Thoughts on a few books: The Exiles and Other Stories by Horacio Quiroga In these stories, frontiersmen carve out a life in Argentina’s brutally hot Misiones jungle. Although they spend most of their hours hard at work, their mental life is consumed by the dull mid-afternoon hours when heat makes it impossible to do anythingContinue reading “Horacio Quiroga “The Exiles” – Guido Morselli “Dissipatio HG” – Christopher Priest “The Adjacent” – Yoko Ogawa “Revenge” – Roberto Calasso “The Ruin of Kasch” – Eugène Savitzkaya “In Life””
Tag Archives: Avant-Garde
Olga Ravn “The Employees” – PD James “A Certain Justice” – Sylvia Townsend Warner “The Corner that Held Them” – Diana Souhami “No Modernism without Lesbians” – Leonora Carrington “The Hearing Trumpet”
Five novels about communities: The employees of an interstellar startup. The barristers and employees of a British legal chambers. The nuns of a medieval convent. The lesbian artists and patrons who created modernism. The residents of a nursing home. The darkest of these novels are the most conventional (A Certain Justice) and the most experimentalContinue reading “Olga Ravn “The Employees” – PD James “A Certain Justice” – Sylvia Townsend Warner “The Corner that Held Them” – Diana Souhami “No Modernism without Lesbians” – Leonora Carrington “The Hearing Trumpet””
Brian Evenson “The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell” – Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca “Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition” – Joy Williams “Breaking & Entering” – Jorge Luis Borges “A Course on English Literature”
In Evenson’s stories, it always feels like something is missing, like the characters need to recover what they haven’t realized is gone. His settings are empty landscapes, undescribed except to mention objects that advance or impede narrative progress. At the dawn of Spanish imperialism in the Americas, Cabeza de Vaca also wrote about desolate places.Continue reading “Brian Evenson “The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell” – Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca “Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition” – Joy Williams “Breaking & Entering” – Jorge Luis Borges “A Course on English Literature””
Julio Cortázar “All Fires the Fire” – Roberto Calasso “The Celestial Hunter” – Deirdre Madden “Molly Fox’s Birthday” – Sam Riviere “Dead Souls”
Many of Cortázar’s stories share the same form: two separate narratives (separated by time, by species, by distance) slowly become more similar, until they reveal they’ve always been the same narrative, pushing the reader into vertigo. They’re double narratives that hunt each other and both catch their prey. Calasso also writes about hunters who becomeContinue reading “Julio Cortázar “All Fires the Fire” – Roberto Calasso “The Celestial Hunter” – Deirdre Madden “Molly Fox’s Birthday” – Sam Riviere “Dead Souls””
Ted Hayden 