Charles Platt, The Gas,Savoy Books, 1980.


"A delicious erotic dream explodes into an uncontrollable nightmare of perversion, violence, and insanity. An accident at a secret germ warfare laboratory allows a deadly vapour to infect all of Southern England. The vapour is an aphrodisiac that releases every pent-up human urge. Within 24 hours society self-destructs in a vast orgy of lust, aggression, and psychosis, as men and women everywhere act out their deepest, weirdest obsessions."


Eighteen years after publication, the Savoy editions of The Gas and The Tides of Lust, were listed in the UK's Bizarre magazine as two out of five of the most obscene books to have been published in Britain. Notoriety travels.


Charles Platt's classic novel of comic depravity and future sex, The Gas, is being reissued by Orion as part of a nine-book deal that will see most of Platt's titles available once again. Other titles will include Dream Makers, his book of interviews with SF writers, first published by Savoy as Who Writes Science Fiction?, and his 'New Wave' science-fiction novel The City Dwellers. All titles will be in ebook format.
Prior to Lord Horror, The Gas was Savoy's most notorious title. Not only did bookshops in Britain refuse to sell it, our distributors of the time, New English Library, declined to handle it. The book also came under the censorious purview of the Manchester police, and its seizure in 1980 resulted in Savoyard David Britton's first prison sentence: twenty-eight days in the riot-torn slammer of Strangeways. (For writing and publishing Lord Horror he was sentenced in 1993 to four further months in Strangeways and other prisons.)
With this history in mind, Platt has dedicated the reissue to David Britton; the new edition will also contain an insightful introduction by Platt outlining his novel's chequered history including an account of the police attacks on Savoy Books and our fight-back. To the finger-wagging moralisers who object to extreme content in fantasy, Platt's introduction offers this reminder: "In the immortal words of Robert Crumb, 'It's only ink on paper, folks!'" - http://www.savoy.abel.co.uk


This incomparably vile relic from the UK is the highlight of sci fi author Charles Platt's seventies-era excursions in literary pornography (which include THE IMAGE JOB, THE POWER AND THE PAIN and SWEET EVIL). For that matter, I'd say THE GAS is the apotheosis of the "Fuck Book" trend of the 1970s. The idea of a man-made drug causing people to lose their sexual inhibitions had been done before THE GAS saw print (see R.L. Seiffert's THE POLLUTERS from 1968), and after (see James Herbert's THE FOG from 1975), but no other novel took the concept as far as Platt did. So extreme are its contents that the Savoy edition of THE GAS was seized by British police in November of 1980, and used as evidence in a trial that landed Savoy's David Britton in prison. Hence, this sickie is now a bonafide historical document.
    Of THE GAS'S three editions the Savoy publication is the one to read. It was revised somewhat from the original Olympia Press version (which appeared after Platt's intended publisher Essex House went belly-up) yet fully retains the crudeness of its humble fuckbook origins (and contains a record number of typos), and so is far preferable to the more heavily revised Loompanics Unlimited publication that appeared in 1995, in which Platt made the story's satirical bent more overt--and, I feel, lessened its impact. However, the Loompanics version does at least contain an introduction in which Platt retrospectively details the book's origins--it was written, apparently, to "exorcise my British inhibitions once and for all"--and so isn't entirely without worth.
     But anyway: Vincent is a British researcher on the run from the spread of the titular gas, a yellowish contagion accidentally released from a government laboratory. As the book opens Vincent picks up Cathy, a young hottie, in a stolen car and, infected by the gas, fucks her every which way. From there the madness only increases, with mass orgies, a specially designed sex machine, parachuting lovers and other wackiness (of which it's best not to give away too much) gradually giving way to unbelievable violence and perversion as the British populace's darker impulses rise to the fore. Vincent certainly isn't immune to this aspect of the gas's influence, and gives vent to his ugly side in a thoroughly repellent cavalcade of gory aggression that prefigures, and outdoes, the excesses of the splatterpunks.
     Obviously this book isn't for wimps, and nor will it appeal to connoisseurs of arty porn (of the type practiced by writers like Samuel R. Delany and David Meltzer). Yet in its crudity and outrageousness THE GAS achieves a definite artful catharsis, being very likely the last word in extreme erotica. - http://www.fright.com/edge/TheGas.htm




‘Hieronymous Bosch directed by Shivers-period David Cronenberg’
You don’t pick up a book like The Gas thinking it will be anything but what it actually is: psychedelic porn.
There’s this gas, you see. Gas that makes you want to have sex. If you can’t have sex, the gas makes you violent. Sex and violence, sex and violence, sex and violence. That is the gas. It has escaped from a top secret germ warfare research laboratory two hundred miles from London, and Vincent (our narrator) may have been responsible. Still. Don’t let that stop you. It doesn’t stop Vincent. He is driving to London, trying to get to his wife and children so they can all get away. Only there is this young hitch-hiker who appears to want to have sex with him. So they do. Afterwards, Vincent explains to her what is going on but – oh-oh – they get horny again. Vincent doesn’t want to stop driving so she rides him as they make their merry way to London. Only it can be quite difficult to drive and have sex at the same time. So they crash the car. Cathy the hitch-hiker is unconscious so Vincent stumbles into the nearest village, hoping to wake up the local policeman and alert him to the fact that something serious is going down. Only the policeman is too busy wanking off his dog (I kid you not) to pay any attention. The next thing you know, there is an all-out orgy and everybody is having sex as far as the eye can see.
And that’s only the first couple of chapters.
From there on in, it’s Hieronymous Bosch directed by Shivers-period David Cronenberg all – and I mean all – the way. There is sex and buggery at thirty thousand feet. There are nuns who have sex in the street (with a gardener dressed up as Christ). There are children eating shit (a la Pierre Guyotat’s Eden Eden Eden). Genitals are fondled and jism is spurted pretty much everywhere. It’s the kind of book that would mightily offend most people (and, let’s face it, that can only be a good thing). It will particularly offend religious types and – coming on the morning that I read how The Catholic Herald felt that Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass was a book “fit for the bonfire” (harking back, no doubt, to those glorious days when we could just burn all those who disagree with us at the stake) – I’m all for that.
The Gas is not great literature. Praise be to God for that. What The Gas demonstrates – and demonstrates in quite spectacular fashion – is what can be achieved by someone in a country that allows you to do, say, act, write and live just the way you want to.
Saying all of that, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that scene in Manhattan. Woody Allen is attending a party at which a bespectacled guy is telling a group of four or five people about his film script. “There’s this guy,” he says, “who screws so good” (and Woody interrupts to say “Screws so good?” as if that phrase alone sums up everything the guy is saying, which, of course, it does) – “who screws so good, that women die on reaching orgasm . . .” Cue Woody – “Jeez-us, are you serious . . .?”
There is no doubt that Platt has issues. No doubt. But don’t let that stop you.
Any Cop?: Psychedelic porn on a grand scale. Not for your grandma (not for most people actually), but worth reading all the same. - bookmunch.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/hieronymous-bosch-directed-by-shivers-period-david-cronenberg-the-gas-by-charles-platt/

“He had to admit it.  He could never go back to the clean life, now.  Not anymore.  Never again.  Lying in the mud, in the gentle sun, he picked up a handful of ooze and squeezed it out between his fingers.  He rubbed it over his arms, smooth and warm.  He wiggled his toes in it and felt its gentle touch all over his body” (95).

Charles Platt (born 1945) is the author of 41 fiction and nonfiction books, including science-fiction novels such as The Silicon Man and Protektor (published in paperback by Avon Books). He has also written non-fiction, particularly on the subjects of computer technology and cryonics, as well as teaching and working in these fields. Platt relocated from England to the United States in 1970 and is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He has one daughter, Rose Fox. He is the nephew of Robert, Baron Platt, of Grindleford.

David Britton, Razor King, Savoy Books, 2017.


Razor King is David Britton's seventh novel. His first, Lord Horror, published in 1989, was the last book to be banned in Britain under the Obscene Publications Act. In a defence led by Geoffrey Robertson QC the book was cleared of obscenity in July 1992.
The new novel continues Britton's cycle of Absurdist picaresque narratives, a series replete with scatological routines and outlandish tableaux. Razor King draws shockingly on the Jewish Holocaust, following the transgressive speculative-fiction lineage of JG Ballard and William S Burroughs while embracing the fin de siècle psychedelia of Alfred Jarry and Harry Clarke.
In Razor King two unconnected worlds and genres collide: the Wild West/Westerns, and outer space/planetary adventure. Key influences are the fantastical works of two of Adolf Hitler's favourite novelists: Karl May, a German author whose Western tales include characters such as Old Shatterhand and Winnetou the Warrior; and Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Mars trilogy (A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, The Warlord of Mars) prefigures many of the popular fictional styles—sword and sorcery, heroic fantasy, science fiction—of later decades. Britton brings to the surface the psychotic undercurrents that often fuel these genres to create a phantasmagoria grounded in real historical events.
Continuing a trend begun with La Squab in 2012, Razor King is illustrated throughout by Kris Guidio.

