The beauty of this novel’s style is that it allows themes to appear via juxtaposition—refugeeism, the nature of human consciousness, the end of life. The fragmented storytelling resonates in a way that moves the reader’s emotions in a constant flow of varying chords, the tensions raised in one story carrying over into the next, then back again.
So, the bad news first. All of a sudden, we have rivers. No one saw it coming. All of a sudden we have mountains, seas, and lakes—yes indeed, we have bodies of water. Still water, rushing water, water gushing up from the deep.
Les Chants de Maldoror is a work that seems to permeate each mind it touches, even if briefly. Whether role-playing or reminiscing, the contributors to The Celestial Bandit bleed confessions. Jordan Rothacker sets the stage expertly by giving a framework for the influence the Comte de Lautréamont has had on generations of creative renegades...
peace is only ever an interbellum blink
a mere footnote in the battleground
especially in these parts, armies clash by night
no amorous remedy for that, master arnold
when refugee babies are washed ashore
or the indignity of a naked dead body dragged through mud
a desperate person in self-immolation
a tearing cow on her way...
you got yourself a new motorbike
although you didn’t need it.
you have no money.
no worries we’ll loan it to you.
what should you be for the rest of your life
if not our slave
promise we’ll help you if you can’t pay us back
and then if...
The perfect friendship of butter & grilled sourdough, the hard-to-place fruity scent of cactus candy, the joy in anticipation of pizza delivery, all gloss over a deep, universal, inevitable melancholy.
The story begins like this. No. It does not. There is no story. Or, they shoveled a load of speed and shuddered toward the coast. Saltpans. Sparse groupings of pine. Dust. A bar at the side of the road. A woman beneath a tattered palm of tarpaulin, cigarette and sunburnt fingers. Vegetables, assorted fruit in plastic buckets. Flies.
He sat with the body for almost ten...
As a reader who has grown increasingly interested in a particular species of postwar fiction from the German-speaking countries—which traffics in introspection, anomie, and melancholy—to hear Wolfgang Hilbig referenced as part of a general literary/philosophical/intellectual cohort which included Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, and W.G...
And now we’re standing, and I noticed that even with great attention and inasmuch as I had turned to my reading with great attention, that is, took up every word, every phrase, with the greatest devotion, I could not stop unexpected images from arising in my head and changing into other new images, that is, the images...
Tosh Berman can never be separated from his pedigree—that his father Wallace was an artist of such originality and aesthetic coolness he was on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—but his father passed in 1976, and Tosh is here now and doing great work. Tosh Berman manages his father’s artistic estate...
I moved from Wedding to Schwabing, from Leopoldplatz in Berlin to Leopoldstrasse in Munich, from migrants and an enduring German underclass to posh Bavarians and global citizens. There is probably no starker contrast between any two German metropolitan districts. I offer just three examples: chilled drinks, dog poop, and street music.
They met in an open field at the compound with the sky bright and empty overhead. No drones or wireless signals infiltrated the space. Or so he was told. Joseph sat before his senior commanders, Mitchell and Jeanine, at a long portable table, among several other patriots, each handpicked for the militia’s most sacred mission. A private meeting held in secret...
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