems to be more readiness to accept the limitations of human life in Farmer, more hopefulness about the human capacity to enjoy life, even if dreams and ideals are for the most part doomed to not to be realized completely." - A Customer

Lord Tyger - Philip Jose Farmer

Reviews:

"Now that Philip Jose Farmer's wild books from the late 1960's-mid 1970's that are being reprinted, the reintroduction of "Lord Tyger" to the world appears overdue. It is the best Farmer book of this period. The title character is a Tarzan-like individual who is raised by people he doesn't believe to be human, attains mastery of the jungle and its animal denizens, and torments the local tribe of primitives (the Wantso). The descriptions of LT's encounters with the Wantso and the chieftain of a rival tribe are entertaining and frequently hilarious. No SF writer has more fun with the science of anthropology than Farmer.

The entire novel is a fast read and packed with adventure. At his best, Farmer's adventures seem to contain as many ideas, plot turns and dramatic action sequences as entire series by more mediocre authors. I had the misfortune of trying to read two volumes of the "Decology" by "L Ron Hubbard" many years ago, and it's plain to me that average SF adventure writers do not have what Farmer had, especially around the time of "Lord Tyger."

Farmer is a dedicated fan of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and books like "Lord Tyger" make Farmer appear to be a more informed and (much) less restrained Burroughs. This is a pastiche of what I consider to be the best of the Tarzan books (I, VI and VII), which I recommend. The idea of the "noble savage" by Rousseau gets ill treatment here, especially if one's idea of "noble" is based on civilized ideals. In fact, the presence of Tyger's insane benefactor Boygur speaks to the rather sick consequences of trying to make monsters out of men.

"Lord Tyger," like all of Farmer's Tarzan-inspired fiction, is worth seeking out and buying. It is excellent, but clearly not for younger readers." - P. Kufahl

Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke - Philip Jose Farmer

Reviews:

"Far too long out of print, TARZAN ALIVE: THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF LORD GREYSTOKE is a postmodern classic that will appeal to readers of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Philip José Farmer, as well as those interested in parascholarship, fictional biographies, and literature in general. This is the book that launched the concept of the Wold Newton family, the genetic lineage exposed to a radioactive meteorite in 1795, thus spawning a number of great detectives, scientists, explorers, and adventurers, some of whom border on the superhuman. Farmer's addendums, expanding this concept to include a multitude of literary characters (such as those from Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and Jack London's THE SEA WOLF, to name only a couple), alone make the cost of this book worth it.

This is truly the definitive edition of TARZAN ALIVE, and Bison Books has wisely added a number of extras that will make this edition worth owning even if one already has a Doubleday, Popular Library, or Playboy Paperbacks copy of the book. Collected here, but missing from the older versions of the book, are two gems: 1) "Extracts from the Memoirs of `Lord Greystoke' (previously only available in the hard to find anthology MOTHER WAS A LOVELY BEAST); and 2) "Tarzan Lives: An Exclusive Interview with the Eighth Duke of Greystoke" (in which Farmer himself interviews the Jungle Lord). Further, the Bison Books edition includes an insightful new foreword by Win Scott Eckert (editor of MYTHS FOR THE MODERN AGE: PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER'S WOLD NEWTON UNIVERSE), which places TARZAN ALIVE in the context of "Sherlockian biographical scholarship," showing how Farmer's book is truly exemplary (and also transcendent) in the field of fictional biography. This is followed by a new introduction by science fiction author Mike Resnick discussing Farmer's other Tarzan pastiches.

The book itself is a compelling read. Farmer treats the subject of his "biography" as a living person about whom Edgar Rice Burroughs chronicled in fictionalized form. This livens up what otherwise would be a dry summary of ERB's Tarzan series, as Farmer often interjects with persuasive comments, conjectures, and elaborations in the brilliant style that is unique to him. In TARZAN ALIVE, Farmer breaths new life into the legend of Tarzan, all out of a respectful love for the character which pours from every word on every page of this delightfully wonderful work." - Christopher Carey

Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life - Philip Jose Farmer

The Siege of Krishnapur - J. G. Farrell

Amazon:

For those seeking greater insights into Britain's imperial ethos, I urge you to read THE SIEGE OF KRISHNAPUR, by the late(and great)Anglo-Irish writer J.G. Farrell. It's about the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, when thousands of native Indian Army troops (know as Sepoys) rose up against their English masters. The bloody mutiny began in Meerut barracks in May of '57 and quickly spread along a 500-mile string of cities and villages in northern India. It was finally put down five months later. Marked by appalling atrocities on both sides, thousands of Indians and hundreds of Europeans were slaughtered. The proximal cause of the uprising was the introduction of rifle cartridges greased with animal fat, which was unacceptable on religious grounds to both Hindus and Muslims. The underlying (if at the time unarticulated) cause of course rested in dissatisfaction on the part of Indians, the inhabitants of an ancient and sophisticated civilization, over their subjugation by foreigners.

In the 18th century, the presence of the British in India, most of whom were men, was generally benign and not much noticed. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the behavior of the British toward Indians had become increasingly oppressive and arrogant, in large part due to the presence of English wives, who ghettoized the English communities and regarded all native Indians with fear and contempt. After the rebellion, such attitudes hardened and became pervasive; this in turn fed the resolve of Indians to expel the British from their country - which they did 92 years later. Although there is no record of it, at the time, a few thoughtful Englishmen must have recognized that the rebellion was an indelible sign of what would inevitably follow.

The centerpiece, if you will, of the Sepoy Rebellion was the four-month siege by the rebels of the Residency at Lucknow. The "residency" was in fact a large, walled compound which served as the British administrative center of an area consisting of thousand of square miles and millions of inhabitants. It was also the social center of the British community and the home of the "Collector", the region's chief administrative officer. THE SIEGE OF KRISHNAPUR, first published in 1973 and winner of the Booker Prize that year, is a fictionalized account of the Lucknow siege - although most of the incidents related in the book actually occurred and most of the characters are based on real people.

THE SIEGE OF KRISHNAPUR is, bar none, my favorite 20th century novel. It is a sublime book that has everything - elegant, crystalline writing, vividness, tight novelistic structure, tremendous scope and depth, action, excitement, moving, convincing sentiment, comedy and tragedy, uproarious savage satire and searing irony. Supporting these virtues is a serious philosophical discourse about the nature of human progress as it is reflected in the efforts of Westerners to "civilize" the rest of the world. For all of that, although KRISHNAPUR demands close attention, for the literate, it is a highly accessible, highly satisfying "read". I know that you'll enjoy it, and in reading it will, I believe, learn a bit more about the human condition.

Should you be inspired to learn more about the Sepoy Rebellion, I recommend Christopher Hibbert's THE GREAT MUTINY, Viking, l978. And for a trenchant, entertaining examination of day-to-day life during the Raj (from the British perspective), see PLAIN TALES FROM THE RAJ, edited by Charles Allen (Holt, Rinehart, l985)

Absurdly, J.G. Farrell died in a fishing accident in 1979. Among his other works are: TROUBLES (1970), set in Dublin in l919, THE SINGAPORE GRIP (1978), set in Singapore in the weeks immediately before the Japanese invasion of the city in 1940, and the unfinished THE HILL STATION, set in Simla in pre-independence days.

Troubles - J. G. Farrell

Double or Nothing - Raymond Federman

Reviews:

"Double or Nothing" is a concrete novel in which the words become physical materials on the page. Federman gives each of these pages a shape or structure, most often a diagram or picture. The words move, cluster, jostle, and collide in a tour de force full of puns, parodies, and imitations. Within these startling and playful structures Federman develops two characters and two narratives. These stories are simultaneous and not chronological. The first deals with the narrator and his effort to make the book itself; the second, the story the narrator intends to tell, presents a young man's arrival in America. The narrator obsesses over making his narrative to the point of not making it. All of his choices for the story are made and remade. He tallies his accounts and checks his provisions. His questioning and indecision force the reader into another radical sense of the novel. The young man, whose story is to be told, also emerges from his obsessions. Madly transfixing details-- noodles, toilet paper, toothpaste, a first subway ride, a sock full of dollars-- become milestones in a discovery of America. These details, combined with Federman's feel for the desperation of his characters, create a book that is simultaneously hilarious and frightening. The concrete play of its language, its use of found materials, give the viewer/reader a sense of constant and strange discovery. To turn these pages is to turn the corners of a world of words as full as any novel or literary discourse ever presented. "Double or Nothing" challenges the way we read fiction and the way we see words, and in the process, gives us back more of our own world and our real dilemmas than we are used to getting. "Invention of this quality ranks the book among the fictional masterpieces of our age..." - Richard Kostelanetz

"This is a terrific book, clever and rollicking and inventive and funny and haunting and all those good adjectives. But this edition is terribly disappointing; the text is set in a proportional font, which makes all the "concrete" games and shapes look cheesy. The pages (spoiler alert?) where the text is run together with no spaces between the words, for instance, are significantly easier to read in this edition, and a great deal is lost because of it. Try to hunt down a copy of the first (1971) edition if you can; this edition is a dim shadow of that one. (Hence the 4 stars -- really I'd give this edition much less but it is a five star book and a poor job of keeping it in print is better than none at all.)" - Chris Pluma

Ackroyd: A Mystery of Identity - Jules Feiffer

Reviews:

"Whodunnit? Who's Who? And, more importantly, "who the hell am I?" He solved the case of the missing parakeets. Now if he could only figure out who he was... Jules Feiffer works his easy-going wit and biting social satire into his second novel "Ackroyd," which begins as a parody of the Raymond Chandler school of detective fiction, but ultimately asks the age-old question: Is identity merely a metaphysical conceit? A shamus who may or may not be a sham, Roger Ackroyd (named after the victim in Agatha Christie's most shocking novel) is hired to investigate a case of writer's block by sports writer Oscar Plante. Over the course of five years, in between the bonhomie of Elaine's and tangling with unconventional femmes fatales, Ackroyd's personality begins to merge with his client's as he acquires his ex-wife, his mistress and, eventually, his craft. In "Ackroyd," Feiffer uses the detective genre to further his investigations into human neuroses, and to re-imagine the artist as a young sleuth forced to cope with a corrupt world. Originally published in 1977." - jacket copy

Molly Dear: The Autobiography of an Android - Stephen Fine

The Circus of Dr. Lao - Charles G. Finney

Review - Ian Shoales

Review - David Maddox

A mysterious circus rolls into town by means of neither roads nor train. Its advertisement promises sights and wonders as yet unseen by mortal man. Its owner is a chameleonic Asian man of uncertain age and origin. Though at first unimpressed with its run-down appearance (heck, it doesn't even have an elephant!), the mundane citizens of Abalone, Arizona are soon to learn that the circus contains a bizarre collection of myths, oddities, fables and lore that will challenge the very nature of their lives and beliefs.

Charles G. Finney's 1935 classic The Circus of Dr. Lao is a difficult book to describe. Although he wrote a handful of books in his career, this is the only one with lasting power. It was made into a film in 1964 (under the name The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao) in which Tony Randall played all the strange denizens of the circus. But while the film took a straightforward approach with the message of enjoying the miracles of life all around us, the book is much more obtuse.
...

Review - Mike Simanoff

Review - Edward Hoagland

Amazon:

"Finney writes as though he had been possessed by the spirit of Ambrose Bierce, and to me, that's a GOOD thing. More of a short story than a novel (I last read it in the space of a single afternoon), "The Circus" shines light in many directions and is best appreciated after more than a single reading. Frankly, I'm astonished that it got published in the first place, and even more surprised that it here receives what amounts to a "Criterion Collection" sort of treatment, including reproductions of the illustrations by Boris Artzybasheff from the first edition.

The citizens of Abalone (plus a few visitors) are scathingly protrayed in amazingly understated passages. Presented with actual unicorns, satyrs, sea serpents, mermaids, and other "fabulous" creatures and miracles, hardly any of the townspeople can muster more than a yawn and a shrug. The ultimate spectacle, the sacrifice of a virgin to the giant bronze god of the rotten-to-the-core city of Woldercan, is absolutely a gem.

The use of several racial epithets does nothing to reflect on Finney - it doesn't take a super-astute reader to understand Finney is reflecting on his *characters*, yes, even in 1935.

As most reviewers have noted - this is NOT a children's book. And while the Tony Randall film of 1960 has some of its own charm (thank you, Barbara Eden!!), it is a kiddy-fied, watered-down version of this story. It was probably Finney's experience as a newspaperman that soured him on human nature - it must be an occpational hazard, since he shares that experience with the afore-mentioned Bierce as well as with another arch-cynic, Cyril Kornbluth of "Marching Morons" fame. The writing style varies (intentionally) from pulp to inspired to crisp and concise, sometimes all on a single page. Obviously not a book for everyone, but I find it refreshing, enlightening, and supremely entertaining." - Mark Shanks

Five Novels - Ronald Firbank

"Ronald Firbank, whose forty-year lifespan (1886-1926) covers a particularly bountiful era of English prose artistry, is so eccentrically individual an author he almost seems to be a creature invented by Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. His five short novels, collected in this New Directions Paperback edition, are utterly unclassifiable; no genre suggests itself when they are being read. His prose, as fastidiously styled as a coiffured poodle, as twee as an afternoon tea, is bewilderingly florid even beyond the standards of his contemporaries. With the descriptive proclivities of an interior decorator, he paints with all the colors on the palette; an orchid is not just an orchid but a "rose-lipped" orchid with a "lilac beard." England had not seen lyrical flamboyance like this since Oscar Wilde a quarter century before, and would not see it again until the ascendance of Freddie Mercury a half century later.

But Firbank's writing is not just fancy window dressing. His stories may look like fairy tales because of the whimsical characters and settings, but his narrative technique fractures the linearity of the plots by focusing on external details. In "The Flower Beneath the Foot," for example, the subject of the conversation in the first few pages is not immediately apparent, but disclosure gradually occurs over the course of the following chapters: His Weariness the Prince Yousef's mother, the Queen of some mythical Arabesque realm called the Land of Dates, disapproves of her son's desire to marry the humble convent-dwelling Mademoiselle de Nazianzi instead of Princess Elsie of England. Not until the final paragraph does Firbank dispel the story's genteel facade to reveal a passionately beating, and broken, heart.