Abel Diaz sends his impressions of the latest from David Britton:
"Razor King arrived like some insurgent ambush into my complacent, unguarded mailbox. It is another exceptional entry in an already exceptional body of work, but the chapters that really stand out for me are:
"'The Horror, the Kike and the Cake' for its opening salvo of dark humor that remained the funniest chapter throughout. The introduction of Dolly Lolly, his absurd mission and his candy-planet origins was ingenious, and it breathed new life into the Horror universe. He made for a more interesting foil or sidekick to Lord Horror than La Squab does. In addition, the contrast of Dolly's innocence against the horrid landscape of Auschwitozaliala and his confusion about his purpose for being there was much more enthralling to me than Lord Horror's hubris and pomposity. This was a damn fine beginning that set a terrific tone for the rest of the book.
"'Pipsqueak on the Take' for its sustained, fantastic imagery delivered in that luxurious prose I deeply love. I never suspected there was cosmic horror to be found in popcorn, but now I'm convinced: 'In actual fact, Lolly was in the middle of a field of popcorn, its buttery yellow shells puffing out a spoory vapour that danced with purpose through the air'.
"That passage harkens back to some of the finest, quietly unsettling atmosphere invoked in the first Lord Horror novel. 'He was well accustomed to receiving emissions from space "I speak to, and of, and for, nations; I speak to, and of, and for, nations; I speak to, and of, and for, nations" Lord Horror had concluded that the voice was a kind of countdown, pitched to give the impression of gradually fading. But he was sure it was not a broadcast from earth; it seemed to arise from somewhere beyond Jupiter."
"I savour these strange and haunting moments in these novels. To me, there is something more fundamentally valuable about this writing than the shock and awe that gets all the attention. If these books had been just a collection of racist jokes and offensive antics, I would have quit reading them long ago. I have stayed in love because time and time again, in certain paragraphs and pages hidden here and there amid the chaos, I have found the most incredible examples of cosmic horror, surreal decadence and weird fantasy that I have ever read in my life. That is no exaggeration.
"I also found Chapter 3, 'In the Belly of the Dolly Varden', to be especially interesting as a sort of Weird Wind in the Willows. It set my mind to dreaming about the existence of an entire novel featuring these vicious little badgers, ferrets and rats, plundering the Seven Seas and butchering all that crossed their path. In my imagination, this slim and superlative volume is titled The Pyrate King in Yellow or perhaps The Sea-Wolves of Torenbürgen.
"To my surprise, my favorite character this time around was not Lord Horror. He stood buried in the long, deep shadow cast by Dolly Lolly Pop. This interplanetary traveler was a fantastic creation. He stole every scene he was in, so much so that I admit that I grew impatient waiting for Dolly to return while reading certain chapters. His transformation from confectionary angel to repentant man-eater was phenomenal; it WAS the book for me. And I was so angry when Lord Horror ate that beautiful little bastard that I had to put the book down for several minutes. Like the inspired recreation of the Ononoes before him, Dolly Lolly Pop will stay long in my mind and heart.
"Julien Gracq once wrote, 'What I want from a literary critic 'contribution' to literature and the enrichment it is supposed to bring me, know that I will marry even without a dowry.'
It is in this spirit and according to this philosophy (which I agree with completely) that I have tried to share my thoughts. I know that I'm no Julien Gracq, but this is why it has never been very important to me to champion Savoy as descendants of whatever important dead authors or to debate the morality of writing such books in the first place. (For the record, I am half Ashkenazi Jew but agree absolutely with Wilde that there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, and these books are NOT badly written at all.) What I have tried to do (with spectacular failure, I'm sure!) is to communicate what I loved and what spoke to me and what excited me. I feel that I have been privileged to watch something unique and incredible unfold. This is art of the highest quality.
"Let me end by saying:
"Dolly Lolly Pop über alles, meine Freunde!!!" - http://www.savoy.abel.co.uk/

David Britton, La Squab: The Black Rose of Auschwitz,  Savoy Books, 2012.



Masquerading as a book for children ... At once loony and dangerous, La Squab relates a picaresque river journey down a Thames whose metaphysical qualities exist only in Mr Britton s imagination ... The final destination is a submerged Auschwitz conjured afresh beneath the mighty Thames. There La Squab s playful romp through literature and topsy-turvy morals reveals that all is not always well in the end!

La Squab by David Britton represents a departure from the author’s reputation as the creator of Lord Horror, the last novel to be banned in Britain.
Masquerading as a book for children, the primary inspirations of La Squab are The Wind in the Willows—if Grahame’s classic had been re-written by Adolf Hitler!—and the ‘Fudge & Speck’ comic strip created by celebrated Beano cartoonist Ken Reid.
At once loony and dangerous, La Squab relates a picaresque river journey down a Thames whose metaphysical qualities exist only in Mr Britton’s imagination. Along the way, favourite children’s characters such as Tiger Tim, Angel Face and Weary Willie & Tired Tim are encountered, together with real-life historical figures Alfred Jarry, Sigmund Freud, Leni Riefenstahl, and Lord Horror’s treacherous doppelgänger, Lord Haw-Haw.
The final destination is a submerged Auschwitz conjured afresh beneath the mighty Thames. There La Squab’s playful romp through literature and topsy-turvy morals reveals that all is not always well in the end!
Illustrated in colour and black-and-white by Kris Guidio.
Includes a reading on CD by Fenella Fielding.
Cover design by John Coulthart.

David Britton, Invictus Horror,  Savoy Books, 2013.                 


'A new hand-grenade of a novel from David Britton! Letting his romancer's torch shine on Holocaustic goings-on in modern-day Manchester, the Mac Daddy Horror sashays forth as a giant glass rapscallion, puffing out his killing philosophy. In their customary role as the Devil's idle hands, Meng and Ecker spread a freaky-deaky comedic 'Umgawa!!!' over Porchfield Gardens. The Razor Kings' Magic Garden unveils its bounteous nourishing beauty to refugees turned blue from Planet Auschwitz. Oooh'weee. All things are well not.'


In Britton’s books “Lord Horror” is a fantastic character inspired by William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, of wartime infamy. The principals of Invictus Horror are Meng and Ecker, twins subjected to “scientific” experiments by Josef Mengele. They’re not nice – Ecker is rational but violent and Meng is a mutant with a huge cock and tits. In this novella, the terrible twins are celebrating Christmas at Lord Horror’s residence in Manchester with some unsavoury violent and anti-Semitic activity.
Would-be readers should be aware that, as in his previous Lord Horror novels, Britton counters the ghastliness of Fascism with a ghastly ironic satire. The irony has sometimes been lost on those offended by Britton’s works, his first Lord Horror novel being the last work of fiction to be banned in Britain.
The novella is illustrated by a riot of colour and monochrome illustrations by Kris Guidio, which evoke the fantastical world of Lord Horror but have no direct connection with the text.
Although published this year, and after David Britton’s illustrated Lord Horror novel ‘La Squab’ of 2012, this short novel is a riff on the ending paragraphs of Britton’s ‘Motherfuckers’ which ends with Christmastime in Porchfield Gardens, Lord H’s Manchester residence where the Twins are holidaying.
“Invictus Horror” was fun in its gruesome way. I liked the illustrations a lot, though they’re not matched to the text (there’s no La Squab in the text, for instance.) Not sure if it really develops the Horror opus any further than the four previous books did, but with the artworks it’s a nice book to have. - http://www.sandg-anime-reviews.net/?p=1455



David Britton& John Coulthart, Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, Savoy Books, 2013.           
excerpt


Welcome to the nightmare metropolis of Torenbürgen, where New York's Art Deco architecture has fused with the termination machinery of Auschwitz. In this urban inferno Jessie Matthews is singing Sondheim, James Joyce is at work on a new novel and Lord Horror, ex-Nazi propaganda broadcaster and Torenbürgen's model citizen, is stalking the streets in search of fresh victims for his razors. Murderous apes infest the alleyways, Ononoes feast on the living and the dead, while above the rooftops the Soul of the Virgin Mary drifts like a swollen Lovecraftian dirigible, picking at bodies destined for the charnel furnaces. Lord Horror: Reverbstorm is a unique graphic collaboration between writer David Britton, the author of four Lord Horror novels, and artist John Coulthart, whose book of Lovecraft-derived comic strips and illustrations, The Haunter of the Dark, featured a collaboration with Alan Moore. Reverbstorm was originally published in serial form and is now being presented in a single volume for the very first time. Britton's debut novel, Lord Horror (1990), was the last work of fiction to be banned in the UK; an earlier Lord Horror comic series, Hard Core Horror, was also banned by a British court in 1995. Coulthart's death-camp artwork from the final issue in that series appears in Reverbstorm as a prelude to the main narrative. There's never been a comic like this surreal collision between Modernist art and pulp aesthetics, a world where Finnegans Wake is drenched in Alligator Wine and Picasso's 'Guernica' is invaded by Tarzan's simian hordes. Ambitious, transgressive and meticulously rendered, Reverbstorm is one answer to the eternal question posed by those cultural philosophers, The Cramps: 'How far can too far go?'


