“Waiting,” the final story in The Quantity Theory of Insanity, is about Jim, a man in late ’80s, early ‘90s London who is tired of waiting. Instead of sitting in traffic, he becomes a disciple of a motor-courier/prophet named Carlos who “never has to wait” and can visualize all of the city’s “the tail-backs, allContinue reading “Will Self “The Quantity Theory of Insanity” – Emily Bronte “Wuthering Heights” – Matthew Rose “A World After Liberalism” – Christopher Priest “The Gradual””
Tag Archives: science fiction
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”
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””
E.T.A. Hoffman “Tales of Hoffmann” – Mark Fisher “The Weird and the Eerie” – Paul Scheerbart “Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!”
ETA Hoffmann’s gothic romances are full of implausible events and coincidences, but what makes his tales feel so unreal to a contemporary reader is the characters’ emotions. They’re never suspicious of their feelings – they immediately act in whatever way their heart tells them to. In contemporary novels, characters mistrust and analyze and interrogate theirContinue reading “E.T.A. Hoffman “Tales of Hoffmann” – Mark Fisher “The Weird and the Eerie” – Paul Scheerbart “Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!””
Ted Hayden 