Firbank's characters are garish works of art, most of them either impossibly frivolous nobles of theatrically exaggerated primness or paupers with pride and dignity. As in "The Flower Beneath the Foot," a common theme is star-crossed love, a romance between two people of different social stations. This love can be interracial, as it is in "Valmouth," a British colony with a climate so salubrious that the inhabitants live well over a hundred years, as well as in another novel with an evidently Caribbean setting and a controversial title which I refrain from typing so as not to have to wrestle with the Amazon censorship filter. Infatuation can also be grotesque, as it is in "The Artificial Princess," whose heroine, reluctantly betrothed to a foreign Crown Prince, unwittingly encounters the Devil on the night of her debut.

Firbank, one of the first of many English Catholic writers to emerge in the twentieth century, is comfortable setting one of his novels in Spain. "Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli" is self-explanatory, as the good cardinal, who allows aristocratic dogs to be baptized as a favor to wealthy patrons and disguises himself in the street as laity of either gender, risks being defrocked by the Roman church for his perceived sacrileges.

This is humor, but of a less obvious sort; unlike P.G. Wodehouse, who made a handsome living with his comical portraits of the upper class, Firbank doesn't target a specific group of people or stratum of society, nor does he seem interested in such petty substantiality. His fiction, insulated in a world unscarred by war and populated by dainty animated dolls, is an idyllic extension of reality, somehow a reminder of the limitless expanse of literature where formulas lose their validity and time stands still. Toss aside all your preconceptions, because these novellas will surprise you." - A. J.

The Thought Gang - Tibor Fischer

Reviews:

"Middle-aged layabout Eddie Coffin wakes up naked & groggy in an apartment full of child-pornography just as the police break in. If you ever find yourself in similar circumstances, Eddie advises "try to be good-humoured and polite" because "it makes the police fret about having got something wrong."

So begins this hilarious tale of a tenured philosopher at Cambridge who absconds with departmental funds to France, where he meets up with a deranged(?) one-armed robber named Hubert, a psychopath with "a gluttony for erudition." Soon the two of them are on an increasingly improbable crime-spree, rifling bank-vaults & schools of thought with equal aplomb.

As the loot mounts and the police circle ever closer, Eddie & Hubert decide to make one last, climactic heist, to put the capper on their caper career and to put their philosophical conclusions (which include contributions from the Ancient Greeks to Nietzche) to the ultimate practical test.

Tibor Fischer has created a side-splitting narrative that is as full of deep intelligence as it is full of belly-rending guffaws. This is a novel whose pace puts the average potboiler to shame and whose implications stretch the envelope for literary fiction. Eddie & Hubert are characters you will love to hate and vice-versa. If you have an appetite for Felony and Philosophy, then this book is a must-read, a re-read, and a keeper." - jjwylie

Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald

Amazon:

"Offshore possesses perfect, very odd pitch. In just over 130 pages of the wittiest and most melancholy prose, Penelope Fitzgerald limns the lives of "creatures neither of firm land nor water"--a group of barge-dwellers in London's Battersea Reach, circa 1961. One man, a marine artist whose commissions have dropped off since the war, is attempting to sell his decrepit craft before it sinks. Another, a dutiful businessman with a bored, mutinous wife, knows he should be landlocked but remains drawn to the muddy Thames. A third, Maurice, a male prostitute, doesn't even protest when a criminal acquaintance begins to use his barge as a depot for stolen goods: "The dangerous and the ridiculous were necessary to his life, otherwise tenderness would overwhelm him."

At the center of the novel--winner of the 1979 Booker Prize--are Nenna and her truant six- and 11-year-old daughters. The younger sibling "cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness." But the older girl is considerably less blithe. "Small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world's shortcomings," Fitzgerald writes, she "was not like her mother and even less like her father. The crucial moment when children realise that their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha."

Their father is farther afield. Unable to bear the prospect of living on the Grace, he's staying in Stoke Newington, part of London but a lost world to his wife and daughters. Meanwhile, Nenna spends her time going over incidents that seem to have led to her current situation, and the matter of some missing squash racquets becomes of increasing import. Though she is peaceful by nature, experience and poverty are wearing Nenna down. Her confidante Maurice, after a momentary spell of optimism, also returns to his life of little expectation and quiet acceptance: "Tenderly responsive to the self-deceptions of others, he was unfortunately too well able to understand his own."

Penelope Fitzgerald views her creations with deep but wry compassion. Having lived on a barge herself, she offers her expert spin on the dangers, graces, and whimsies of river life. Nenna, too, has become a savant, instantly recognizing on one occasion that the mud encasing the family cat is not from the Reach. This "sagacious brute" is almost as complex as his human counterparts, constantly forced to adjust her notions of vermin and authority. Though Stripey is capable of catching and killing very young rats, the older ones chase her. "The resulting uncertainty as to whether she was coming or going had made her, to some extent, mentally unstable."

As always, Fitzgerald is a master of the initially bizarre juxtaposition. Adjacent sentences often seem like delightful non sequiturs--until they flash together in an effortless evocation of character, era, and human absurdity. Nenna recalls, for instance, how the buds had dropped off the plant her husband rushed to the hospital when Martha was born. She "had never criticized the bloomless azalea. It was the other young mothers in the beds each side of her who had laughed at it. That had been 1951. Two of the new babies in the ward had been christened Festival." Tiny comical epiphanies such as these have caused the author to be dubbed a "British miniaturist." Yet the phrase utterly misses the risks Fitzgerald's novellas take, the discoveries they make, and the endless pleasures they provide." - Kerry Fried

Gould's Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan

Amazon:

"In the reviews that are printed in the Grove Press Trade edition, I counted 22 renowned authors the critics cite with whom to compare Flanagan. The list is rather impressive and includes Joyce, Melville, Conrad, Rabelais, Borges, Hemingway, Marquez, Swift, Morrison, Pynchon, Sterne, Dante, Ovid, de Quincey, Heller, Dickens, Camus, Faulkner, Fielding, Smollet, Dostoevsky and, by inference, Peter Carey (the reference is to Carey's character, Ned Kelly in The True History of the Kelly Gang). Throw in a reference to Wuthering Heights (in terms of the book's lingering effect upon the reader's imagination) and you see the sort of playing field Flannagan is occupying. In terms of critical acclaim, the guy has arrived.

The praise is justified. Great novels introduce us to fully realized worlds, which burst forth from singular imaginations. This is just such a work. As T.S. Elliot noted, great literature also connotes, contains and reexpresses the great literature of the past. As you can infer from the number of references cited, this book acomplishes that.

Great works also contain great characters and William Buelow Gould, "sloe-souled, green-eyed, gap-toothed, shaggy-haired & grizzle-gutted" is as large and expressive a character as has been penned in recent literature. He's witty, expansive, loveable, colorful and as dimensional as they come. He's unforgettable, as are several of the other characters in the novel, most notably the penitentiary surgeon, Mr. Lempriere, in his passionate quest to become another Linnaeus, fellow convict Capois Death, who represents the life-force irrepressible. Towering over them all is the most surreal Commandant, once himself a convict, who through luck and subterfuge has assumed the identity of a British officer who perished in a shipwreck off the coast of Tasmania. He is rescued and taken back to the nearby penal colony, where he again lucks out when the old Commandant dies and there is no one else to replace him. He ultimately assumes absolute power and control over every guard, soldier and inmate in the colony and proceeds to engage all these unfortunate inhabitants in fullfilling his grandiose schemes. To accentuate his god-like stature, he has a gold mask fashioned for him, behind which his old identity disappears. His history and his fate, becomes inextricably linked with Gould's.

One word of warning, and it is the sort of warning that small children would be powerless to obey, but I know that I am writing to intelligent, mature readers here. Do not look at the final page of the book!! It will ruin the read for you, I assure you, and it is such a great read, you really don't want that to happen, do you? Remember the old adage about Curiosity and the fate of the cat!! Don't be led by your feline instincts!! Save the surprise for the right time! I know that I've just made that difficult for you, but it's just not worth it, I assure you! OK, now that that's settled, go get a copy of this treasure and prepare for a marvelous voyage." - Bruce Kendall

Dictionary of Accepted Ideas - Gustavo Flaubert

Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments - Martyn J. Fogg

Brian L. Davis on Amazon:

"While terraforming has been talked about for a long time in science fiction, it seems technical information about it is scarce. Martyn Fogg has compiled here the handbook of this diverse subject. Starting out by describing what terraforming is about (and what sort of grand engineering has been done to date), it then covers "engineering" Earth, Mars, Venus, and even the outer planets. How could you live "on" Jupiter? What would it take to make Io habitable? Spin up Venus? Shift the orbits of entire plants? It's here, and more. Rich in data, references, and calculations, it also covers both the planetary and biological aspects of the subject. Not for the math-phobic, but if you ever wondered "can you really do that?" about a science fiction terraforming idea, this will answer your question."

Terraforming Information Pages

Penguin Island - Anatole France

Facing the Tank - Patrick Gale

Amazon:

The British author of Kansas in August , The Aerodynamics of Pork and Ease (all published by age 25) has in this novel carried off yet another ridiculously crazy tour de force. The village of Barrowcester and its inhabitants are the launching point for the narrative's bizarre trajectory. An American professor known for his book about hell is now researching heaven in the Cathedral, where, coincidentally, the remains of the local saint are to be disinterred in order to repair a crumbling foundation wall. The bishop is having "Doubts," the landlady's daughter has been knocked up by a Cardinal, another villager is doing her best to summon the Devil, a previously homosexual dress designer with a positive AIDS test is marrying a black American doctor, a schoolboy thinks he has fathered a litter of puppies, and someone--or something--giant rats? a feral child?--is loose in the village. And that's not the half of it. The plot ricochets between the dozens of richly drawn characters, and one of the many reasons to devour this novel at one go is that it will make it easier to keep track. Some other reasons are that this book is a delightful read, albeit a strange one, and that if started at bedtime, pages will be turning inevitably into the wee small hours. If E. F. Benson, Iris Murdoch and Fay Weldon were to produce a story in some mad collusion, the result might be something like this.

Memory of Fire Trilogy:

1 - Genesis

2 - Faces and Masks

3 - Century of the Wind

Grendel (1971) - John C. Gardner

John Gardner Chronology

Grendel's Lair

Reviews:

"I'm amused by the angst of Gardner's critics. Many of them seem as misanthropic as Gardner's Grendel, and though many of the critics are respected colleagues, I find their review of Gardner's masterpiece to be skewed by their own prejudices, political leanings, or disbelief that any one would ever poke fun at a classical piece of literature. (Oh,what shameful disregard!)

Some have claimed that Grendel whines like a modern teenager. How do we know that wasn't Gardner's intent? As the artist, isn't it his prerogative to create his fictional landscape? And yes, the Dragon comes across like Timothy Leary on LSD but of course, that may exactly be the way Gardner wanted it to appear. One critique repines that Grendel's mother plays such a minor role in Grendel, and that unlike her revengeful and powerful character in Beowulf, she is reduced to a sleepy, unfit, and uncaring mother. So what! If Gardner portrayed her as a soccer mom whistling around Hrothgar's castle in a mini-van would that make you feel any better? Get over it! If he wanted, Gardner could have depicted Grendel's mother as a Dominatrix, outfitted in five inch stilettos and a Madonna cone bra, whipping the Danes senselessly, but appreciatively, in the dark dank corners of her cave.

What's important is this: Gardner is able to take a fairly dull minor literary character, breathe life into it, and make the character witty, funny, irreverent, and continually entertaining. The prose is clear and fluid like fountain water, and unlike the epic poem, the scenes flow quickly from paragraph to paragraph. For all its satire and macabre humor, the book is a quick and enjoyable read.

And yes, Grendel is a descendant of Cain, and the enemy of Christianity, but who amongst us hasn't seen an Unferth revealed in a Christian congregation? Like a lucid dissenting opinion, whereby the truth of an argument is clearly divulged, the hypocrisy of the Danes is exposed through the thoughts and utterances of Grendel, a creature supposedly incapable of even having a brain cell. His killing is cruel but how different are his murders from those of Hrothgar, his men, and the men of their enemies? Seems to me all the men did at the mead hall was eat, drink, and spray platitudes all through the air while plotting the destruction of those they feared and hated.

In Grendel's case, at least he thinks about what he does and questions it, mourns it, tries to seek a higher form of intelligence so he can understand it. The dim-witted men marching around the Hrothgar's castle do nothing of the sort. Regimented by the mores of their culture, they simply follow their senseless leader until a day comes forth where they all must bathe in their own blood.

As an aside, you would have thought, by the amount of leftists in this forum, that more than a handful or so of the reviewers would have drawn parallels to the Bush Administration. Certainly no liberal, even I can see Donald Rumsfeld cast as Hrothgar.

With regard to Gardner, there's no doubt he earned this masterpiece. This literary gem sits high on the bookrack at my home." - gary mack

"Grendel has a sarcastic and cynical mind, which serves to entertain both him and the reader. Through his expositions of situations, we see humor where others would simply see violence, and irony where others only fact. These others are the humans, the Danes, unwitting neighbors of Grendel, forced to stand night after night of slaughter. What is a traumatic and terrifying experience for them, is simply a game to Grendel, and the reader. Grendel bursts in on the Danes, ready to kill, and they squeak. They are funny in their fear, laughable in their drunken fighting. The reader is focused on Grendel's perception of the Danes. The deaths go by easily, because of the humor involved. It does not cross the reader's mind that these are people Grendle is killing. The humor allows the reader to sympathize with Grendel's position, that of the predator. The prey is not meaningful, only nutritious and entertaining. It is a macabre humor, which accentuates how no death is noble, it is simply death. By making the Danes un-heroic and un-ideal, cowards and drunkards, the author is presenting the reality through the humor.