Reverbstorm is an eight-part comic series which I began drawing in 1990. Last week I finished work on the final section, and also completed the layout and design for the collected edition, a 344-page volume which Savoy Books will be publishing later this year. All the artwork has been scanned afresh, re-lettered and, in a few places, improved to fix compromises and print errors present in the published issues. This unfinished project has been hanging over me for so long that I make this announcement with some relief. The book will be published without a foreword so this post can serve as an introduction for the uninitiated. But before I get to the details, some history.–  John Coulthart


As the son of the last British artist to be successfully prosecuted for displaying obscene paintings, I have some empathy with David Britton, the last person successfully prosecuted in Britain for publishing obscene literature. Unlike my father, who accidentally strayed into the purview of the police, Britton’s prosecution in 1992 was almost inevitable. His publisher, Manchester-based Savoy Books, was raided by the police with vindictive regularity between 1976 and 1997.
Ironically, Savoy has often been reviled as much by the left for its lack of political correctness as by the right for attacking the shibboleths of authority. It embodies a longstanding tradition of non-conformist and essentially anarchist thinking in Britain that also underpins Reverbstorm.
This is a graphic novel, written and illustrated by Britton and John Coulthart. Part of the long-running Lord Horror series, it is set in a nightmarish dreamscape where a fantasy 1930s New York is fused with the death camps at Auschwitz. Although presented in a single volume, the book began life in 1994 as an adult comic, published in the tradition of Dickens as a piece-work. It is tempting to say that is where the comparison with 19th-century literature ends. But the mire of Dickens’s world, where stories of callous modernity and human degradation go hand in hand, runs throughout this book.Yet unlike Dickens there is a question whether there is a story here at all. There is the central motif of the psychopath Lord Horror, a pun on the British wartime traitor Lord Haw-Haw. Horror stalks the streets repeatedly slashing people, mainly Jews, with a cut-throat razor. He still has his radio show, but beyond a Joycean tour around the fantasy city it is difficult to outline a clear narrative thread.
The images of evisceration in the drawings are explicit. In a nod to Hollywood, Horror’s victims often have to endure a bad joke before their deaths, but you only have to think of a James Bond or Dirty Harry film to get the measure of how that cheapens human life.
And perhaps that is the point. Confront people with unmediated murder, mutilation, rape and racism and you force them to react. The police who raided Savoy assumed that reaction would be to celebrate these things, but the opposite is just as likely.
The lack of a clear narrative also resembles modernist literature, and both Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake feature prominently. Britton and Coulthart borrow endlessly from modernist culture, with Seurat’s painting ‘Sunday at La Grande Jatte’ acting as a touchstone. In their drawings they pile images by Beardsley, Picasso and others on top of Seurat, so we end up with drawings that are so complex and layered, they verge on being chaotic.
In this they seem to illustrate somewhat self-consciously the ideas of Walter Benjamin. Indeed, Benjamin is quoted at the start of the novel imagining the ‘Angel of History’ looking at the story of humanity as a single moment in time, each event piling on the top of the next in layers of broken images. Here Seurat stands for some kind of 19th-century order, a ‘more innocent era’ the authors call it, and it is on top of him they heap the wreckage of the 20th century.
We might not agree that Seurat, a political anarchist himself, can be seen as emblematic of innocence and stability. But if you can suspend disbelief at that then the novel gains a navigable structure as a kind of fall narrative, all given life and power through strong and memorable draughtsmanship.
- Michael Paraskos  https://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/03/murder-rape-and-racism/


A graphic novel rendering of the notorious Lord Horror mythos that shows up most of today’s purveyors of “extreme horror” as the poseurs they are. It continues the tradition of previous Lord Horror media in its nonlinear storytelling and overpowering concentration on ugliness and disgust (although REVERBSTORM is somewhat unique in the Lord Horror lexicon in that it doesn’t contain “Fuck” in its title--unlike FUCK OFF AND DIE, MOTHERFUCKERS and BAPTISED IN THE BLOOD OF MILLIONS: A NOVEL OF FUCKING HOLOCAUST TERROR).
     REVERBSTORM, which originally appeared as an eight issue comic series from 1990-2012, is distinguished from its predecessors by one crucial aspect: the astounding black and white artwork by John Coulthart. Coulthart’s gorgeous dark-hued art was previously featured in the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired graphic anthology THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK, but his work here (as he himself has acknowledged) goes far beyond anything in that volume, or anything else he’s done, in its depictions of up-close eviscerations, otherworldly creatures, outré architecture and bold samplings of Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte” and Picasso’s “Guernica,” details from which are layered into the artwork.
     The setting of REVERBSTORM is the imaginary city Torenbürgen, a hallucinatory playground for Lord Horror and his minions that’s packed with wonton bloodletting and Lovecraftian creatures. Lord Horror, for those unfamiliar with the earlier volumes, is a fascistic politician in an alternate universe where the Nazis have taken over the world. The character is based on William Joyce, a.k.a. “Lord Haw-Haw,” an American-Irish-British fascist notorious for broadcasting Nazi propaganda during WWII. Another real-life personage referenced in these pages is Jessie Matthews, a British singer/actress popular in the 1930s who appears here as Lord Horror’s wife, while James Joyce, whose words are widely quoted (actual pages from FINNEGAN’S WAKE turn up throughout), is Horror’s brother.
     As is his custom, author David Britton seems determined to offend absolutely everybody. If the lovingly depicted dismemberments, eviscerations and sex scenes don’t upset you than the flippant anti-Semitism of Lord Horror and his minions just might, and if that doesn’t phase you than there’s the relentless nonlinearity of the piece, which has no real narrative to speak of, and indeed often feels like a portfolio rather than a proper graphic novel.
     Then there are the literary and artistic references (to the aforementioned James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Aubrey Beardsley, etc), which are so copious an eleven page appendix is included to explain them--and which will doubtless go clear over the heads of 99 percent of REVERBSTORM’S readers. The problem is that a knowledge of those references is necessary to fully understand the proceedings, which are as extreme as just about anything you’ll find, but contain a real fire and intelligence. It’s just a shame that this book’s ideal audience is so limited as to be all-but nonexistent. - http://www.fright.com/edge/LordHorrorReverbstorm.htm


The first publication released by Savoy Books, in 1976, is said to be Stormbringer, a “graphic version” of Michael Moorcock’s early stories of Elric of Melniboné by the artist James Cawthorn. Specifically, the work was published by David Britton, a bookstore proprietor who’d been involved in small press magazine printing and editorial since 1969; one of the first works he’d released was a suppressedcomic by Ken Reid, which had been passed along by Steve Moore, the future mentor of an unrelated Alan. Before long, Britton would combine his energy with that of Michael Butterworth — not the Mike Butterworth who wrote Vampirella as “Flaxman Loew” in the ’70s, but a contemporaneous author/editor/publisher — and, through several iterations of the Savoy legend, would release books, records, and comics, the most recent of which arrived in 2013: Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, a 344-page hardcover compilation of work dating back nearly 20 years.
It was scripted by Britton himself, from a scenario by Butterworth, the editor, and drawn by John Coulthart, also the book’s designer. Despite praise from the aforementioned Alan Moore, I don’t recall any of this work, in any format, being distributed to North American comic book stores through traditional comic book distribution channels, nor can I recall much of anything in the way of sustained critical attention from comic book specialist avenues.
But already, in puffing myself up, I have made an error. The first 32 pages of the collected Reverbstorm are taken from a yet-earlier Savoy publication – one of the most curious horror comics of the 1990s.

To understand Lord Horror #7, aka Hard Core Horror #5, aka King Horror: Zero, copyright 1990, it is crucial to know that David Britton had been to jail once, in 1982, and would be jailed again in 1993, both times for selling obscene material; Savoy’s bookshops had been raided by police on a steady basis since ’76, the year Britton began publishing. Most infamously, a 1989 raid seized copies of Britton’s debutante prose novel, Lord Horror, a surreal conflagration of fascistic exaggeration loosely based on the WWII persona of William Joyce— dubbed “Lord Haw-Haw” by the British Press — an Irish-American resident of England turned naturalized German who helmed British-targeted propaganda broadcasts with a sneering, mocking glee which rendered him something of an evil celebrity among the aggrieved. Britton had debuted his “Lord Horror” variant on a 1986 Savoy-published New Order/Bruce Springsteen cover record, the sleeve of which depicted James Anderton, the severely religious chief constable of the area, uttering racial slurs whilst the back of his head exploded.
Anderton was among the figures alluded to in the pages of Lord Horror, which, from the excerpts I have encountered in print and audio form, trafficked in a swirling perceptual mist colored entirely by the hatred of its monstrous, fantastical and not entirely uncomic title character, who at one point, wandering a neon-lit NYC like an immortal champion of anti-Semitism, snatches a fully-grown leather-and-enema sex pervert and gobbles him up like a hungry hippopotamus. The book was found obscene by a local magistrate, and, though the ruling was overturned the following year, at least sparing the impounded stock destruction, it has never been reprinted, save for a 1995 edition released only to the Czech Republic. For those interested in reading further, I recommend David Kerekes’ exhaustive study of Savoy’s travails, which, via accumulation, depicts the applicable obscenity prosecutions as less civic-minded adjudication than a fabulous, generation-spanning local beef with one side empowered to seize both property and liberty from the other.
There were also comic books: Lord Horror, begun the same year as the novel, depicting the further adventures of the title fiend; and Meng & Ecker, a more overtly comedic ‘bad taste’ spin-off which suffered its own obscenity ruling alongside the Lord Horror novel. Both series were written by Britton and drawn by Kris Guidio, until (to repeat myself) the seventh issue of Lord Horror, which concluded a sub-series, Hard Core Horror, which anyway functioned as a standalone unit entitled King Horror: Zero. It is a magazine-sized 8.5″ x 11.75″, well-produced with a glossy cover and good paper, 60 pages in black & white.
It is, in effect, a work of thorough deconstruction.
—
King Horror begins on its inside front cover with photographic images of Jessie Matthews, an actress familiar to British audiences of the WWII period – famous, in part, for her scandalous romantic life. The images are accompanied by text, fiction, noting her marriage to Horace Joyce, Lord Horror: glamour intertwined with disgust. “He really loves her, and she loves him,” muses James Joyce, fictive brother of the title villain. On the facing (first) page, we then see a photographic blow-up of Matthews’ face, on which is overlaid historical text detailing the tremendous, disgusted renown of the real William Joyce, at the time of his trial on charges of treason, despite not actually being a citizen of England. Two popular images.
Then, horribly, we are seeing photographic images of ovens. Overlaid are texts relating to the creation of the “Lord Haw-Haw” name by journalist Jonah Barrington, a title eventually embraced by the in-character propaganda broadcasts of Joyce himself, so that fictive reality came to embrace a deeper fiction; all the better to tease the paranoia of reality, since part of the impact of such broadcasts was that they were meant to be taken as emanating from within Britain. Next, we read an excerpt from a 1941 novel by Brett Rutledge, depicting the heroic killing of Lord Haw-Haw – fiction again rising to fiction. The shock of reality subsequently arrives, as the photo-backgrounds depict heaps of starved corpses while the text details testimony as to the oratorical prowess of Joyce, the man behind the character; interspersed is sarcastic commentary by Barrington, who himself sought to fight back this menace with ridicule. This is a war of bodies and minds, each represented by image and text, the fundamentals of comics, but at different times. The prelude ends.

John Coulthart’s ink-on-paper contributions to King Horror can be messily identified as architectural or industrial drawing. For 32 pages, we are shown full-page or double-page renditions of settings, very occasionally with the absurd, tall-haired silhouette of Lord Horror lurking about. It is evident, quickly, that this is a concentration camp: “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Savoy begs comparison with the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, while generous comic tragics may cite to Martin Vaughn-James’ eerier, wordier 1974 graphic novel The Cage, but the most obvious comparison issues from a comics artist famously reliant on background support: Dave Sim, of 2008’s Judenhass.

The departure of aesthetics between these two early images is self-evident. Sim, by his ready admission, is working from specific, cited photo-reference. The image is cold and mechanical, by design. It seeks to groan with the burden of witness, and the fact of its deliberation will become the heart of the Judenhass project.

Taking a small handful of photographs and copying, detailing, excerpting and collaging, Sim creates a distinctly literal type of poetics. Tiny panels of damning bodies underlie quotes taken from brightly-illustrated famous faces, positioned for maximum anti-Semitic horror impact – these are the consequences of such words. That Judenhass was questioned as to the causative value or basic applicability of these words is natural, since every page of it is pedagogical, instructive.

Coulthart’s images, meanwhile, are disquieting in their vivid imagination. These are *not* drawn from photographs (which the comic has already demonstrated are easy enough to print on their own); in their looming black spires and smooth vintage contours, they look fit for a genocidal episode of a superhero cartoon from the Bruce Timm era. See an ashen skull grin in the skies above these gates! Eerie tendrils writhing down a dread, yawning hall! In these moments, one can imagine the dismay of Manchester’s moral guardians, grudges aside, because Coulthart, also an illustrator of Lovecraft, is making these images awesome, in the sense of inspiring awe, which can easily read as tribute. I feel it is more about emphasizing the unique qualities of drawing versus the mechanical capture of photography; both can be visceral, sensual, hallucinogenic, but drawn images in sequence can better absorb, because in lacking the blunt sensory recognition of ‘reality’ they can be accepted instantly as allegorically ‘real’ – as places.
But note too the blank spaces of white occupying each page. These are empty captions; they are the indication of explanation, or at least accompaniment, or counterpoint, or something, but without any substance. This is not the same as merely presenting images – here, images are explicitly split off from text. And, when read in conjunction with what has come before, and what will come after, the suggestion is made that images can be both concrete and subjective. As I mentioned before, this segment of King Horror (printed darker, with some extra strokes of shading added, and one image inverted) would eventually become a prelude to the collected Reverbstorm, which indeed planted its cast of characters into an Auschwitz by way of Gotham City, dislocating [h]orror from a specific time and location and declaring it everywhere – like threat made stone. And if it all threatens to look like an album sleeve, well: isn’t this a comic anyway about image and excitation?

Again, the poles reverse. Coulthart withdraws and Britton enters for five pages of white text on black paper. It’s a rambling, dense screed, depicting Lord Horror’s inquisition of himself regarding the suicide of his wife, Jessie Matthews, and, among other things, the suspicion that the microbes clamoring on his hand are Jews – all this despite him being costumed as a rat, the bringer of plague. Aloud, Horror wonders if genocide isn’t a biological imperative. “All things are to be counted good that are done according to nature,” says Cicero, below the issue’s title. Yet suicide is to yield “to the mind’s jungle.” Is it, then, good? The annihilation of the ‘beautiful’ image, Matthews, before the horrific?
I cannot promise you will not be somehow left wanting by these provocations. This is a comic, after all, which concludes with 15 pages of sequential images of photographs of corpses, as both a reprisal of its prelude and a final lunge into questioning images. Here, we react: we recognize these as bodies, instantly, though we are never told that they are victims of the Holocaust. They are overlaid, instead by two additional elements. There are brief factoids, detailing more of the life and influence of Lord Haw-Haw, supporter of all this. And there are also measurements: musical scales and the like, drawn over the bodies. This is the futility of art, perhaps, to account of these physical and psychological horrors. Or maybe it is a leap toward accounting for everything – the final page sees a nude, dead man with a star chart drawn over him, reminding us that we are all carbon-based entities, just matter, and threatening that pain and horror and suffering and hatred and death are endemic to our condition, and that it will continue well past humanity and its affairs, upward and into infinity. -  Joe McCulloch
http://www.tcj.com/this-week-in-comics-7914-hell-eternal/