In contrast to the drunken lurching of the others, Unferth comes toward Grendel with speeches and bravery. He is a puffed up as a peacock, proud and ready to die for his king, his people, his ideal. Grendel simply states, "He was one of those." Grendel sees Unferth with a clear and unbiased mind. He is ridiculous. His exaggerated heroism, his words, even his first move, to scuttle sideways like a crab from thirty feet away, is laughable. Grendle does with him what he does with no other Dane in the story, he talks.

Unferth offers Grendle death, and Grendle sends back taunts. The reason this scene is funny is because the taunts are sharply accurate. The self-sacrificing hero is shown to be a spotlight loving fool, serving only his own reputation. Grendel continues talking to Unferth, making the poor wretch angrier by the moment. At one point, he compares Unferth to a harvest virgin. Unferth attempts to begin his own speeches, but is always cut off by Grendel, who has another barb to throw at him. Finally, Unferth screams and charges, his voice breaking.

This scene, of escalating argument, presents a different type of humor. While the first was a slapstick, exaggerated and dark humor, the argument is more sarcastic, intelligent and cutting. It exposes the cruel reality of the hero; he serves only himself and his fame when helping others.

When Unferth charges him, Grendel does the unthinkable. He throws an apple at him. Unferth is astonished, and even loses his heroic vocabulary. He continues charging, and Grendel continues the barrage of apples. This scene is pure humiliation for Unferth, pure delight for Grendel, and entertaining for the reader. Grendel, murderer and monster, is hitting the hero with simple red apples. By doing this, he is breaking any type of significance the battle could ever have. The bards cannot sing of how the monster threw apples. It is symbolically important that Grendel throws apples. Unferth symbolizes a virgin, pure in ideal and purpose. The apple brought down the first virgin, Eve, as these apples bring him down. They represent the truth, the knowledge that Grendle is pelting him with. The hero ends up on the floor crying, and Grendel remarks to him "Such is life...such is dignity." This remark holds no pity, only scorn, and is funny in its viciousness.

Most of the humor in the novel is followed by some of the most chilling and melancholic pieces of prose. This contrast of the humoristic with the somber makes the despair Grendel feels a more striking emotion. Before being completely exposed to nihilism and solitude by the Dragon, Grendel is compared to a bunny rabbit because he was startled. The monster that terrified the Danes is terrified by the Dragon, who continues poking fun at him and his fear. The reader is presented with the impotent figure of Grendel, trying desperately to react in some way to the dragon's laughter, and not knowing how. He gets angry, which immediately makes the dragon deadly serious. What follows is the dragon stating in turn his truths about life and snide side remarks on humanity. The humor allows the reader to connect slightly with Grendel's feelings as they transition from the comedy to the drama, sometimes in a jarring fashion.

This same transition occurs in the interaction of Grendel and Unferth. The Dane is a broken man, both physically and mentally. He cries. He has a broken nose. The humor is lost as the reader begins to feel pity for him. Once we feel connected to the being suffering, the humor evaporates, leaving behind the message, ideals are false. The humor sets up the atmosphere and the elements of the message, but it is only in the alternate tone that the message is truly established.

Grendel's humor is the truth in some aspects and a farce in others. It contrasts sharply with the Dane's views but it is a valid view. At the same time, the humor in Grendel hides a deep despair and the root messages. Grendel makes fun of Unferth, but is more like Unferth that he could possibly guess. Unferth represents the hero brought down by the monster, and the shattering of his own beliefs. Grendel is a monster who has no beliefs, and is brought down by an unnamed hero. The dragon spares Grendel, while Unferth is by Grendel. Unferth is a cast out among the men, and Grendle is a cast out to all human society. Unferth seeks desperately to die in the fight, and regain some type of honor. Grendel seeks the fight for some type of recognition from the Danes. In a way, when Grendel makes fun of Unferth, he is hurting that part of himself he dislikes. He, through Unferth, is hitting at the pretensions." - A Reader

The Wreckage of Agathon - John Gardner

Reviews:

"This very modern novel of a down and out pre-Socratic philosopher, self-exiled from Athens to Sparta, has stayed vivid in my memory for 35 years and more. It combines razor sharp satire, low comedy, a philosphical playfulness that reminds you of Borges, and an aching, bittersweet recollection of a life firecely lived. I can't think of a more continuously entertaining book. What is amazing is that it also draws the reader into a deep and uncompromising confrontation with the most serious questions of loyalty and love." - Brian C. Holly

Red Shift - Alan Garner

Reviews:

"I am amazed that Alan Garner's "Red Shift" is out of print, and also that I am the first reviewer of it on Amamzon.com

Garner's "Red Shift" is a culmination of his development as a novelist, starting with the fantasy adventure "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen", before he completely changed, and wrote his "Stone Book" quartet, stories of his ancestors, stonemason, blacksmith, and others. Increasingly, from "Weirdstone" to "Red Shift", Garner's use of fantasy moves from overt to inner. In his first books ancient forces, old gods and creatures, co-exist in our own modern world. Although Garner was not entirely original in writing such stories, it seems that his were the first that spawned many similar stories for children and adults. But the Merlin-like magician in "Weirdstone" develops into the psychological presence, a form of possession, in the modern characters of "The Owl Service" (the novel immediately before "Red Shift") who find themselves repeating the actions of love, lust, murder and revenge which are told in the Welsh myth of Llew Llaw Gyffes and Gronw Pebwyr in "The Mabingogion".

In "red Shift" the move from outer fantasy of "Weirdstone" to inner possession of modern characters in "Owl Service" becomes the shared consciousness, at moments of trancelike crisis for sets of characters living in three separate eras: post-Roman Britain, the English Civil War, and modern Manchester. An ancient Stone Age axe head is the focus of this possession-like shared consciousness.

Through "Red Shift" Garner tells three stories, each from a different time, but each set in the shared location, and each mirroring the pattern of relationships of the others. Through this book, a fourth relationship is demanded by Garner, namely the reader piecing together what is happening, and how each story connects with the others.

Few other writers attempt such complex, powerful narratives. Perhaps Robert Cormier, another difficult Young Adult writer, or William Mayne, come closest, with stories of similar narrative tangling, and emotional intensity: "I Am the Cheese" and "After the First Death" by Cormier, or "A Game of Dark" and "The Jersey Shore" by Mayne.

The experience of reading Garner, in "Red Shift", and later through the "Stone Quartet", is like that of reading poetry, or listening to music, where images, words, feelings and experiences resonate and connect, an event in one story chiming like an echo of another, forcing the reader to reconsider what has already been experenced in the light of new facets of similar actions. Neil Philip's study of Garner "A Fine Anger" is an excellent introduction to Garner's work, and his fascinating use of literary and mythic sources.

What is "Red Shift" about? Imagine a story of a boy and girl, on the edge of falling in love, each trapped in their own cage made of different family background, tormented by the differences between one another, and by their mutual betrayals. Meanwhile in post-Roman Britain, a lost patrol of Roman soldiers, surrounded by pagan tribes, decides to go tribal - descending into their own hearts of darkness, madness, rape and murder. And, at the same time, a simple-minded lad watches his adored girlfriend raped by soldiers in the English Civil War. Flashes of epileptic insight enable each of the central male characters to see through one another's eyes, hardly comprehending what is happening. The "red shift" itself is many things - a red petticoat, a bloody recourse to action, the hurtling apart of distant galazies, and the corresponding rushing apart of lonely people.

Very subtle. Undoubtedly difficult. But deeply rewarding!" - A Customer

The Dance of Genghis Cohn - Romain Gary

Grunts - Mary Gentle

Reviews:

"Just as in every military campaign, in the Final Battle between the Dark and the Light, it's the ordinary soldiers who get the short end of the stick. On the Dark side, that means the orcs. Ashnak is a minion of the nameless necromancer, who in turn is lackey to the Dark Lord. When he and his orcs are sent on a secret mission in preparation for the Final Battle, he has no idea that it will turn his life and the lives of hundreds of orcs in an entirely new direction.

The nameless necromancer instructs Ashnak and Co. to act as a protective guard to Ned and Will Brandiman, two extremely nasty and murderous halfling thieves sent by the Dark Lord to steal special weapons from a dragon's hoard. But the dragon, Dagurashibanipal, has cursed the hoard with the following curse: What you steal, you shall become. Now, it just so happens that the dragon has accumulated some of its booty from other worlds... including ours. And what they steal from the dragon happens to be weaponry and uniforms courtesy of the United States Marine Corps. So the effect of the curse is to transform the orcs into MARINES, in all of their disciplined, well-trained glory. Or at least as disciplined and well-trained as bloodthirsty wild creatures can be...

Grunts is a satire, poking not so much at Tolkien as at his numerous formulaic imitators, and not so much at the United States Marines as at the body of blood-and-guts action films made in the '70's and '80's (think Rambo, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, etc.). It's also a parody of modern politics, and of alien invasion books/films (Starship Troopers REALLY takes a hit in Grunts). I won't encapsulate the entire plot -- there are too many nifty twists and I hate to put in too many spoilers -- but I will say that Mary Gentle is a delightfully twisted soul with a sharp eye for the ridiculous, and she pulls no punches here. ..." - Maria Nutick

Sad Swashbuckler: The Life of William Walker - Noel B. Gerson

Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

"The humor of this glorious funny book resides mainly in Gibbons' masterly control of prose style; if you have only seen the movie, you know less than half of what the author has to offer. Yes, she creates a wonderful gallery of extraordinary characters, and the story clips along nicely if rather predictably, but it is the author's language that really gets you laughing out loud. Written in 1932, the book is a parody of a certain kind of rural melodrama popular at the time, but of the authors mentioned by the Oxford Companion to English Literature as models only D. H. Lawrence is still read today. But no matter; there are strong echoes of Hardy and the Brontes as well, and anyway the language works just fine on its own. It ranges from gothic descriptions of a landscape primeval and stark, throbbing with the fecund sap of plant and beast, to gnomic sayings delivered in a rural dialect so thick as to be incomprehensible if one did not realize that half the words in it were probably made up by the author. And, as an added incentive, Gibbons has helpfully marked her most purple passages with two or three stars, "according to the method perfected by the late Herr Baedecker."

Flora Poste, twenty, fashionable, well educated, and recently orphaned, decides against working for a living so writes around to various distant relatives asking them to take her in. She decides to go to live with the Starkadders, some distant cousins whose alarming address is Cold Comfort Farm, Howling, Sussex. (This will seem less odd if you know English place-names, and throughout the book Gibbons' choice of names is both almost plausible and brilliantly absurd.) The farm is described in the first of the starred passages, beginning thus:

"Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm. The farm was crouched on a bleak hill-side, whence its fields, fanged with flints, dropped steeply to the village of Howling a mile away . . . ".

The extended family she meets there, all with short biblical names of Old Testament force, is equally dour, and the living conditions are primitive to say the least. The household is presided over by the matriarch, Great Aunt Ada Doom, who "saw something nasty in the woodshed" as a child and has barely emerged from her room since, but terrifies the others into submission for fear of completing her descent into total insanity. But Flora determines to take the farm and the family in hand, beginning with the youngest, the nature spirit Elfine, and working up to the old woman. The manner in which she does so forms the plot of the rest of the book.

The gothic style which the author handles so well depends upon the ability to evoke impending doom, and Gibbons virtually redefines the verb "impend." So the first half of the novel at least is superb. However, as light and warmth are brought into Cold Comfort Farm, the doom begins to dissipate. In nineteenth-century terms, Gibbons' influence changes from Bronte to Jane Austen, whom she can certainly match in witty observation, though at the loss of the gothic elemental power. The plot, too, lacks suspense; everything that Flora undertakes to do works out with few surprises; the main parody element at the end is the neatness with which it all does work out, even including the resolution of Flora's own romantic needs. But in exchange, as others on this site have mentioned, Stella Gibbons achieves a transformation of a different kind: the forbidding cast of caricatures to whom we are first introduced has become a family of real people, whom Flora finds herself caring about quite a lot. And the reader too. Skill of this sort takes Stella Gibbons beyond the ranks of a mere parodist and reveals her as a true novelist. - Roger Brunyate

"Published in 1932, this novel is a hysterically funny, tongue in cheek parody of the heavy handed, gloomy novels of some early twentieth century English writers who had previously been so popular. Tremendously successful when first published, "Cold Comfort Farm" caused quite a stir in its time.

The novel starts out innocuosly enough, when well educated Flora Poste finds herself orphaned at the age of twenty. Discovering that her father was not the wealthy man she believed him to be, she is resigned to the fate of having to live on a hundred pounds a year. Opting to live with relatives, rather than earn her bread, she seeks out a most unlikely set of relations, the odd Starkadder family who live in Howling, Sussex.

Therein begins what is certainly one of the funniest novels ever written. When Flora arrives in Howling, she meets her odd relatives, who live in neglected, ramshackle "Cold Comfort Farm", where they still wash the dishes with twigs, and have cows named Graceless, Pointless, Feckless, and Aimless. Headed by a seventy nine year old matriarch, Flora's aunt, Ada Doom Starkadder, who has not been right in the head since she "saw something nasty happen in the woodshed" nearly seventy years ago, they are a motley and strange crew indeed. Confronted with their dismal and gloomy existence, Flora sets about trying to put things to right.

Peppered with eccentric, memorable characters, this book will take the reader on a journey not easily forgotten. It is one that is sure to make the reader revisit this novel yet again, like an old friend who is missed too soon." - Lawyeraau

Lafcadio's Adventures - Andre Gide

Amazon:

"Gide, the novelist's novelist, tends to his wicked garden of amoral flowers in this multi-leveled satire. Defying the formulaic strictures of his day, Gide skewers the pomposity of the French and Italian gentry while soaring above them with gleeful snobbery. My parents forbade me to read Gide, and so of course I did, in secret, only to have "Lafcadio" snatched from my precocious twelve-year-old hands before I could finish the novel--but memories of Lafcadio lay buried for years until they ultimately emerged to flower anew in the mystery/ adventure: "Into the Deep--The Haven" . . . both a companion and handshake to Gide's examination of the motiveless crime." - V.E. Rosswell

Scarecrow & Other Anomalies (2002) - Oliverio Girondo

Reviews:

"A bilingual edition and first-time English translation of outrageous and hilarious phantasmagorias by the Argentine genius (or madman) that inspired the acclaimed film "The Dark Side of the Heart" (1994, directed by Eliseo Subiela).

"Scarecrow" is indescribable. It is so spectacularly original that even though alerted by advance notice, the reader will still be surprised by it more than anything else he or she might have ever read. Also included are "Invitation to Vomit," "It's all Drool," and "Lunarlude."

Consuming all of the most fantastic symbolist, futurist, cubist, surrealist, expressionist, anarchist, dadaist, existentialist, post-modernist and every other -ist compositions that can be had, Girondo's "Scarecrow" stands alone as a one-of-a-kind, bug-eyed creation." - Amazon blurb

The Dodecahedron: Or a Frame for Frames - Paul Glennon

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol - Nikolai Gogol (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, tr.)

Amazon:

"This collection brings together almost all of Gogol's notable short stories, from his first surviving piece, St. John's Eve, to his last and most acclaimed short piece, The Overcoat. The first seven stories come from Gogol's earlier period (1830-1835) during which he set his tales in the Ukraine, while the last six, written between 1835 and 1842, are all set in Petersburg.

Critics still disagree to some extent over the quality of Gogol's Ukrainian tales and the extent to which they reflect the artistic vision found in his later, most famous pieces. I would acknowledge that there aren't any absolute masterpieces among these stories, but the world he creates through the lot of them, with the constant presence of the supernatural (probably best seen in "The Night Before Christmas" and "Viy") and a charming provincial sense of humor (at its height in "The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich"), is really quite memorable. Also, it's very interesting to see how the simple country folk of the Ukrainian tales evolve into the often equally naive clerks found in the Petersburg tales, and how the demons and ghosts of Gogol's earlier pieces anticipate the haunted portraits and phantoms of departed eternal titular councillors that would later win Gogol lasting fame.

It is, however, the Petersburg tales that are really the centerpiece of the collection. Though it would be a mistake (one that has tempted many a socially-minded critic over the years) to portray these stories as representing a profound sympathy on Gogol's part for plight of the little man, Gogol uses humble copying clerks, struggling artists, and their ilk to paint a wondrously alive picture of the bustling imperial capital. In each of the stories (among which I should mention "Nevsky Prospect" and "The Portrait," neither of which appears in anthologies nearly as often as it should), Gogol infuses the experiences of a seemingly undistinguished individual with something extraordinary, sometimes using the supernatural and other times exploring the protagonist's dreams or his madness. Though Gogol's contemporaries (like Pushkin and Lermontov) were producing a number of excellent works at the same time, those works tended to focus more heavily on the privileged few, and, innovative though they were in various ways, they were written somewhat more in the spirit of the works of foreign authors like Byron and Scott. In Gogol's Petersburg Tales we see Russian masterpieces written for almost the first time in a relatively non-Western European style about the masses who were not lucky enough to belong to the high nobility, and these works (though Gogol surely had no intention of things turning out this way) would go far to influence the social realism developed by later Russian authors.

Gogol's prose is known among Russians for its beautiful lyricism, which sometimes fails to come through in translation. This translation is (unsurprisingly, given how widely praised Pevear and Volokhonsky are) an exception to that; each of the four stories in the volume that I had previously read in other translations improved substantially under the influence of Pevear and Volokhonsky, and throughout the volume I often marvelled at the elegance of the narrative. The one complaint I might have about the collection is the omission of the historical romance Taras Bulba, which is probably the best known of Gogol's Ukrainian tales and is substantively different from any other story he wrote. However, since (at about 120 pages) it might better be described as a novella that a short story, and since the volume is already slightly Ukraine-heavy, it's understandable that Tara Bulba didn't make it in. Other than that issue, I can't think of a single weakness in the collection, and I highly recommend it to anyone with any interest in Russian literature or in the development of the short story as an art form." - mikeu3

"Witold Gombrowicz (pronounced VEE-told gom-BROH-veetch) was the author of novels, plays, an early collection of short stories, and autobiographical works (see Bibliography). He was born on August 4, 1904 in Maloszyci, Poland to Jan-Onufry and Antonina Marcela. The elder Gombrowicz was a wealthy lawyer, land-owner and chairman of an industrial association; his wife was the daughter of Ignacy Kotkowski, also a land-owner.

Witold was raised Catholic and studied with private tutors and at an aristocratic Catholic school in Warsaw. The son followed the father as far as law studies (he attended Warsaw University from 1922 to 1927 and graduated as master of law) but later admitted to having no interest: "I didn't go to the lectures. My valet, who was more distinguished than I, went instead." From 1927 to 1929 he studied philosophy and economics at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales in Paris. But he neglected his studies and, when his father cut off his allowance, Witold reluctantly began training to become a lawyer in Warsaw. Here he began frequenting literary cafes and writing short stories -- the first writings he did not destroy.

The collected stories were published as Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity (1933) and met with harsh criticism and faint praise that made Gombrowicz regret the title. Ferdydurke, in fact, seemed to deal with the author's sudden self-consciousness as a public entity; and while self-consciousness is often detrimental to a writer's craft Gombrowicz wielded it as a weapon to separate the outer layer of the persona from the nameless inner depth of the person. Susan Sontag has called Ferdydurke "one of the most important overlooked books of the 20th Century."

Gombrowicz's principal works were written in Argentina, to which fate transported him virtually the day before the outbreak of WWII in 1939, and where he remained for 24 years. His struggle with identity now assumed new ferocity as he was branded a Polish émigré writer; the story of these first years in exile is "documented" in the hilarious Trans-Atlantyk, written while filling a sinecure position at the Polish Bank in Buenos Aires.

After eight years in Argentina, Gombrowicz collaborated (in 1947) with a team of South American writers to translate Ferdydurke into Spanish, but the resulting work was ignored. In fact, apart from publications in the émigré review Kultura, issued by the Polish Literary Institute in Paris, Gombrowicz was virtually unknown until 1957 -- when the Communist regime in Poland briefly lifted its ban on his work (in place since the Nazi invasion of 1939) and Ferdydurke was reissued. It was interpreted as an insightful premonition of totalitarianism and became an overnight success. Other publications followed, as did stage performances of his plays -- which were compared to Beckett and Ionesco. A new ban in 1958 removed his work from Polish shelves, but not before they gained notice in the west.

Though his works have been translated into 30 languages, he remains largely unknown outside of Europe. A Ford Foundation grant in 1963 permitted Gombrowicz to leave Argentina at last to spend a year in Berlin. A return to unfriendly Poland was out of the question and after a brief visit to Paris his asthma drove him to the south of France, where he lived his few remaining years in Vence. He won the prestigious International Prize for Literature in 1967 for Cosmos (his novel Pornografia previously missed the prize in 1960 by one vote) and was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in 1968. The asthma reduced him to near speechlessness and also affected his heart. Though he survived the first heart attack, the second took his life at midnight on July 24, 1969.

Cosmos, considered Gombrowicz's best novel, is an absurdist mystery in which the instinctive human search for order and meaning becomes the "culprit," just as it had in Pornografia. Most of his writings, in fact, deal with the distorting power of Form over the human mind, the seductive allure of immaturity (formless yet imbued with the potential for form), and thus with the questions of identity and the possibility of relationship. His fiction hinges on moments in which the antithesis or incongruity of Form and reality becomes public and undeniable, and Gombrowicz is often as hilarious as he is revealing.

In his journals he was uncompromising in defrocking imposters and poseurs; every page of the Diaries contains some sparkling insight that transcends the cultural or historical particulars of which he wrote." - Alan Gullette

"Witold Gombrowicz is probably the most important twentieth-century novelist most Western readers have never heard of, which is to say that he is the kind of writer whose following consists largely of other writers, whose faith in Gombrowicz's under-recognized genius has led them to shower him with superlatives. Susan Sontag, in her introduction to the recent English translation of Ferdydurke, his ironic masterpiece, calls him brilliant. John Updike takes this praise one step further, noting that Gombrowicz is "one of the profoundest of late moderns." Milan Kundera ranks him among Joyce and Proust as one of the seminal figures in modern literature. His writings are beloved in France, where they have long been available in competent translations, and where Gombrowicz himself spent the last years of his life. And in his native Poland, Gombrowicz remains something of a cultural legend almost thirty-five years after his death; in a publishing market that frequently casts its best literature out of print, all Gombrowicz's books are easily available, as are any number of volumes about his life and work. The official website of Radom, a lackluster city in central Poland near the small town where Gombrowicz was born, proudly proclaims him alongside Jan Kochanowski (an excellent Renaissance poet) and director Andrzej Wajda as having lived there (or at least as having had some association with the area, which is important enough for the local cultural imagination). And the Polish Ministry of Culture has officially proclaimed 2004 "The Year of Gombrowicz," which will include a plethora of conferences and cultural events marking the one hundredth anniversary of the author's birth.

It's just the sort of thing that Gombrowicz - or a certain side of him - would abhor. From his very first book, a collection of short stories called Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity (1933; later entitled Bakakaj, and including the story "The Rat"), Gombrowicz raged against what he saw as the aristocratic conservatism of Polish culture, the formality of men bowing and kissing ladies' hands in greeting, the general insistence on how Poland's grand destiny had been sidetracked by a century of partition and occupation, and perhaps most of all the uncritical reverence for such cultural heroes as Copernicus (of questionable nationality), Mickiewicz (the national poet, actually born in Lithuania), and Chopin (half-Polish, who spent most of his life in France). Early in his three-volume Diary, itself an extraordinary record of an author at play, Gombrowicz asks, "What does Mrs. Smith have in common with Chopin?" Next to nothing, but that's not even the worst of it. What Gombrowicz found truly frustrating - even dangerous - is how his country's inferiority complex, its need to remind the world time and again how Polish culture is just as great - nay, greater - than that of the West, cripples the individual, forces him to memorize verses and dates and to behave in a manner befitting the great civilization that is Poland. Or at least this is the attitude represented in the preponderance of Gombrowicz's work, any treatment of which is obliged to bear the disclaimer that you can never fully trust an author so fond of irony and masks. Indeed, writing about Gombrowicz's attitude toward Polish culture is kind of like writing an obituary for someone who didn't believe in death.

That said, the individual's battle against the strictures of culture remained a lifelong obsession for Gombrowicz. In his early work in particular, this theme manifests itself as a battle between maturity - that is, the social expectation that the individual will behave according to a given code, a superego imposed from above - and "immaturity," the freedom to do as one will and, in general, not to give a damn. This is the central conflict in "The Rat": a retired judge captures a troublesome vagabond and does his best to rein in his "particularly massive nature," which offends the judge's sense of order and propriety. In "The Honorable Kraykowski's Dancer," the story that opens the same collection, the protagonist becomes so obsessed with the regal manners of an attorney and his wife that he does everything he can to subvert the lawyer's individuality, for example, by paying for his daily pastries in advance. "Imagine this," he addresses the reader conspiratorially. "A lawyer comes out of a public restroom, reaches for his fifteen cents, and learns that the bill has already been settled. How does he feel then?" And famously, in Ferdydurke (1937), a thirty-year-old man is enslaved by his old schoolmaster and thrown back into the classroom, where he finds it impossible to gain freedom without first enduring endless humiliations. In each of these instances, no one really needs to bother about the totalitarianism that will later occupy Poland and preoccupy so much of its literature. For Gombrowicz, culture itself, with its insistence on acceptable norms, is plenty totalitarian as it is, thank you very much.

Which brings us to the curious irony of the author’s fate. In 1939, following the publication of Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity, a play called Ivona, Princess of Burgundy, and Ferdydurke (plus, truth be told, a second novel, The Possessed, which appeared under a pseudonym and wasn’t acknowledged by its author for thirty years), Gombrowicz was invited to enjoy the maiden voyage of a cruise ship across the Atlantic. He set sail and arrived in Buenos Aires. Then the Nazis invaded Poland, followed by the Soviets, and that was that: Gombrowicz was in Argentina with no money and no Spanish. He remained there for over two decades, utterly impoverished, relying for his survival on a contingent of Polish expatriates who were, like most communities in emigration, more conservative than his critics back in Poland. This is the subject of his hilarious 1953 novel Trans-Atlantyk, which features a protagonist named Witold Gombrowicz and is written in a specialized narrative style of the old Polish nobility, a wholly appropriate medium for the stuffy circumstances in which the author found himself.

Yes, appropriate. In fact, Gombrowicz's prose has never been as absurd as journalistic reductions would have it, since it is always - both thematically and linguistically - a consistent, even systematic response to a set of cultural, philosophical, and psychological problems. "The Rat" provides an excellent case-in-point: it is the language of obsession and fetish, with its concatenated synonyms and spontaneous singing, its repetition and play. The writing is at once extremely poetic and anti-conventional, a stylistically "mature" prose expressing the lushness and buoyancy of immaturity. Gombrowicz's early critics attacked his lack of restraint, his sometimes childlike delight in language, his flirtation with excess and arbitrariness. (The collection's second title, Bakakaj, is itself arbitrarily chosen; Gombrowicz took the name from one of his streets in Buenos Aires, as he later explained, "the way we name dogs, simply in order to tell one from another.")