Writer and co-founder of Savoy Books, David Britton is a controversial figure. His novel Lord Horror was the last book to be banned under the UK’s Obscene Publications Act 1959 and Britton himself served a prison sentence.
None of which appears to have deterred Britton from producing work that will inevitably offend and outrage many readers, dealing with potentially contentious subject matter in a manner that, while overtly satirical and blackly comedic, flings our own bigotry and fascination with the mechanisms of atrocity back in our faces.
Nor should it deter him.
Subtitled “The Black Rose of Auschwitz”, LA SQUAB (Savoy Books hc, 334pp, £25) is a novel that introduces itself as “A Nuggerty Treasure Book for Children of All Ages”, though I suspect the only minor who might make head or tail of it is the eponymous heroine of the narrative, a switchblade wielding nymphet with a wardrobe courtesy of Agent Provocateur and a penchant for discussing philosophy. According to the promotional material accompanying the book, “the primary inspirations of La Squab are The Wind in the Willows – if Grahame’s classic had been re-written by Adolf Hitler – and the ‘Fudge & Speck’ comic strip created by celebrated Beano cartoonist Ken Reid”. I’ve read the former, but have no recollection of encountering the latter, and in any event it was all such a long time ago and I have no faith in my ability to pick up on any resonances.
The stem narrative involves a boat journey, made by La Squab in the company of Lord Horror who she refers to as Uncle Horace, along the River Thames, though this fictional waterway meanders somewhat more than its geographical counterpart, taking us to places both real and imaginary. Along the way the two philosophise and swap banter, have adventures and meet a wealth of interesting people, both fictional and historical (e.g. Tiger Tim and Weary Willie, Alfred Jarry and Sigmund Freud), and inevitably they also bump into characters from Britton’s back catalogue such as Meng and Ecker, creations inspired by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. It’s all mildly pleasurable, with some delicious descriptions of the Thames Valley, witty dialogue and endless invention, the kind of book where you never really know what to expect from one page to the next, and this is a good thing. The best comparison I can think of are the Jerry Cornelius novels of Michael Moorcock, but with the decadence cranked up to eleven. And yet at the same time it’s also vaguely dissatisfying, with the feel that there really isn’t much point to it all and that ultimately the author is simply freewheeling, with no real end in mind, other than being whimsical in his own special way. That, of course, is a valid position for a writer to take, and if it’s what you’re looking for from a novel then possibly La Squab is the book for you.
But Britton’s text isn’t the entire story. Considered as an artefact in its own right, La Squab the book is a thing of beauty, a lavish volume produced to a high standard, with a CD of Fenella Fielding reading from the text, and sumptuous illustrations by artist Kris Guido on just about every other page, so that what we have is a treat for the eye. As a novel it didn’t quite work for me, but as an art book with added words then I’d have to rate it the best thing to come down the pike for years, a work that puts most so called collectibles to shame. And yes, I am a very superficial and shallow person, thank you for asking.
And I could pretty much copy and paste some of the comments above for the epic production that is the graphic novel LORD HORROR: REVERBSTORM (Savoy Books hc, 344pp, £25). Reverbstorm was originally published in serial form, and now the seven issues are collected together in a single volume for the first time with a wealth of supplementary material. Written by David Britton and illustrated by John Coulthart, the book is a treasure trove of cultural references – the literature of Joyce and Eliot, the art of Seurat and Picasso, the music of Sondheim and Leiber & Stoller – all caught between the same covers and polished to a fine gloss intermixed with images of death and destruction, the visual language of splatterpunk chic.
To quote from the promotional material: “Welcome to the nightmare metropolis of Torenbürgen, where New York’s Art Deco architecture has fused with the termination machinery of Auschwitz”. Imagine if you can, the cities of Science Fiction’s golden age, the futuristic architecture of Gibson’s story ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, as illustrated by Giger, and then handed over to Tom Savini to chuck a bucket or two of blood and intestines over it all. This work is a tour de force of invention, Britton’s narrative the glue that ostensibly holds it together, but with Coulthart throwing just about every stylistic trick in his considerable artistic repertoire at the page in an effort to dazzle and appal the reader, as what we are seeing veers between subtle eroticism and garish atrocity show, with the line dividing beauty and the grotesque at first blurred and then eliminated altogether, so that we question both the reality and mores of what we are seeing, while interrogating our own response to the work – why does such horrific imagery appeal, what is it in our own natures that it speaks to.
Or maybe not.
It’s also an immensely clever book, using artwork and lyrics to represent the characters in much the same way that people in musical dramas have key note refrains, and as a supplementary to that there are explanations in the back of the book, a glossary of cultural references and influences that is as fascinating as it is substantial. As an example, one technique used in the book and categorised in the glossary, is that of A Humument or “treated novel” in which parts of the text are drawn over leaving only selected words visible, thus creating a new work. In all honesty, I didn’t understand what I was looking at for much of the time, though I guess I could waffle on a bit and lay on the bullshit thick, but that would be to do the creators’ work a disservice, impose a meaning on it that I don’t really believe in myself. In the final analysis, I’m not sure that it all adds up to anything greater than the sum of its parts – for that you should probably ask a philosophy professor with a side line in semiotics, rather than a humble book reviewer – but those parts are quite, quite magnificent. Regardless of things like meaning and authorial intent, I loved Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, every single page of gut wrenching imagery, and expect to spend a lot of time in the future just browsing through the book’s pages and stumbling across yet more to delight and repel. - https://trumpetville.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/filler-content-with-lord-horror/










Keith Seward, David Britton, Michael Butterworth, Horror Panegyric, Savoy Books, 2008.


"David Britton and Michael Butterworth are the founders of Savoy Books. To call Savoy a publishing house is rather like calling Charles Manson a criminal — it’s correct but it fails to account for so much more. A frequent contributor to New Worlds magazine, Butterworth established himself at a young age as an important figure in the “New Wave” of science fiction that also included J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and others. Britton became notorious for his first novel, Lord Horror, which earned him a distinction that even Burroughs failed to acquire: it became the first literary work banned in Britain since Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and thus landed Britton in jail. While Burroughs had been in jail a number of times, it was never because of his writing.
In 1979 Savoy Books was prepared to publish a uniform edition of works by Burroughs when it was subject to a series of police raids that temporarily forced it into bankruptcy. The project was scuttled, but Britton and Butterworth never lost their tremendous admiration for Burroughs. A few days after his death in 1997, the two gave an interview to Sarajane Inkster describing their visit to the Bunker, Burroughs’ abode on New York’s down-and-out Bowery. Now they expand on that interview to commemorate the 2008 publication of Horror Panegyric. A collaboration between Savoy Books and Supervert, creator of RealityStudio, Horror Panegyric features an enthusiastic analysis of the Lord Horror novels, excerpts from the hard-to-find books themselves, and a timeline of Lord Horror productions including books, comics, and CDs. Text is also available in its entirety at supervert.com." - realitystudio.org

Table of Contents:
"The Frogmen" (from Lord Horror, 1989)
"The Auschwitz of Oz" (from Motherfuckers, 1996)
"The Afreet of Dachau" (from Motherfuckers, 1996)
"Our Lord of Fuck-Off Confronts Angels" (from Baptised in the Blood of Millions, 2000)

"Horror Panegyric begins with a penetrating essay by Keith Seward on the three Lord Horror novels produced by David Britton and Michael Butterworth, aka Savoy Books of Manchester, England. The first novel, Lord Horror, was the most recent work of literature after Last Exit to Brooklyn to be banned in England and obliged Britton to serve a term in Strangeways Prison. Savoy's "franchise of Lord Horror productions," Seward writes, "is provocative, original, visionary, and contains at least one outright masterpiece (Motherf*ckers). Young writers should be looking at it the same as they do Naked Lunch, i.e. as a work that shows them what the possibilities are in the hands of a master.""Lord Horror," Britton has said, "was so unique and radical, I expected to go to prison for it. I always thought that if you wrote a truly dangerous book - something dangerous would happen to you. Which is one reason there are so few really dangerous books around. Publishers play at promoting dangerous books, whether they're Serpent's Tail or Penguin. All you get is a book vetted by committee, never anything radically imaginative or offensive that will take your f*cking head off. Ironically, I think it would do other authors a power of good if they had to account for their books by going to prison - there are far too many bad books being published!" Following the essay are excerpts from the three difficult-to-find novels Lord Horror, Motherf*ckers: The Auschwitz of Oz, and Baptised in the Blood of Millions. Rounding out the volume is a timeline of Lord Horror productions that includes the novels, comic books, and recordings for which Savoy Books has earned its worldwide notoriety."

The Most Disturbing Alternate History You'll Ever Read
If Philip K. Dick's "Axis won the war" novel Man in the High Castle made you squirm, then the 1980s novels about Lord Horror and his Nazi England will make your brain explode. The Lord Horror novels — Lord Horror, followed by Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz — are vicious, psychedelic satire about a Nazi DJ (Lord Horror) in England after Germany wins World War II. Written by underground publishers David Britton and Michael Butterworth, owners of the notorious Savoy Books, the first novel was declared obscene in court and got Britton sent to jail for four months. Now, cult author and critic Keith Seward (who wrote Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish under the name Supervert) has helped revive the long-suppressed scifi classics in a collection called Horror Panegyric. It brings together Seward's essay about the Lord Horror books with excerpts from the novels. And you can read it online for free.
Writes Seward in his introduction to the book:
Unlike Dick or Spinrad, sci-fi writers who confined Nazis to a book or two, Britton and Butterworth have pursued their theme with a probably disturbing intensity that can be quantitatively measured in the sheer volume of Lord Horror productions. What's more, they do not tack a moral to the end of their tales. This is not to say that there are no morals but rather that there are no easy answers, seals of approval, rubber stamps, calmatives ("don't worry, it's just fiction, the jackboots won't hurt you"). Their work is not ideological, like a hate tract, but is rather a deliberate collision of seemingly incompatible ideologies: death camp + dream factory = ? Satire, hyperbole, and reductio ad absurdum work to energize, anger, inspire, offend, but the one thing they do not do to readers is pacify. And why should anyone be pacified by Nazis, even fictional ones?Seward's essay alone makes great, thoughtful lunchtime reading, especially if you like your scifi on the transgressive side. And once you've read what he has to say about Lord Horror, you'll definitely want to check out the excerpts themselves." - Annalee Newitz

"A masterpiece is like pornography: it is difficult to say what it is exactly and yet, as the Supreme Court judge once said of porn, I know it when I see it. I know that a masterpiece, like porn, excites me when I see it. I know that, like porn, it reveals something to me. I know that, like porn, it tends to avoid sentiment, which is another way of saying that it has deep connections to truth. I know that, like porn, a masterpiece can often be shocking or scandalous. I know that I not only know porn when I see it, I know the difference between good porn and bad — and a masterpiece is always like good porn. And above all I know that, just as porn makes me want to fuck, a masterpiece makes me want to create. It's a stimulant, an incitement that does to the aesthetic sense what porn does to the libido.
Rimbaud excites. Dostoievski reveals. Burroughs inspires. And Lord Horror?" - Keith Seward
Continue reading: http://supervert.com/essays/horror_panegyric/