Gombrowicz's opponents took such games as an affront, an attack against all that was right and proper in Polish culture, as an assertion of the individual against his context, and perhaps a few of them still do. Just the other day in Kraków, I was enjoying a late dinner of beer and kielbasa when a Polish acquaintance (he actually grew up in Canada, but he's a hell of a lot more Polish than I'll ever be, as he kept reminding me) suggested that Czechs have no culture of their own. "Certainly they do," I insisted, and went on to praise their extraordinary literature, their rich heritage of music and language. "No," he said, "it's all Austro-Hungarian." I pointed out how the Austro-Hungarian Empire had occupied all of southern Poland, including Kraków, for well over a century, occasionally inciting the peasants to saw their Polish landlords in half. This, I suppose, is how a situation escalates. He started rattling off the standard roster of Polish cultural heroes, and that's when I began to channel Witold Gombrowicz. "What does Mrs. Smith have in common with Chopin?" I asked. My interlocutor bristled, became very solemn, and told me in no uncertain terms that making such remarks on the street would give me an opportunity to use my health insurance, which he hoped was comprehensive. And it is. And he's probably right" - Benjamin Paloff

Cosmos and Pornografia: Two Novels

Reviews:

"We have in Witold Gombrowicz a mind not unlike Kafka, though with more depth and originality. His Cosmos is potently real, as to have a life of its own. It is the most original book I have yet come across. With Pornographia, there is cleverness, wit, humour, and suspense. In it, two old men draw a fascination for a young boy and a young girl, whose apparent closeness implies possible seduction. They become obsessed by them, how they are, what they say, what they do. It tends to represent the VITALITY OF YOUTH as no other book does. The language is poetically sounder than Cosmos, and the scenery and discriptions are of a dark rural town admist Second World War Poland. As with Cosmos, the characters have mystical occurences of wonder, bewilderment, confusion, silence. The world becomes baffling, alive, and beyond reason. It hits you like a hammer. No other books have even come close to doing that to me (with the possible exceptions of Gurdjieff's or Dunne's thinking). In Cosmos, a series of happenings baffle a young man as he rents a boarding room with a friend. He notices the arrangement of objects, and the behaviours of persons without knowing why he is noticing them. He sees a bird, hung upon a wire, dangling from a tree. Then, he sees in the backyard a piece of wood likewise dangling from a tree. Other things follow, until his world is a confused existential dream. With Pornograpfia, there is less beautiful strangeness. It tends to represent the vitality of youth as no other book does. I feel that Mr. Gombrowicz was among the most starting and absorbing writers of this century, and, sadly, he is almost unknown. His work should vibrate you as an emotionally driven song. It has an uncanny mold of realism that other authors have not hit on, as for instance moments where the protagonist of both novels have fragmented thoughts (and sentence fragments!) rather than long sentencing, or when the dialogue of other characters are seen as droning on and not being listened to. I value this work as being among the greatest I own, and having a mysticism the likes of which I can not begin to appreciate. The books are difficult and brilliant. I could read them 50 times over.

Read his diaries, and perhaps Kafka's THE CASTLE to see their world of meaning beyond words." - Clandestine

The Syntax of Chaos: Semiotics and Silence in Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos - Glen Scott Allen

Ferdyduke - Witold Gombrowicz

Reviews:

""Ferdydurke" by Witold Gombrowicz has finally been properly translated into English. Not that this is an event worth mentioning in general, but the point to be made is that the world of translation offers room for all kinds of mischief and sloppiness. Who would have thought that it were perfectly acceptable for publishers to allow translation from a second, and not native tongue? Imagine, for purposes of illustration, that a work of a classic British author translated into German not directly, but from Suahili, for this was the language the book was first translated into. Would you be satisfied with a product of this type? This was the fate of Gombrowicz, his native tongue was done away with, and the Anglo-Saxon world of bibliophiles had had no other choice but to read a lemon. Perhaps this is the revenge of the Heavens on the author himself, for never was there any other Polish author who had his native country in such a low regard as he did. In his "Trans-Atlantyk", Gombrowicz dared to ridicule everything a Pole holds dear, together with the whole idea of a nation as such. Were he to live today, he would embrace the idea of convergence and the global village of consumptionism, as opposed to Europe of Nations. That was one of the main reasons for Gombrowicz's emigration to Argentina, where he spent almost all of his literary career.

"Ferdydurke" is an early novel by this author, and it's never as crass as the aforementioned "Trans-Atlantyk". In fact, it constitutes part of a literary canon in Poland to this very day, and there is no educated Pole who hasn't read or at least heard of "Ferdydurke". Scenes from this book, gestures, and neologisms entered the mass vocabulary, and once you learn some of these expressions, you cannot unlearn them, for then there is no better way to express yourself, but to use the phrases coined by Gombrowicz. Whatever issues Poles have with this author, one thing is certain: we are grateful to him for augmenting our language. Gombrowicz created an archetype of a confused man, whose karma is to move back in time, back to school, with the mentality of an adult. I will even risk a claim that this fact alone lies at the very heart of science fiction - for how might that be possible, and what would happen if such occurence took place? How would that affect the object in queestion? Perhaps my perception of this problem is a bit skewed due to my occupational hazard of a scientist, but for me, "Ferdydurke" is a laboratory novel, where with a literary set of tools we analyze both the situation, and the object, in the vein of the medieval alchemist. This novel, hardly known in the English-speaking world, will be an exhilarating reading experience for you, provided that you will trust me and pick it up. The amusing analysis of the immature world the protagonist found himself in, mixed with elements from all literary forms, from plain mystery, via comedy, to sophisticated analysis of society, makes Ferdydurke an experimental novel of potential interest for all bibliophiles and lovers of the nonstandard." - Amazon

Translating Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdyduke - Danuta Borchardt

The Unstrung Harp - Edward Gorey

Reviews:

""Mr Earbrass belongs to the straying, rather than the sedentary, type of author. He is never to be found at his desk unless actually writing down a sentence. Before this happens he broods over it indefinately while picking up and putting down again small, loose objects...He frequently hums more in his mind than anywhere else, themes from the Poddington `Te Deum'."

Gorey is strange. Not weird strange. Just strange. His glib verbosity is a fantastic challenge. He takes the absurd and the stark into a play-acting of 1920s (I choose this era only because it is a feeling I get from his drawings) melodrama with a twist. I suppose his writing wouldn't have the same impact without his illustrations. His unblinking faces and penguin bodies are black comedy parodies of our over-rated catalogue of mannerisms and expressions. I laugh when I realize how serious Gorey is about taking his characters down a seriously mad path.

In the `Unstrung Harp', Mr Earbrass' boredom and inability to write are a bizarre focus. Gorey finds so much humor and psychology in our seemingly empty, drifting moments. Makes me realize that boredom really is a thing in itself to appreciate. Mr. Earbrass, after all, gets more from his "straying" than his actually writing, enjoying the "about to happen" rather than the "happening".

Start your collection. His books are tricky to come by, but even more difficult to part with." - JR31

Father and Son - Edmund Gosse

Amazon:

Edmund Gosse's FATHER AND SON is legitimately considered one of the highpoints of Victorian autobiography. As has been noted by others, the book recounts the relationship between Edmund Gosse and his father, a member of the Christian sect generally known as Plymouth Brethren, but who was also a member of the Royal Society and one of the foremost marine biologists of his time. The narrative tends to break down into a number of definite segments: the author's birth until the death of his mother; life with his father until the time of the publishing of Darwin's THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES; the move of the Gosses to the coast of England; and young Gosse's schooling and gradual growth away from the religious teachings and expectations he had received from his parents.

A number of powerful impressions evolve over the course of the telling. First and foremost, one is left with an impression of how overwhelmingly Gosse's childhood was stripped of nearly all fun by his parents' puritanical and stern religion. Gosse's father is presented not as a cruel, vicious, and hypocritical. Instead, he is shown as a caring parent, a completely earnest practitioner of his religion, but fanatically concerned to eliminate all activities that do not lead to increased religious devotion and moral seriousness. Unfortunately, this resulted for Gosse in a childhood from which all possibility of play and fun and delight had been eliminated. Near the end of the book, I was left wondering if Gosse would have been inclined to leave Christianity if he had just had more fun as a kid.

The section of the book dealing with his father's reaction to Darwin's ORIGIN OF SPECIES was for me the most interesting part of the book. His father's scientific standing was such that Darwin actually contacted him before the publication of his theories, and asked his response. Gosse notes that his father instantly understood that the scientific evidence clearly supported Darwin's theory. His reading of Genesis, however, indicated to him that the world was created in six days, which precluded the scenario articulated by Darwin. He therefore concluded that god created the earth in six days, but in so doing implanted fossils and geologic strata into the earth. In this way, his father was able to explain both the apparent evidence for eons long development of the earth and homo sapiens and yet retain his belief in the belief that Genesis taught a six day literal creation.

There are any of a number of reasons to read this work. It is a classic autobiography, an important source for one response to the reception of Darwin, and a magnificent evocation of puritanical religious life during the Victorian age. Most of all, it is a disturbing account of the distortive effect that intolerant and narrow-minded religious upbringing can have on an individual.

The House of Breath - William Goyen

Reviews:

"'The House Of Breath' reads like a sacred text, as they turn the pages the reader feels like they are blowing the dust from a casket of long hidden jewels.

Narrated by a man returning after a prolonged absence to his long abandoned family home in Charity (a small, river-bound Texas town) the book invokes the ghosts of the past to tell the tales of desire, loss & melancholy that make up the (largely secret) history of that family.

Weaving a dizzy spell over all is the richly evoked river delta landscape. Goyen uses the most mesmerizing, lush descriptive prose to magically and brilliantly conjour up a sense of time and place. The overall effect is like living through a waking dream. You choose to read slowly to soak up the atmosphere and prolong the poetic experience:

"(the river) was ornamented with big drowsy snapturtles sitting like figurines on rocks; had little jeweled perch in it and sliding cottenmouth water moccasins. It crawled, croaking with bullfrogs and ticking and sucking and clucking and shining..."

Comparable to Cormac McCarthy at his most lyrical, readers of Calvino, Banville, Flannery O'Connor & Faulkner amongst others, will swoon over this southern masterpiece." - T. Branney

Quarantine: A Novel - Juan Goytisolo

Amazon:

"Spanish experimental novelist Goytisolo (Landscapes After the Battle, 1987, etc.), the author of a two-volume memoir (Realms of Strife, 1990, and Forbidden Territory, 1988), explores the 40-day journey that souls, according to Islam, take from the moment of death to their final resting place and reflects on the creative writing process. For him, the journey is a quarantine of sorts, akin to the experience of a writer who must withdraw from the world so that his imagination can take flight. Indeed in Quarantine, Goytisolo's narrator is a writer in the process of composing a novel--in fact, the very novel we are reading. He is imagining his own death and journey as he meditates on the spiritual wandering of a woman friend who has recently died. The narrator, like the dead according to Islam, must account to Nakir and Munkar, the two angels who examine and, if necessary, punish the dead in their tombs. Meanwhile, it is the year of the Persian Gulf War, and all its wartime horrors become mingled with the torments of the underworld. At the end of the ``waiting'' period, the writer's novel is finished and his soul and the soul of his friend are released. ``Write, keep writing about me,'' she implores him. ``Only your interest and the interest of those who read you can continue to keep me alive!'' Quarantine is an intriguing multilayered novel, but one at times more powerful in concept than in execution. The writing itself is awash in a dreamlike quality that bestows on even the vivid descriptions of pain and torture a gauzy, and not always compelling, feel. Goytisolo's fans, however, should be pleased by this unique meditation on death and the creative process by a distinctly original voice." - Kirkus

The Dark Domain - Stefan Grabinski

Reviews:

Early in the last century, this shockingly underrated Polish writer saw the horror that haunted modernity. His ghosts and demons don't inhabit graveyard or ruins, but steam trains, electricity cables, and the rapidly growing cities. The antithesis of nostalgic fantasy. - China Mieville

"Great horror story writers have a unique imaginative inner vision that distinguishes them from other writers. Stories by Poe, Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and W. H. Hodgson could have come only from them. Stefan Grabinski is one of the great ones. His work reflects bizarre personal obsessions that recur throughout his tales: the metaphysical meaning of fire; trains as a symbol of the vast, implacable power that machines give man over his surroundings and also of man's relentless journey to who knows where; strange sexual phantoms that emerge from either unplumbed dimensions or from man's own twisted pshyche. These stories are gripping, haunting, and have the power to pull you into Grabinski's warped but somehow universal reality and to keep a part of you there long after you have turned the last page and read the last word. As with the other great horror story writers, Grabinski's inner demons make a connection with each of his reader's inner demons and create an indelible impression.

My favorite of the stories in the collection is "Fumes", but the others are all strangely great and compelling as well. Two other exquisite Grabinski tales are unfortunately not in this book. However, English translations of "The Dark Hamlet" can be found in "The Dedalus Book of Polish Fantasy", and "The White Wyrak" can be found in "100 Creepy Little Tales". I look forward to the day when all of Grabinski's horror shorts are available in English translation." - Gregg Zimmerman

The Opposing Shore

Reviews:

"Even in translation you can feel the lyrical intensity and beauty of this novel which creates an atmosphere of tension which no reader will forget easily: Aldo, a young nobleman, has had enough of the decadence of his native Vezzano, a fictitious republic modeled on Venice. He has himself posted to a navy base which was once built to defend Vezzano against Farghestan. The two powers are still officially at war, but nothing has actually happened for 300 years. Now, however, there is a growing tension, not just inside Aldo, who dreams of the unknown Farghestan. People in Vezzano seem to be tired of its eternal stability, they long for action...

Most of the novel's plot takes place near the old navy base, which is surrounded by a desert landscape which is described with mesmerizing intensity. Little incidents are building up towards an explosion which is only hinted at in the book. People waiting for something to happen in a more and more uncanny slience - that may remind the reader of the fact that the book was written before and during World War II. The decadence longing for action, danger and change, however, seems to me reminiscent of World War I. This is not a book of easy historical analogy. It is a unique work of art which stands completely on its own." - Manuel Haas

The Meeting at Telgte - Gunter Grass

Reviews:

"Or are you well informed about the history of the "Thirty Years War" in Germany? Do the following names mean anything at all to you: Jakob Boehme? Paul Fleming? Andreas Gryphius? Martin Opitz? and especially Paul Gerhardt? And then the really essential names: Heinrich Schuetz? Johann Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen? Those are just a few of the cast of historical personages that Guenter Grass assembles in his imagination in the village of Telgte in 1647, and if the names and places are utterly meaningless to you, you'll never get past the first chapter of this well-packed little book.

Still, there are reasons why you might want to try. It's a "quick read" if you have a running start, and drop-dead funny if you have any idea what the stakes are. It's also a vivid lesson in European political and religious history, a lesson that will pound the significance of the 17th Century for 20th Century Germany in your Anglophone head forevermore. And it's a pointed reprimand to the self-importance of writers and scholars of any era.

Here's the scene: Simon Dach, a professor of poetry at Koenigsberg, has invited all the most notable Protestant writers of war-torn Germany to gather and discuss the state of the German language and the vision of German intellectuals for a "new Germany" after the impending peace. The poets find themselves helplessly stranded until they are 'rescued' by the extravagant figure of Gelnhausen (Grimmelshausen), unbeknowst to them the most notorious free-booter in Germany. Gelnhausen is the pivotal character in this narrative, and his interface with the assorted literary bigwigs provides most of the humor. They regard him as a rogue and a buffoon, while he is eager to absorb what lessons he can from them. The 'punch line' is that, among all these preening, posing mediocrities, Gelnhausen will become the author of the greatest German novel of the epoch, the picaresque classic "Simplicius Simplicissimus." Quite frankly, if you've never read Simplicius, you'd be better off to start with that, and read Guenter Grass and Bertolt Brecht later. The problem, sad to say, is that Simplicius has never gotten much attention in the English world, and translations go out of print quickly. There's a simplified abridgement of the story available, titled "Adventures of a Simpleton," which I've also reviewed; it's adequate to prepare you for Telgte.

As a foil to the resourceful rascal Gelnhausen, Grass introduces the other greatest creative genius of baroque Germany - composer Heinrich Schuetz - into the Telgte 'parliament of fowls' as an uninvited guest. All the assembled 'intellectuals' are secretly uncomfortable with the austere composer, well aware that his opinion of their word-smithing is far from laudatory. Schuetz, in real history, lamented the failure of German writers to provide texts comparable to the Italian poets like Petrarch and Tasso. His own choices for texts to be set in music came chiefly from the Italians and from the German translation of the Bible. (If you are unfamiliar with Schuetz's music, this review will have supreme impact on your future life; you simply shouldn't spend another week without hearing it. Luckily for your wallet, Brilliant Classics has issued a three-box multi-CD edition of Schuetz's most sublime compositions, performed by Cappella Augustana.) Schuetz's grave presence dominates the assembly rather like that of Obi-Wan Kenobi dominated scenes in Star Wars. There is no historical probability than Schuetz and Grimmelshausen ever met, but in Grass's fantasy, Schuetz sees deep into the character of the brilliant rogue, and assigns him the task of writing rather than raiding.

Schuetz also confronts his musical mirror image, the pietist hymn-writer Paul Gerhardt, whose 'simple' strophic songs are still sung by Lutherans and Calvinists around the world. This confrontation is possibly the deepest and most ambiguous theme of the book, amounting to a question about the value of any art in the lives of ordinary people. You'll have to take The Meeting of Telgte on for yourself in order to learn what Grass concludes.

If indeed you decide to read this spectacular parable, here's what you need to do: read the "Afterword" by Leonard Forster first. Then, as you start the book, for the first three or four chapters, keep your finger in the "Dramatis Personae" at the back of the book, and look up each new character as he is introduced. Then, by the time Gelnhausen takes charge, you'll be having enough fun to keep reading despite any unfamiliarity with the flock of odd birds." - Giordano Bruno

Lanark: A Life in Four Books - Alasdair Gray

How Lanark Grew - Alasdair Gray

Return to Unthank - William Boyd

Lanark 1982: An Unofficial Alasdair Gray Website:

"What can I say about Lanark that hasn't been said already? Anthony Burgess, in his list of the 99 greatest novels written in English since 1945, called it the "shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom" that Scotland needed, compared the book itself to James Joyce's Ulysses and proclaimed Alasdair Gray "the best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott". It is hard to understate its importance in the recent renaissance of writing in Scotland.

Worked upon, on and off, for 25 years (chapter 12, with very few differences to what was finally published, was runner-up in a short story competition organised by The Observer, an English newspaper, in 1958) Lanark was eventually published in 1981 by a small Edinburgh-based publisher called Canongate. A publisher to whom Gray has returned several times in his subsequent career. It was immediately seen as a great event in Scotland's literary life. The country's resurgence of literature as something to be proud of, can almost be dated from the moment this novel hit the bookshops. The New Yorker, in 1996, called Gray "the grand old man of the Scottish renaissance", and the editor of The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies says that the 1981 publication of Lanark "detonated a cultural time-bomb which had been ticking away patiently for years".

But enough of its reputation, what of the book itself?

First off, it's a BIG book. Big in ideas, big in reputation, big in ambition and big in weight. At close to 600 pages long, it's certainly the longest of Gray's works and it's not the easiest. Although, being his debut novel, Lanark was many people's introduction to Gray, it is not the one I recommend reading first. If you're the sort of person who isn't going to like Gray's writing, Lanark and 1982 Janine are the books that are most concentrated in their Grayishness. If you aren't sure you're going to like Gray, start with Poor Things or, the one I always lend people (I've lost several copies), the short story collection Unlikely Stories, Mostly.

But don't let this put you off Lanark. Like all mountains, you might need to prepare for the climb, but the view from the top takes your breath away.

Lanark defies description. Like Slaughterhouse Five it is both outlandish science-fiction and obvious autobiography, like The Third Policeman it makes use of lengthy footnotes that say absolutely nothing, it begins with book three, has a prologue halfway through, and it includes a long index of plagiarisms in the middle of a discussion between the author and his lead character. Like many difficult books it is probably better appreciated on subsequent readings, but it is likely to grab you from the off. Books 3 and 4 (which you read first and last) are about Lanark, a man who arrives by train in a strange town. Having no name, he takes one from a sepia-tinted tourist-photograph he saw on the compartment wall. The city has no daylight and the inhabitants do no work, living off subsistence-level grants from an unseen power. Many people suffer from oddly symbolic diseases. Lanark develops 'dragonhide', a physical manifestation of Wilhelm Reich's emotional armouring, which smothers his arm in thick heavy scales and claws where his fingers were, one of his friends develops 'mouths' the symptoms of which involves mouths opening like wounds over the body which then speak independently of the sufferer. Lanark commits suicide and comes round in 'The Institute'. The Institute is devoted to curing those it can, but uses the hopeless cases as fuel (dragonhide sufferers eventually 'go nova' if uncured, when their pent-up emotions cause their bodies to explode, which energy is harnessed to power generators) or as food (the glutinous 'softs' are turned into a processed blancmange-like substance which Lanark refuses to eat when he discovers its source). This is only part of the opening book. The novel later trips back to Glasgow just after the war, where we meet Thaw (who it would appear is Lanark in a previous incarnation) for books 2 and 3. I will stop the description here, because it cannot do the book justice.

In the USA, the novel was due to be published 6 months or so after the original UK issue, to use whatever promotion had been garnered. As it happened, management changes at Harpers and Row meant that they were issued at the same time, it was marketed as a straight science-fiction novel in the States and disappeared without trace. In the UK, it remained a cult classic, but began the career of 'Gray, the novelist' and meant that after just a few more books, Gray could live by doing what he wanted, and not what he had to. Along with Unlikely Stories, Mostly it is the only one of Gray's book never to have fallen out of print in the UK, and its status as 'cult classic' seems assured for a while yet. If only Danny Boyle could be pushed into directing the film version, staring Ewan McGregor as Lanark/Thaw, Gray could live a wealthy retirement."

The Book of Prefaces - Alasdair Gray

Amazon:

"After a decade and a bit of footling around with pleasant but whimsical novels and the occasional killer short story, Alasdair Gray has finally delivered his long-promised anthology of English-language prefaces. And what a treasure it is. Designed and presented with the author's characteristic loving care, it's a mighty selection of beginnings-of-books from Anglo-Saxon down to 1920 or so (more recent prefaces being excluded because of copyright laws.)

Besides the sheer wealth of Stuff To Read, there are dense, canny and wonderfully sure-footed essays on the progress-or-not of English culture'n'society courtesy of Mister Gray, plus marginal glosses by a variety of highly intelligent people and also Roger Scruton. Scruton (England's dimmest philosopher) provides the gloss on the preface to Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France", and offers up his customary brand of simple-minded conservatism, but it doesn't matter because Gray has already neatly undercut him several dozen pages earlier with his own reflections on the revolution.

A book to keep with you for the rest of your life and leave to someone in your will. There haven't been many such in the past 50 years. And while the errata slip isn't quite exhaustive (there are a few typos that it fails to credit), how can you resist it when it's written in rhyme?" - lexo-2

"For many years in catalogues of forthcoming publications Alsadair Gray's Anthology of Prefaces has been referred to. Some suspected a Gray type joke as the book failed to appear year on year. Was it a post modern joke? Gray after all was the man that had an erratum slip inserted in an earlier book reading "This erratum slip was inserted by mistake." The apparent joke was taken too far when one catalogue of second hand books published almost a decade ago suggested that the book had not appreciated in value and was worth roughly £20 second hand. This was not a bad sum for a non-existent text. Snippets of text appeared occasionally, and while the book remained unpublished it became apparent that Gray was beginnning to make serious progress on the work. It then became known that others were assisting Gray in his task of glossing the prefaces including crucially important Scottish writers such as Jim Kelman, Tom Leonard, Janice Galloway, and Alison Kennedy.

So now the book has arrived. The title has changed (now The Book of Prefaces, rather than an anthology). The price rather more than the suggested second hand value.

And it is well worth the wait. This will stand as a monument to Gray's achievements as an artist (of words and of pictures). His remit has been to produce a history of literature in English from the sixth century to the present day.

This is a book to revel in. Among prefaces to novels and poems (from the well known, such as Mary Shelley's genesis of Frankenstein to the less well known such as Trahern's poetry) there are prefaces (and prologues) to works of philosophy (e.g. Bentham and Franklin) and law (the introduction to Stair's Institutions, a crucially important work in the survival of Scots law as an independent legal system).

The book is beautifully illustrated, wonderfully designed, and contains a charming introduction by Gray detailing reasons for prefaces and for enjoying reading them (my favourite, enjoying watching authors in a huff).

This book will be an invaluable companion through life, and careful reading will have the desired effect of making an individual appear better read and more erudite than they really are.

Buy and enjoy this wonderful book." - scottish lawyer

Nothing - Henry Green

Linda Linguvic:

"The British writer Henry Green's literary skill went far beyond a comedy of manners, which this book appears to be on the surface. Dense with meaning, "Nothing" is a short literary gem, which forces the reader to read a million nuances into the witty and yet deeply dense conversations which make up the entirety of the book. The story is set in 1948 and follows John and Jane, now middle aged but still reminiscing about an affair they had many years before when they were still married. They both have new relationships, Liz and Richard, but still see each other frequently for meals or for tea. Their respective children, Mary and Philip, are now grown and want to marry. But of course there are complications.

The world that the author creates for the reader is a very British one. The dialogue is precise but filled with hidden meanings, as what is unsaid is often even more important than what is said. There's a wonderful symmetrical balance in each of the conversations as well as in the structure of the book. The characters speak for themselves, with very little description, and, through their words alone, the twists and turns of the story emerge, the sounds of their voices echoing on the pages. The question of what really happened and is happening is always just beyond our reach, and the even though the characters might be moved around like chess pieces at the author's whim, they never do change or gain insight into their behavior. Surprisingly, this is still an amazingly satisfying read, as if is the reader himself or herself who gets to experience their world and gain insight into the inevitability of the conclusion. This book is a delightful read and a real treat. I highly recommend it."

Squire Haggard's Journal - Michael Green

Eileen Berdon Galen:

"This little journal is fine and funny little parody of the eighteenth-century journals of Boswell, and Pepys (earlier) - and many less famous English diarists and chroniclers. It is introduced by its creator, Michael Green. In one elegant paragraph he tell us a lot about the diaries he used: "What struck me was their fascination with food (dinner was usually described in great detail and many of the dishes were rather strange by modern standards). Death and illness were also subject to close scrutiny. There seemed a compulsion to record sexual adventures in high-flown language which contrasted with the sordid realities [...] And there was an obsession with small sums of money." Green's protagonist, Amos Haggard (soon to be joined by his son) stays within these parameters as he takes the reader on a tour of his world (London, and then a comic tour of Europe). His diary entries are in turns droll, hysterically funny, gently repulsive (mostly the menu items), bawdy, and shot through with very funny political commentary on the hypocrisy (and criminality, sometimes) of the upper classes.

The journal begins on September 16, 1777 with a deadpan report of a man, Jas. Soaper, having been hung for stealing a nail. By the next day, we learn that "Jas. Soaper found to be innocent." Amos Haggard is a man who knows his own mind; if not closed, it is narrow. "I make it an infallible rule while travellg. abroad to see as little of the scenery as possible; thus the mind is not unsettled and disturbed by the wild excesses of Nature and barren deserts such as the Scottish Highlands." But he does travel; he goes to France, landing on "the loathsome land of Toads and Pederasts" and then to Paris, where for sport he insults the French, and finds that is impressed by the Bastille. He admires the variety of punishments there, is impressed by the prison's architecture, and makes a quick sketch - "with a view to erctg. a smaller copy in England."

Squire Haggard knows that December 25th is "the most sacred feast in the Christian Calendar," and observes annually by setting out early in the morning to evict his tenants who are in arrears. The day proceeds. He reports on his misdeeds and lack of nominal ethics with an insouciance that is constantly ridiculously funny.

There is a slyly woven plot that offers ample satirical commentary on the historic English preoccupations of class and money. There are imagined and real insults, bad food and dyspepsia, gossip and civil intrigue, poisonings, outrageous behavior, and (in a wholly successful parody of Plague diaries) the ever-present Death. In addition there is romance, bawdy fun, much too much drinking and, at evening's end - Squire Haggard's inevitable reluctance to settle the bill.

I laughed my way through this very entertaining little book."