The unusual title -- "Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz" -- tells you it's an extraordinary novel. But it still doesn't prepare you for the story (or the swastika on the cover). Which is why "Horror Panegyric," published today by Savoy Books, works so handily. As Keith Seward explains in his introductory essay:

Motherfuckers' principals are Meng and Ecker, twins who had been subject to "scientific" experiments by Josef Mengele. After the war they find themselves in northern England, waiting for Lord Horror the way others wait for Godot. Ecker is rational but violent, Meng is a mutant whose huge cock and tits are nothing compared to the mutations of his mind. Not Holocaust survivors in any sense you've ever seen before, Meng and Ecker have adopted the ways of their captors -- the bloodlusts and hates. However, there is nothing paramilitary about them. They're not neo-Nazis or skinheads. They're more like the ultraviolent droogs of A Clockwork Orange,, though it is quite possible that the droogs would not feel any affinity in return. Meng and Ecker are even further out in some post-war delirium. Auschwitz, meet Oz.

• "time no longer flows in a straight line"
• "history loses its coordinate points and therefore its constancy
• "cause and effect are sundered"
• "space loses its divisions"
• "motion loses its efficacy"
• "gravity loses its inescapability"
• "life loses its phyla"
• "characters mutate"
• "behaviours lose their norms. Or rather, norms are represented not as injunctions but as worst-case scenarios"
• "art loses its conventions"

Fifty years on, Horror had confided to Ecker, Auschwitz would be a recognisable brand name, a mythic character as well-known as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan. A fortune awaited the author who could bring 'Mr Auschwitz' to life. To recreate the persona of Auschwitz would be an ordained mission. Auschwitz, the holy end-all of life's futile pattern, slinking through the subconscious of humanity, the one archetypal riff common to all nightmares, fuelled on the anvil of Little Richard. In a hundred years, Auschwitz would form its own genre and become the most successfully marketed product in the history of the world, a name as well-known globally as Coca Cola, taking all media under its encompassing umbrella. The camps were the obvious ultimate enclosed world, the desired image of world television, beamed by satellite into each city, town and village, ideal for community soap operas (a story of everyday life on the edge of life), of science fiction time travel (travel back through your life and end it in Auschwitz). In this televised scenario thhe dog-boys loomed large as Heathcliff doomed lovers, the spice of sexy bodice-rippers which thrilled millions of women. Guilt would never stand in the way of commerce ...

Keith Seward, aka Supervert, is a writer based in New York. He also runs Reality Studio, a website and forum devoted to Burroughs. Reality Studio has had a big impact on ballardian.com in that it’s a template for how to present an intelligent and provocative site about a major cultural figure without descending into the worst excesses of fandom. There is much discussion of Ballard over at Reality Studio’s forum, and some crossover the other way: Supervert submitted an entry to our Ballardian Home Movies competition and occasionally pops up in this site’s comments box, as do other RS regulars. At some stage I hope to conduct an interview with Seward, in which the Ballard/Burroughs nexus will be analysed along with Keith’s various writing projects (but as always with this site finding the time is the factor, although I hope the interview will not be too far away).
I have Supervert’s two books, Necrophiliac Variations and Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, and I find them to be hilariously challenging examinations of the nature of sexuality. Careening through outright farce to science fiction and beyond, these self-published, thoroughly subversive gems have been around for a few years, appreciated by the likes of Mark Dery and i09′s Annalee Newitz.
Dery even managed to draw Ballard into the frame:

Things are getting weird out there, so much so that imaginary obsessions such as exophilia, the “abnormal attraction [to] beings from worlds beyond earth” that is the subject of the underground novel Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, are starting to sound downright plausible. Can we be far from the future foretold by J.G. Ballard, where car-crash enthusiasts get off on vehicular manslaughter and fans of Space Age snuff thrill to footage of astronauts being roasted alive during re-entry? In the introduction to his 1974 novel Crash, Ballard wondered if the android numbness induced by media bombardment—the “demise of feeling”—would open the door to “all our most real and tender pleasures—in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena…for…our…perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game.”

Now Keith has a new book out, a limited-edition hardcover called Horror Panegyric. Published by Savoy Books, this is Seward’s apppraisal of Savoy’s notorious Lord Horror novels by David Britton and Michael Butterworth. The novels tell the story of Lord Horror, who, Seward writes, “is based on a historical personage: Lord Haw-Haw, aka William Joyce, British fascist and radio announcer”. The books are alternative histories of a fascist England, brutal, bloody, highly confrontational and shot through with a violent Surrealism.
According to Seward:

Lord Horror takes the repository of symbols bequeathed by World War II and pours it into a cauldron boiling over with pop culture. Bigots and death camps get cooked up with rock and roll, comic strips, esoterica. It’s a “what if the other side had won the war” trip like you’ve never seen before.
…
Constant harassment — which continued into the late 1990s — from an obsessed constabulary would have quashed most publishers, but Britton and Butterworth operated under a maxim more along the Nietzschean lines of “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Far from folding up shop or retreating into less controversial publications, the two launched an all-out assault. Though the novel Lord Horror was effectively suppressed and remains difficult to find even today, the character Lord Horror multiplied, made appearances in different media, spawned other characters who in turn featured in their own books, comics, music. In short, the death of the book was the birth of a twisted empire, a reich of deviant imagination that neither Allied nor Axis powers would ever have recognized.
…
Their franchise of Lord Horror productions is provocative, original, visionary, and contains at least one outright masterpiece (Motherfuckers). Young writers should be looking at it the same as they do Naked Lunch, i.e. as a work that shows them what the possibilities are in the hands of a master. Academics should be crawling all over it with their magnifying glasses trying to figure out what it means and what it says about society. Anyone interested in literature should be reading and experiencing the damn thing. A few cognoscenti are there already, snapping up the first editions of Lord Horror before everybody else catches on and prices them out of the market. But the victory celebration hasn’t happened yet, and it is hard to understand why.

The Lord Horror books are now difficult to find, but following Seward’s essay in Horror Panegyric are excerpts from the works that are guaranteed to stoke the fire. Perhaps you might even find yourself sharing Colin Wilson’s reaction:

I think that, as an exercise in Surrealism, Lord Horror compares with some of the best work that came out of France and Germany between the wars, for example Georges Bataille… Britton is undoubtedly brilliant, but when I came to the bit about Horror hollowing out a Jewess’s foot and putting it over his penis, I started skipping. With the best will in the world, I couldn’t give his brilliant passages the attention they deserve because I kept being put off by this note of violence and sadism. No doubt it is because I belong to an older generation that is still basically a bit Victorian.

Horror Panegyric is available online at supervert.com or can be purchased in hardcover. The latter is worth it for the great cover art and design by John Coulthart. - Simon Sellars

Latest in Savoy's ongoing series of books about Savoy is this Lord Horror sampler and essay, a handsomely bound hardback boasting an Arcimboldo-inspired John Coulthart cover painting of the great man himself. As for the contents, you get four extracts from the Lord Horror books plus Seward's appreciation and a Horror timeline for under a tenner, which brings this as close as Savoy have got to populist publishing since AC/DC and Kiss.
Lord Horror certainly deserves critical appraisal but Seward's tone is altogether too casual for the job and his arguments unlikely to convince any but the converted - or even many of the converted. Much of the essay is written in the first person - 'It's a good name, and I thought Motherfuckers was good too' - and consists mainly of Seward attempting to categorise the Lord Horror books, a daunting and probably pointless task: surely the work's category implosion is itself half the fun? Reiterations of similarities between Horror and works in the accepted canon of Great Art (Burroughs, Swift, Bosch) are swiftly wearying - can't Horror stand on his own daintily shod feet? - and the pretzels Seward contorts himself into while trying to place the morality of the books surely miss the point: if Horror's 'about' anything it's the transformative power of an imagination weaned on Fudge & Speck, rock'n'roll, fascist iconography and unwarranted incarceration.
Seward's final call to arms, for a US publisher to publish the Horror books as a 'nicely designed line of paperbacks' for broader consumption, is baffling - this is never going to be mainstream fare. I imagine sixties readers would have had similar problems believing that a handful of Burroughs titles would be stocked by every branch of Borders today, but Burroughs never baited his readers as relentlessly as Britton and Butterworth: their most extreme imagery may be tempered and finally redeemed by an imagination prodigious enough to join the dots between Auschwitz and Oz, but this is still dangerous stuff. Calls to add Lord Horror to the academic canon seem similarly misplaced: academic appraisal is sure to draw the sting from even the most brutal work, while Savoyards have long celebrated the obscure, unsung and hopelessly irredeemable - what better place for their own work than shoulder to shoulder with the likes of David Lindsay and Robert Aickman?

Seward does make the astute point that Savoy is 'in a weird place, like one of those soldiers lost in a forest and still fighting the war after it's over'. As fantastic fiction Lord Horror continues to impress; as censor-baiting statement in an age of beheadings and bukake piped directly into British homes, perhaps its relevance has lessened. And it's hard to fault the enthusiasm of the essay, which if nothing else is likely to prompt a re-examination of the Horror canon. Happily the extracts published here show Horror at his strongest: like a lacklustre support band, Seward's appreciation only serves to make Britton and Butterworth's work shine ever brighter.- James Marriott

David Britton and Kris Guidio, Fuck Off and Die, Savoy Books, 2005.


Fuck Off and Die is the follow-up to the notorious Adventures of Meng & Ecker. Featuring all the usual favourites—Meng & Ecker, Lord Horror, La Squab—as well as new characters, it is probably David Britton and Kris Guidio's farewell volume of comic strips. All-new strips in b/w and 48 pages of full colour, containing the complete run of the La Squab three-panel strips, FOAD stacks-up more fucking bad taste than a monkey can shake a pointed stick at; the un-politically correct Daddy of comic books.
With an introduction by Alan Moore and an afterword by Dr Benjamin Noyse.
Jacket design by John Coulthart.


"Consider the lilies of the field—and let the cluster-bombing begin. Fuck Off and Die, the latest literary JDAM from David Britton and illustrator Kris Guidio, targets pretense, hypocrisy, and the icons of so-called culture, whether highbrow or popular. Passionate, provocative, harrowing, hilarious: this collection of comic strips and graphic stories puts pay to a brave new century where governments prohibit photographs of dead soldiers and hurricane victims lest emotion—and possibly even thought—may follow. Its centerpiece is a series of three-panel strips featuring La Squab, offspring of vivisectionist vaudevillians Meng & Ecker (stars of the only comic book to be banned in England). Slam Little Orphan Annie into an anime nymphet, dress her in a death's head and butt-climbing miniskirt, slip her a handgun, and you'll get an idea. La Squab wanders the wasteland of the New Jerusalem, exacting her own brand of moral vengeance through bitter bon mots—"I don't like the thought of dying...on the other hand, I do like the thought of not being here"—and, courtesy of a quick trigger finger, the occasional bon voyage.       
La Squab's mischief frames epistles from Meng & Ecker, including 48 pages of full-color delirium wending from urban legend and the Hungerford murders into Schopenhauer with the full-immersion baptism in hate, violence, fascism, and duplicity that have marked Britton as a brave, unapologetic, and unblinking satirist—arguably the best of our generation—and, in England at least, as a pornographer and criminal. Guidio's artwork is wrenchingly beautiful, repulsive, nightmarish, profound. Buying this book is an act of conscience—and of revolution against those who fear words and images." - DOUGLAS WINTER


"Oh, Christ. Britton and Guidio. Now look what you've made them do, and at the worst possible moment.
La Squab herself, apparently, was fathered on the bestial and psychopathic Meng by former Manc stud Morrissey somewhere between the squalor-sequined pages in jailbird of Paradise Dave Britton's and sinister legend Guidio's Meng & Ecker comic, though the issue of her actually parentage and pedigree runs somewhat deeper.
La Squab is a gothed-over, morbidly embellished version of the innocent, delightful Angel Face, originated by authentic British cartoon genius Ken Reid.
A terraced street visionary whose creations were the squelchy, squeaking furniture of many 1950s juvenile imaginations, Ken Reid and his various homunculi have always fitted seamlessly into the bilious, fluorescent Savoy swirl of cultural reference that sluices the toxic minor-cosmos of La Squab, Lord Horror, Meng and Ecker; an apocalyptic universe where ghastly English landmarks such as Oswald Moseley are set on spectacular collision courses with icons like James Joyce, Arthur Askey, Tiger Tim or Jessie Matthews.
An incongruous soup of moral outrage and nostalgia, this splenetic oeuvre offers us a key to the scarred, scalded sensibilities behind La Squab, behind the whole Savoy agenda. In these comic strips, as in our lives, the reassuring and beloved playmates of our past are herded onto cattle-trains and dragged into the semen, shit and blood stained razor-wire enclosure of our present.
This is a black and excellent collection, sharp as gall, a fine display of Britton's acid voice and splendid gallery of Guidio's elegant and decadent designs. La Squab is a sophisticated howl of anger and disgust disguised as a Violet Elizabeth Bott tantrum, Minipops conceived by Bertolt Brecht with set designs by Harry Clarke and camera work by Leni Riefenstahl. A paedophobic gymslip gem, it should be on the shelves of anyone hoping to fathom the lurid, fractal mess of turn-of-the-century British culture, a must for those of us who cannot stomach Cute unless it's gnawed down to the painful cuticle. Go out and order six more copies of this book immediately.
Tomorrow belongs to her." - ALAN MOORE IN THE INTRODUCTION



“Enthusiasm for the mysterious emissaries of pulp”: an interview with David Britton





Lord Horror: A History Of Savoy Publishing 
Carol Huston discusses with its enigmatic founders, the publisher's turbulent history and the influence and circumstance that lead to its iconic output
The six-foot-two vegan writer, publisher and editor makes me another cup of strong black coffee in his flat in central Manchester overlooking the Hilton Tower. Sitting in the cluttered living room chatting, the sixty-five year old skinhead talks about several instances he’s known of people who have drowned in Mancunian canals over the years. His friend, who is smoking rollies in the background, laughs cynically and jokes, ‘Don’t hang around this guy. Your books won’t sell and you’ll end up in the river.’ This guy is Michael Butterworth, who has co-run indie publisher Savoy since 1976 with the enigmatic David Britton, whom Butterworth fondly refers to as ‘Devious’.
Savoy began as innovative paperback publishers, and in the Eighties and Nineties they moved on to include records and graphic works. As Butterworth offers up pieces of organic dark chocolate, it’s hard to imagine this generous man’s office and bookshops were raided by the Manchester Obscene Publications Squad more than sixty times, in a battle with the Manchester police that became known in Savoy mythology as the Savoy Wars. As political correctness took hold of the nation in the Eighties, it was a conflict that also encompassed attacks from the Left – from the alternative culture from which Savoy had grown. The company managed to piss off just about everyone. The story of Savoy is a tricky one, rife with judicial encounters and imprisonment. But, as always, there is another side to this coin – a softer side which often remains unsung.
Butterworth met Britton in Manchester in the early Seventies, and n 1996 told GQ: ‘Back in the Sixties, I was living on Ladbroke Grove and writing for New Worlds magazine.’ It was during this time that Butterworth befriended JG Ballard, who took Butterworth – as a young New Wave science fiction writer – under his wing. In a letter dated from 1967, Ballard gave Butterworth the sage advice to ‘never use more than one adjective per noun.’
In the early Seventies Butterworth moved back to Manchester with his family and worked in advertising for a brief spell. He continues, describing how he met Britton, ‘I was a freelance writer and novelist for a while. I edited New Vegetarian magazine and wrote sci-fi fantasy. At the same time Dave was running a bookshop, The House on the Borderland. We were both publishing small press fiction, fantasy and art magazines, and with my contacts and his money decided to get together to do something on a larger scale’.
Along with two other bookshops, The House on the Borderland was frequented by Joy Division’s Ian Curtis and Steven Morris in the late Seventies. Britton remembers Morris as an ‘Art Tripp and Michael Moorcock fan who had been expelled from school for some charming skulduggery’. Butterworth told Jon Savage a couple years ago that Curtis and Morris seemed to be ‘disparate, alienated young men attracted to like-minded souls. They wanted something offbeat and off the beaten track, and the shop supplied this. They probably saw it as a beacon in the rather bleak Manchester of the early 70s. They came in every couple of weeks, sometimes more often. Ian bought second-hand copies of New Worlds, the great 60s literary magazine edited by Michael Moorcock, which was promoting Burroughs and Ballard.’ Curtis and Butterworth went on to become friends around 1979 and Curtis often visited Butterworth’s lodger’s house in Altrincham.