Cormorant - Stephen Gregory

Amazon:

"Initially, I intended to criticize "The Cormorant" by Stephan Gregory for failing to be as compelling as I had expected a book touted as "Award-winning" to be. However, as I began writing this review, my opinion began to take another shape. Gregory does a masterful job of creating the landscape and atmosphere of the Wales countryside and the cozy cottage where the narrator and his wife take residence after the death of his uncle Ian. It is quite easy for the reader to become enveloped in the world the author has created: to cozy up to the fire and watch the pre-Christmas snow falling outside the slowly-fogging windows, all the while sensing the sulking, angry presence of the ugly joke, the cormorant, trapped in a cage in the back yard. Based on atmosphere alone, "The Cormorant" is a book whose images and emotions will linger in your mind. The ending of the story, the portion of the book with which I was going to find fault, is still unraveling itself in my mind. At first, I felt that the ending didn't create the kind of emotional impact that I felt the author had intended. I now believe that my feelings had more to do with the fact that I stayed up late reading and got little sleep, rather than any failings on the author's part. I feel a bit like a shock victim coming out of it: the emotions are rising up in me as I think back on the story, and plotlines that I felt were left unresolved are weaving themselves together. The sheer fact that a novel can leave this kind of lingering impression should be enough to recommend it. White Wolf publishing, under their Borealis line, has published a number of great books in recent years by authors who are not well know in the United States. After reading several of the titles published in this line, I now browse through bookstores in search of the Borealis imprint. Some other titles in the line include "The Immaculate" by Mark Morris, "Resume with Monsters" by William Browning Spencer, and "Virgins and Martyrs" by Simon Maginn. Check them out!!!" - A Reader

Russell Griffin

"Sci-fi writer Russell M. Griffin, after a succession of poorly-marketed novels, each from a less successful publisher than the one before it, last week devoured his own foot in order to stay alive. Griffin was unavailable for comment, but our sources conjectured, "How else is the poor b*st*rd supposed to live? Not on the piece-of-sh*t advances these people pay!"

What brought Griffin to this end? Inquiring minds want to know.

The seeds are visible in his first novel, THE MAKESHIFT GOD (Dell, 1979). Obviously some sort of effete intellectual snob, Griffin packs an otherwise well-written and fast-paced space adventure with all sorts of literary references and dead languages.

It is in CENTURY'S END (Bantam 1981), however, that Griffin begins to blatantly show his true colors. Not only does he mock organized religion, flying saucers (!), and politicians, he has a whole sci-fi novel with no time machines, space ships, or aliens. What's the point?

THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT (Timescape, 1982) isn't even set in the future, for cripe's sake, and not only are there no aliens and no spaceships, the origin of the story's Elephant Man is so disgusting we dare not print it in a family newsmagazine!

THE TIME SERVERS (Avon, 1985) starts off promisingly enough, set in an embassy on an alien planet, a situation we are told resembles the "Retief" stories by fellow sci-fi'er Keith Laumer. But in the end Griffin resorts to sly accusations about the Vietnam War, and we know no one wants to hear about Vietnam any more.

These reasons all seemed sufficient to explain Griffin's lack of popularity. Still, because inquiring minds like yours want to know, we contacted Prominent Literary Critic SUE DENIM and asked her opinion on Griffin's work.

"I think the guy's a genius, but for G*d's sake don't quote me. Obviously the guy has f*ck*d up big somewhere to get his stuff buried like this. I mean, he should be getting hardcover deals and high five-figure advances and every award in the field.

"Take CENTURY'S END. Please. Apparently nobody noticed that this was the first really visionary book about the coming millenium. It's going to be crazy, and Griffin is the only writer I know of (other than maybe Jim Blaylock or Phil Dick -- and Dick wasn't as funny) who is good enough at both humor and pathos to really bring the craziness of it to life. In the next 15 years we're going to see pale imitations of this book make the best seller list. You'll see.

"THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT is cripplingly funny, the characters are so vivid and so fully realized that you forget you met them in a book, Griffin seems a complete expert in every field he even touches on, and the moral issues he raises are always complex and important. The book is about the news media, but more about taking responsibility for your actions -- the Elephant Man being a living symbol of Consequences.

"You almost feel guilty about laughing at THE TIME SERVERS because it's so brutal, but when you find out who the Depazians really are, when the whole Vietnam parallel starts taking shape, you just want to laugh and cry and jump up and down all at the same time.

"But obviously I'm not supposed to talk about this, or somebody else would already have been singing Griffin's praises. He's that good. So forget I even said anything, okay? And if you print a word of this I'll sue your *ss off."

THE TIME SERVERS is still available in a lot of bookstores, but the rest of Griffin's books are of course out of print. Sci-fi, as we all know, is meant to be cheap, lightweight, and disposable -- rather like a butane lighter -- and is not meant to appeal to Prominent Literary Critics. Inquiring minds don't need them." - Bruce Sterling

The Timeservers

The Blind Men and the Elephant

The Century's End

The Makeshift God

The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus (1689) - Hans Von Grimmelshausen

Project Gutenberg Edition (in German)

The Thirty Years War

The Thirty Years War of the first half of the 17th century is often considered to be the first "world war" of the modern era in which all of the major European powers were engaged. The territories of the German states were fought over many times and naturally this led to considerable loss of life and destruction of property. The reasons for the war were the traditional reasons of great power rivarly complicated by the newer conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism. Ultimately physical and economic exhaustion led to a stalemate and a negotiated end to the war.

A participant in the war was Johann Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen whose account of the war Simplicius Simplicissimus (1689) has become a classic of German literature. Although it is highly imaginative at times, it is solidly based on his own experiences as a soldier and contains moving eyewitness accounts of the destruction wrought by the war.

Life and Fate - Vassily Grossman

Books to Seek Out - Jeff VanderMeer

Amazon:

"Vasily Grossman submitted his manuscript for Life and Fate in 1960 at the height of Khrushchev's post-Stalinist cultural thaw. Subsequent to a review of the manuscript Grossman was advised that the book was being arrested. The book could not be published for at least 200 years. All copies of the manuscript were rounded up and sent to party headquarters for safekeeping. The manuscript was arrested because it dared to imply that Hitlerism and Stalinism bore more similarities than differences. Grossman made this point obliquely by putting these words into the mouth of a despicable SS death camp commandant. Nevertheless this was too much for both Khrushchev and the apparatchiks at the National Union of Writers and the book was banned. Life and Fate was eventually published because a manuscript remained at large. The author Vladimir Voinovich helped smuggle a copy to Switzerland where it was published in 1980, 15 years after Grossman's death in 1965. The book was published in the USSR in 1989 to sensational results. Nevertheless, Grossman remains relatively obscure outside Russia and that is a great pity.

Grossman was born in 1905. Although Jewish by birth, Grossman was never particularly religious and his family supported the 1917 revolution. After receiving a degree in chemistry Grossman found work in the Donbass coal mines. Encouraged by Maxim Gorky, Grossman began writing short stories and plays. Grossman adopted Stalin's maxim that writers were engineers of human souls and his work was firmly rooted in the rather tedious school of socialist realism. Grossman's play "If You Believe the Pythagoreans" attacked the philosophical rants of intellectuals and argued that they were garbage not "worth a good worker's boot." For all intents and purposes, Grossman was a true believer. How and why did this change? Life and Fate begins to answer that question.

Grossman volunteered for the front after the German invasion in 1941 and worked as a reporter for Red Star, an army newspaper known for its forthright reports from the front lines. Grossman received national fame due to his reporting from the front lines. Grossman was the first reporter to write first hand accounts of German concentration camps and his experience there had a devastating impact on his world view. Grossman learned after the war that his mother, who he failed to move from Berdichev to Moscow after the invasion perished in Hitler's genocide. It was the death of his mother and the post war anti-Semitic campaigns of Stalin that may have led Grossman to challenge his own acceptance of Soviet orthodoxy and set him to work on Life and Fate and his other major work, Forever Flowing.

Life and Fate is a remarkable novel despite its occasional unremarkable prose that contains a trace of Grossman's earlier socialist realism style. The book's emotional core involves humanity's struggle for freedom in an unfree world. Josef Skvorecky put the central question of Life and Fate thusly: "Does man lose his innate yearning for freedom? The fate of both man and the totalitarian State depends on the answer to this question. If human nature does change, then the eternal and world wide triumph of the dictatorial state is assured; if his yearning for freedom remains constant, then the totalitarian state is doomed."

The scope of the story and the cast of characters are vast and in the tradition of both Tolstoy and Pasternak. This edition contains a list of characters and their geographic location during the story. The central characters include Viktor Shtrum, a scientist, and his extended family. Other central figures include Captain Grekov, the leader of a group of soldiers doing battle with the Nazi's in a bombed out apartment building in Stalingrad. Grekov is an iconoclast doing battle not only with the Nazis but the political commissars that spent more time concerned with political orthodoxy than fighting. Key scenes in the book also take place in a German concentration camp and a Russian labor camp.

Life and Fate is a wonderful book. Grossman's assertion towards the end of his work that we can be slaves by fate but not slaves by nature is an important concept to keep a hold of today." - Leonard Fleisig

Diary of a Nobody - George Grossmith

Mainland Press

George Grossmith began his literary career as a police court reporter for The Times, but he was a talented actor, singer and dancer and was soon performing a one-man show, delivering his own comic monologues and songs at the piano. In 1877 he was offered a part in the D'Oyly Carte production of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Sorcerer and he remained with the company for 12 years, creating many of Gilbert and Sullivan's major comic roles.

In 1888, Grossmith began writing a series of humorous articles for Punch magazine, illustrated by his brother Weedon. These articles parodied the books of memoirs then being inflicted on the reading public by self-important windbags whom nobody had ever heard of. Unlike these memoirs, however, The Diary of a Nobody recounts no meetings with the leading figures of the day nor does it tell of the author's involvement in important events - just the everyday happenings in the life of an ordinary office clerk, living in a quiet suburb of London, recorded in meticulous detail. The Punch articles were a great success, and in 1892 a slightly expanded version appeared as a book, which is now regarded as one of the classics of humor.

Project Gutenberg Edition

Ancient Lights - Davis Grubb

Book: A Novel - Robert Grudin

The Plumber of Souls - Michael Guinzburg

Top of the World, Ma! - Michael Guinzburg

The Process - Brion Gysin

"Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven, It was my hint to speak, such was the process... -Shakespeare.

This quote (partial) above is by way of Gysin's introduction to THE PROCESS---like all Gysin's works, greatly underrated, unacknowledged, and ignored, perhaps because of their metaphysical Occult ("hidden and rejected knowledge") origins periously perched as they are on the edge of an exquisitely unique literary absurdity difficult to comprehend without submitting to detailed, in-depth investigation. In other words, he deceptively appears an only half-sincere, sarcastic author writing pulp aimed at comic entertainment alone, when in fact his works (entire) upon further investigation reveal profound esoteric depths much like a Franz Kafka or Philip K. Dick. For a long while I have hoped for what will really be a first time proper evaluation of his masterful works; I can think of no author more deserving of a much-needed critical biography, and probably many will soon be produced. Of the brilliant novel THE PROCESS: The protagonist is Gysin himself, who appears in different colored skin due to the fact Brion suffered from what he called: "bad packaging!" It takes a lifetime to cross the desert and a childhood to do so at its narrowest point, explains one of the many mystical charcaters inhabiting the novel, whose names, like the lady "MAYA" ( literally sanskrit for "illusion") oftentimes reveal their signifigance. Gysin knew the sahara well, spending a good deal of his life in it, centered around expatriate Tangiers, where he owned and operated a resturant well reputed called "The 1001 Nights". The house musicians were none other than THE MASTER MUSICIANS OF JAJOUKA, whom Brion discovered in the "land of the little people" tucked far into the hills, and whom WSB called a "2000year old rock-n-roll band!" The 1001 Nights closed down directly due, Gysin feels (with firm evidence/proof) of Black Magic of a typically North African cursive.

Celebrated in THE PROCESS in a masterful narrative sequence is the yearly Ritual celebration involving the Great God Pan in the form of a man placed inside the actual skin of a recently sacraficed goat, who chases the Moroccan women about in a rite dating back to antiquity recalling the bacchanalia and Dionysian Rites and all Pagan fertility rites, still practised yearly with great festivity in Morocco.

The novel is, as WSB said of his own work, and's wholly applicable also to Gysin's ( whose influence and sway over WSB is immense, as WSB enthusiastically acknowledges)one where: "EVERY LINE IS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FACT AND EVERY LINE IS BULLS**T!" "WRITING IS SUCCESSFUL WHEN IT MAKES THINGS HAPPEN!"---According to both Brion Gysin and William Seward Burroughs, this is the The supreme definition of "successful writing" as well as of "Magick". THE PROCESS, Brion Gysin's novel published first in 1969 was long involved in the "great work" of "writing itself"; for according to Gysin it's: A NOVEL IN THE PROCESS OF WRITING AND READING ITSELF! To a miraculous degree this cannot be properly communicated except by reading the novel yourself, which most of its readers agree they have done so several times; WSBurroughs rightly states besides being an esoteric masterpiece it is also "first-class entertainment", and like all Gysin's completely original works is absolutely hilarious! Noone, and I mean noone writes like he does, nor paints---for he was an early practitioner of surrealist techniques developed by Max Ernst, and Gysin exhibited his works with the surrealists, but was kicked out by Breton at his first exhibition, no doubt due more to his eccentric personality than to his artistic stylizations...he would go on to establish his own unique painterly style consisting of calligraphical overlain symbols resembling magical sigils and Chinese characters placed in grids reminiscent of the likewise magical origins found in the "Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin The Mage" which so influenced other Artists and Mages like Crowley and Mathers and Pessoa. And Like his painting, Gysin's literary origins likewise have their genesis and inspiration in Occultism, so permeating Gysin's life as to be essential in any contemplation aimed at an understanding of his works and life. His experiments and investigations are now legendary, especially those taken place at the Beat Hotel in Paris circa 1960 with Burroughs, Norse, Corso, sommerville, and a host of others where Gysin Established a quite scientific system for all literary history to applaude as the "Cut-Up technique", coined by WSBurroughs.

Brion Gysin will show you how THE PROCESS works, in the very process of "MAKING IT HAPPEN"! Such a magical feat before your very eyes without recourse to simply deeming such astounding miracles an "illusion" will if nothing else boggle your mind a good long while, and make you question the very fabric of the absolutely magical universe we live in. For the literary thrill-seeker as much as the mystically-minded, for the occult practitioner as for the philosophical scholar, THE PROCESS is one that is already a classic, and Gysin's works I feel are destined to outlive many other more famous works of its time; their endurance is miraculous in itself and they are essentially timeless. Aleister Crowley was correct in delineating a classic as defined by its ability to adapt and survive, and is in a sense: "a living being". THE PROCESS shows how such phenonema operate, as well as how it can also be, as everything is, Manipulated---whether to the writer's or the occultist's advantage; and regardless whether such things are called "Black Magick" or "Literature" is besides the point. Gysin often makes his point with a joke at humanity's expense, and it should be borne in mind that he is a great misanthrope; and as for his reputed misongyny goes, he truly believed women were a biological mistake---the irony is that a good many of his closest friend were women!

Brion Gysin is an enigma representative of NO race, religion, color, or creed. He truly is one of the Originals of the human species!" - Anita Fix

Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton

Reviews:

"Set on the eve of WWII, "Hangover Square" is the story of a seriously disturbed man, George Harvey Bone, who's fallen in with a bad crowd. Bone is a solitary gloomy man who lives in a hotel in Earl's Court, London. He has no family--except for an elderly aunt in Hunstanton. George doesn't work--instead he lives off of a modest nest egg and spends his days and nights hanging around a small-time actress, Netta, and her set of male admirers. George is obsessed with Netta, and although he originally impressed her with his ready ability to stand for rounds of drinks, now he's relegated to the status of lowly 'hanger-on.' He is one of "the class of men who desired her, who sought her favours, and to whom she intended to give no favours." He's tolerated--barely--for his money alone.

George is subject to 'moods.' When exposed to an unbearable level of emotional distress, his damaged personality copes by mental escape. He hears a "click" in his head, and then he 'wakes' up with another personality. Whereas George is normally quiet, gentle, and unassuming, his other secret self is cunning and violent. George is aware he 'blacks out' but has no memory of exactly what he does. Once he hears the 'click' he emerges into his other, fractured self, and he's momentarily confused until he finds his bearings: "it was as though he had dived into a swimming-bath and hit his head on the bottom, and was floating about, bewildered and inaudible to himself in hushed green depths."

Netta and her unpleasant friends constantly humiliate George, and in retaliation, during one of his moods, he plots her murder. Netta is blissfully unaware of this, and treats George abominably--using him to bolster her non-existent career. The novel tracks George's existence as he pathetically hopes for a crumb of attention from Netta and also records the episodes in which he flips from one personality to another. Patrick Hamilton's novel is atmospheric and tense as the story reveals George's boozy social world in the grimy smoke filled pubs of London. Netta is a fascinatingly bad yet strikingly beautiful character--a woman who is "sinisterly, devoid of all those qualities which her face and body externally proclaimed her to have--pensiveness, grace, warmth." "Hangover Square" is a gripping story of one man's descent into madness, and the act he deems necessary to gain escape from the unbearable torture of loving a woman who has no conscience. If you like the novels of Patrick Mcgrath, then you'll enjoy "Hangover Square" and its sad, lonely and ultimately complex protagonist.: - anomie

"Hamilton addresses the diminishing importance of the individual in the face of the modern superstate. This novel resembles in atmosphere the 'film noir' genre of the contemporary cinema. George Harvey Bone's pathetic career is 'sensationalised', made lurid and larger than life, so that he becomes like a figure in a melodrama. Hamilton uses language that focus the reader's view through those of Bone, self-obsessedly viewing his own actions, his "great golfers hands" on the golf club for example, as he tries to invest himself with some feeling of worth while sub-consciously plotting murder. Bone's schizophrenic world threatens to explode throughout the book , just as the dark clouds of war with Europe gather threateningly in the background. The tiny tragedy of Bone' s demise is deliberately made to read like pulp fiction, in a sense, and the report of his death, forced off the front page by the breaking out of war, is likewise reduced to a tabloid headline.

The whole setting of the book is artificial; "the agony of Netta beneath the electric light"; the great wave of laughter (the world's laughter) that breaks over Bone as he enters the lime-lit Brighton theatre, are part of the harsh artificiality of the world that Bone inhabits. His friends are cynical and talk enthusiastically of fascism.

I am reminded by this book of the world described in Henry Miller's early work (Tropic of Capricorn etc) and of George Orwell's 'Coming up for Air' in which, once again, events build against the mounting threat of World War II, and the protagonists (George 'Fatty' Bowling) sense of personal history, values and identity are buried by the onslaught of suburban sprawl and its attendant advertising, materialism and the dislocation of community.

Hamilton predicts the present day world of media obsession with personal agony, which trivialises all human anguish and tribulation, reducing human experience and suffering to a commodity to be consumed, rather than a shared touchstone of communication, understanding and empathy.

Hamilton's brilliance lies in the clever contrivance of allowing us to feel Bone's pathetic agony, and yet to see it transformed into a trite, turgid melodrama, which is interchangeable in the daily press with a major international war. This is the kind of attitude, towards the small business of being human, that was necessary to prepare the world for the introduction of concentration camps and mass political executions.

Imagine George Harvey Bone as a character in a Thomas Hardy novel: (Bone could be transformed into a country rube quite easily!) His unfortunate story would be imbued with a sense of sanctity and respect that Hamilton deliberately defiles and destroys before our very eyes, using exactly the same means in achieving this end as the media of his day, and as the media of the present day does in a way that both Hamilton and Orwell could forsee, perhaps, but surely never appreciate the oppressive monstrous extent to which it has come.

This is one of the last novels, it seems to me, written before the obsession with the selfish concerns of the individual (the first article of faith of capitalism) became the only concern of the writer. Hamilton's book clearly indicates the coming of this self obsession. From here on, solipsism rules OK?" - A Customer

Mysteries - Knut Hamsen

Amazon:

"This is a sketchy book to recommend. I've recommended it to friends who say it is among their favorites, others who say they don't get it, didn't like it. Arguably there is no plot to the story, yet something beckons you to keep turning the pages. For me it's the kind of book that I can open to any page and I'm into it. Hamsun has a tricky wit, his characters are quirky and unpredictable, and I guess that's the appeal -- you keep reading just to find out what the characters are capable of.

What I think is amazing about this book is that it had no forerunner (or so they say). Hamsun just decided he was going to sit down and change the course of fiction, and he did it. Basically, he was tired of the predictable course of Victorian literature, the predictable style, predictable endings, and wanted to shake it up, and in the process efforts like Mysteries became the forerunner of the Modern age in literature. The string of modern novelists that count Hamsun as one of their prime influences is too long to list here, and Mysteries (along with Hunger) are the classic favorites.

I don't know if this is my favorite novel of all time (it's close) but Johann Nilsson Nagel is my favorite character. I doubt you'll find a more tragically passionate character. And if you are a self-taught writer this is a tremendous book to learn from." - vandal101

The Resurrected Holmes: New Cases from the Notes of John H. Watson, M.D. - Divers Hands, ed.

Amazon reviewer grreg:

'Resurrected Holmes' is a somewhat convoluted idea well-executed. It is a collection of short Sherlock Holmes stories supposedly written by other well-known authors. In other words, the actual authors who wrote the stories had to write them in the style of the purported authors, who were supposedly endeavouring to write in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Watsonian voice.

Now, that may or may not take your fancy. What is needs to be said is that, by and large, the stories in this volume are of an excellent quality, so even if the literary conceit that is the book's starting point fails to please you, the stories themselves should.

For true Holmes completists, each story is one of the unchronicled stories referred to by Watson in his accounts of Holmes' investigations (with the exception of the final story, which reveals the truth behind 'The Adventure of the Second Stain').

In some cases (for example, 'The Adventure of the Boulevard Assassin' and 'The Madness of Colonel Warburton', ascribed to Jack Kerouac and Dashiell Hammett respectively) the voice of the putative author occassionally overwhelms the Holmesian nature and may be a substantial distraction for those reading this book purely as a Sherlock Holmes collection.

However, some of the stories are good enough to warrant the price of admission alone. I particularly enjoyed 'The Adventure of Ricoletti of the Club Foot (and his abominable wife)', notionally written by P.G. Wodehouse, in that it managed to be both a convincing Holes story while also being a comedy of manners that its putative author might well have appreciated.

Marvin Kaye knows his Sherlock Holmes, and this volume plainly displays his (and the contributing authors) deep-felt love and admiration for the Holmesian canon.

The Essential Jazz Records, Volume I: Ragtime to Swing - Max Harrison, Charles Fox, Eric Thacker

Amazon:

"The first volume of the Essential Jazz Records (I'm not sure if the second volume ever appeared) is a very strong guide to early jazz on a number of accounts. Perhaps the most important reason for its succes is the fact that the three authors are sufficiently alike in their predilections for the book to be cohesive, but are sufficiently particular in their passions for their to be a wide net as they attempt to gather in "the essential jazz recordings." There are enough recordings here to support the title, and they are spread over a wide enough stylistic range (from African music, to field recordings of African American performers, to blues to the earliest jazz through swing to Charlie Parker's earliest recordings) so that no one will find any gaping holes. These three reviewers together probably present a better feel for the breadth and beauty of early jazz than any of the dozens of guides I have read. Anyone possessing all of these records would certainly feel satisfied they had captured the essence of early jazz. Another fine thing about this collection of reviews is the keen insights they offer into the recodings themselves. I have often found myself returning to recordings on my shelf and listening to them with new ears in response to something written in this book. I do not always share the views of these British jazz experts, but they do certainly inspire reevaluation. The fault that many will find with the book is that the particular recordings listed here are all long-since-disappeared LPs. Many of the major label recordings have reappeared in pretty much the same form on CD, but some have not. Nevertheless, almost all the music here is available somewhere. By using this book as a guide to the music one should be looking for, and another guide to help decide which reissue might have the best remastering, etc., the explorer of early jazz won't go wrong." - Eric Hines

The Essential Jazz Records, Volume II: Modernism to Postmodernism - Max Harrison, Charles Fox, Eric Thacker

Amazon:

"It has been 16 years since the publication of vol.1, 'Ratime to Swing' in 1984. At long last we can read the vol.2 . I obtained a copy in the Ginza, Tokyo. It cost me ..........! This was the case in Japan before the ............' in Japan.

During these 16 years the co-writer Charles fox regrettably deceased,to whom this volume is dedicated. The writing by three writers (the leader is Max Harrison) is as highbrow as in the previous one and they frequently mention classical music, which sometimes made me bored. However, rarely have I ever come across such high-grade criticism. The works equal to this brilliance of the two volumes are, arguably, Humphrey Lyttleton's 'The Best of Jazz' 2 vols. (the volume of modern jazz is unpublished), Gunther Schuller's 2 vols (the same as the former), Martin William's The Jazz Tradition, and the Japanese critic Masaaki Awamura's 'The History of Modern Jazz'(only in the Japanese language.

In the vol. 1, 250 records were analyzed and criticized, this time also 250 from Charlie Christian's Minton House Session to Peter Apfelbaum and the Hieroglyphic Ensemble's 'Sign of Life.' We can listen to our own records/CDs afresh from various new points of view and reexperience the process of jazz trend, if not development, from modern to postmodern age. I am sure the meaning/significance of our record collection will become manifold." - takenaka_ryuichi

"I also reviewed Volume One of the Essential Jazz Recordings for Amazon. The first volume impressed me for the breadth and fair-mindedness apparent in the 250 selections listed, but what really excited me was the passion and insightfulness of the individual reviews.

The authors faced an altogether more daunting task in selecting and reviewing the 250 discs included in volume two. The modernist and "postmodernist" (I don't really think there's a difference, but . . .) movements in jazz spawned a plethora of stylistic innovations, many of which demand some sort of representation here. And there are just many, many more jazz recording from the latter half of the century than there were in the first half.

So, where the selections and review essays in the first volume generally reflect the passion the authors felt for the music on the discs, the selections and reviews for the second volume generally seem to reflect a set of arbitrary standards the authors established to deal with the enormous amount of material potentially under consideration.

So, a lot of the inclusions seem to be here not because anyone thinks they are truly exciting recordings, but because they are though to best represent a particular stylist or stylistic movement or structural change in how jazz could be approached.

The thing I like most about the reviews in the first volume is the way it sent me back to the recordings it treats and gave me fresh ears to listen to them with. The thing I remember about the reviews in the second volume is Simon Nicholson's seeming obsession with song structure (A,B,B',A',C,A,A).

I am put in mind of William Youngren's review of Gunther Schuller's fine book Early Jazz. At the end of the day these sorts of books always come down to the subjective response of the author or authors to the experience of the music. Technicalia or any other stage props of purported fairness and objectivity tend to start getting in the way of that response pretty quickly if not used with care.

Schuller's work generally is a model for balancing the musical technicalia fine writing and good ears. While the second volume of The Essential Jazz Recordings is a quite useful book, it falls far short of the pleasures of the first volume, mostly because it fails to strike a good balance between these elements." - eric hines

Things That Never Happen - M. John Harrison

The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War - Jaroslav Hasek

Top 10 Eastern European Novels - Tibor Fischer

What a novel. Hasek blew a lifetime's wit and wisdom in one splurge. Relentlessly funny and true; I read it every two years or so. But why did it have to be written by a Czech?

Amazon:

"I first read Hasek's masterpiece almost 30 years ago in a shorter and more Bowdlerized translation. The Cecil Parrot edition is, needless to say, far preferable (it even contains a wonderful introduction including a discussion of Czech profanity as compared to that in English) and I've read it again and again since it came out in 1974. Shelby Foote said somewhere that every year he reads Proust as a sort of literary vacation. About ever 2 or 3 years I reread Svejk to cleanse my literary palate and it's always as fresh and as enjoyable as it was the first time. The dialogue, the characters and the situations in Svejk are, stated simply, the funniest I've ever read. Many other books have many merits