(Photograph by Stephen Iles
Butterworth remembers, ‘I got to know Ian because of his interest in William Burroughs. I gave him books we’d done, and he invited me to Joy Division gigs. He was a clerk at the DHSS, and quite reserved, but by night he was a bizarre performer with weird, half-reluctant jerky movements. Watching him sing could actually be painful… Just as our friendship was building and Joy Division were on the eve of touring America, of course, Ian killed himself.’ After Curtis’s death, Savoy’s Butterworth and Britton teamed up with PJ Proby in the early Eighties to record or ‘massacre’ - in Britton’s words - some of Joy Division’s tracks including ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. In spite of his humility, however, Melody Maker described the cover as ‘the complete portrait of sexual paranoia. Proby’s [version] is a full-blown Hitchcock masterpiece.’ Of the decision to commission Proby for recordings, including a reading of Lord Horror, Britton recalled: ‘It is the correct Savoy perversity to put PJ Proby in the aural landscape as we did, to try and capture that malignant spark that Good and Cohn had seen in him. He was never a Scott Walker, a Tom Jones or a Robbie Williams, he was being fashioned in a more apocalyptic stew. For us he was definitely the right man in the right place at the right time, and if anyone doesn’t believe that – go and listen to the records.’
But Savoy wasn’t all music and books. The same year that Savoy was founded, James Anderton became Chief Constable of the Greater Manchester Police. Savoy describes his reign as creating a continuous criticism of their work and that Anderton and his men were ‘locked in a seeming conspiracy’ against them. After countless raids into Savoy’s bookshops and offices, seizing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of materials, Savoy Books was forced into temporary liquidation in 1981. They lost publishing copyrights and so became book packagers to survive the blow.
The Manchester Police continued to raid Savoy after Britton and Butterworth had begun producing their own works in order to regain copyrights, commencing with the insurgent novel Lord Horror– the works that have led American anthologists Jeff and Ann VanderMeer to hail them as precursors of the New Weird. After Lord Horror was published in 1989, the graphic title got seized by the police. Police raids continued until 1997 and some Savoy titles were seized by UK Customs in 1999.
In May of 1982, Britton was dealt a twenty-eight day sentence imposed by Manchester Judge James Hardy as result of a police raid in 1980. Britton recalls, ‘Strangeways Prison, then, in 1982, was a truly terrible place, the equal in terror and intimidation of a prison in a corrupt third world country. When people are being burned alive in cells opposite, you get some hint of what Auschwitz must have been like. Prison didn’t cure me. It just made me more bitter, and more determined to retaliate.’
The illustrator of Lord Horror, John Coulthart, recalled of the early raids, ‘The police seemed especially concerned with the German slogans I put into the pictures [of Lord Horror], so much so that they had them translated – foreign languages not being a speciality of the Greater Manchester Police. We were never given any explanation for this. The unstated implication seemed to be that we were trying to plant Nazi propaganda into young minds. The irony – as if there wasn’t enough already – was that the slogans were place there as a critique of the usual propaganda.’
Savoy has announced the early 2013 publication of the eighth and culminating graphic title in the Lord Horror series, Reverbstorm. The comic began life as a Lord Horror film treatment Butterworth and Britton did for Harvey Weinstein, but quickly took on a life of its own in the freewheeling Savoy hothouse. Its title derives from a Northern Soul track and the novel itself abounds with references to pop culture, including Captain Beefheart. The Lord Horror graphic series attempts to deconstruct Western literature and philosophy, quoting from TS Eliot and James Joyce as well as referencing canonical artists like Georges Seurat. In characteristic Lord Horror picaresque style, the creative team behind the book including author Britton, editor Butterworth and artist John Coulthart often use a slapstick approach to taboo subjects such as Hitler and Auschwitz.
Coulthart explains, ‘The creation of Reverbstorm took the path of most of Savoy’s original works whereby a number of key ingredients were laid down as a starting pint from with the work “jess grew”, to borrow a phrase of Ishmael Reed’s. Needless to say, most comic artists who are used to working from very tight scripts would find this situation impossible to cope with. Improvisation is a common thing in music, of course, and novels are frequently written without much sense of how they might develop. Yet for some reason comics, by which I mean English-language comics, show a deep resistance to these methods, the implication being that it’s far better to plot everything out with a hackneyed storyline than just jump in and see where the thing goes… With Reverbstorm this format of presenting eight issues had the advantage of giving a structure to a narrative that might otherwise have been somewhat uneven.’
Continuing to discuss his sources for Reverbstorm, he explains, ‘The ingredients, then were largely hangovers from the film treatment: Horror, Jessie and James Joyce in a New York-like city, themes and references from the “Reverbstorm” song lyrics (Ether Jumpers), Blue Blaze Laudanum, the “Souls”, and some (initially) token art reference concerning the Seurat pictures and their relation to Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. Dave gave me some of Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan books to look at for atmosphere and character presentation; I then suggested that we should have apes in the city (thinking of King Kong and all the other rampaging urban apes in films of the Thirties.) Picasso crept in pretty quickly after that, and finally we ended up with Hogarth’s Ononoes in the mix as well. These appear in Lord Horror, but this was the first time they’d featured in a comic since Hogarth had created them in the late Forties…. Three visual leitmotifs are established for the three main characters: Picasso for Horror, Seurat for Jessie and Finnegans Wake for Joyce (with text ripped from the book and stuck on the pages).’
Of Savoy’s success, Britton says, ‘We never actually made money out of Savoy – and still don’t. Not one book returns its financial investment.’ Britton remembers how in the early days the Savoy offices got sent Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in Highschool, which they rejected and now consider a mistake. Savoy describes itself as ‘England’s truly alternative and autotelic publishing company’. And perhaps it is.
The defiantly Northern English publishers couldn’t care less about being on trend or of the moment. Opting for indifference and black humour, Savoy celebrates anarchy, its punk heritage and a penchant for the uncanny. - Carol Huston  thequietus.com/articles/10988-michael-butterworth-savoy-publisher-interview


Ballardian did an excellent series of interviews with Savoy books, that can be read here.
Interview with John Coulthart

Aris Fioretos, The Gray Book, Stanford University Press, 1999.
extract: arisfioretos.com/en/the-gray-book/


Generally considered the least lively and most bleak of casts, gray is the taint of vagueness and uncertainty. This book situates itself in a region beyond criticism but this side of literature, characterized by forgetting and finitude, and investigating important yet seemingly inaccessible "gray areas" in texts as old as those of Homer, and as recent as those of Beckett.


Generally considered the least lively and most bleak of casts, gray is the taint of vagueness and uncertainty. Marking the threshold region where luminous life seems suspended but death has not yet darkened the horizon, it belongs to an evasive and evanescent world, carrying the tint of smoke, fog, ashes, and dust. As the ambiguous space of thought and remembrance where things blend and blur, gray measures the difference between distance and proximity, shading into tinges of hesitation, hues of taciturnity, tones of time past and lost. Thus it may also be the spectral medium of literature itself—that grainy gas of language.

Written with a lead pencil akin to those found in Nabokov, Rilke, Svevo, Poe, and Dickinson, The Gray Book chronicles the vicissitudes of such equivocal articulation—registering the graphite traces it leaves behind but also recording the dwindling span of its life. The book situates itself in a region beyond criticism but this side of literature, characterized by forgetting and finitude, and investigating important yet seemingly inaccessible "gray areas" in texts as old as those of Homer, and as recent as those of Beckett.

Loosely arranging these literary finds according to a revision of the four elements, The Gray Book distances itself from tradition and treats not water but tears, not fire but vapor, not earth but grain, not air but clouds. The narrative thus construed, proceeding in the meandering movements of volatile thought rather than in the prudent steps of a treatise, appears gradually affected by its subject. Themes and facts previously confined to the realm of quoted texts leak into the narrative itself. The border between fiction and fact slowly dissolves as the book approaches the curious void that the author locates at the heart of "gray literature." Shaped by an omnipresent though increasingly unreliable narrator, The Gray Book may thus ultimately yield a poetics cast in the form of a ghost story.


In Aris Fioretos’s odd and beautiful essay about grayness, its shapes and secrets, the richest of contents is extracted from this color of dearth and boredom.” — Allt om Böcker

“He writes with elegance. The style is both winding, searching, and utterly self-conscious . . . There are purely lyrical passages, many beautiful sections, and deft transitions in the text. At times, its lyrical, associative flow is interrupted, just in order to take a new turn and gain another cogency. Aris Fioretos is not afraid. He obviously knows what he is doing when publishing a book like this, so seductive and well-written, arguing against all narrow strictures of genre, yet anchored in solid theory. The reading turns kaleidoscopic, stimulating in abundance . . .” — Pär-Yngve Andersson

“Fioretos has written an essay as beautiful as poetry.” — Nina Björk

“If you have dealt with books for a long time, it is almost unavoidable not to be enthused by Fioretos’s rhapsody in gray. . . . Despite his sharp ear for dissonance, he seems to me an extremely talented hunter for correspondences, in search of mysterious harmonies between sounds, colors, figures, and flourishes wherever they may be detected. . . . One has to consider the para-littérateur happy.” – Anders Cullhed


“He offers readings which are absolutely dizzying in terms of erudition and speculative acumen. . . . With Den grå boken, Fioretos enters the domain of poetry. The result is literature at the highest level.” — Carl-Henrik Fredriksson

“. . . if one is attracted by Aris Fioretos’s elaborate style, so abundantly full of images, his book offers an almost bottomless source of inspiration and knowledge.” — Gabriella Håkansson

“[Book of the year] You have heard about food eroticism, but pencil pornography, what could that be? It is when everything that is gray, always associated with ennui and death, suddenly appears as sexier than banal colors. Aris Fioretos has succeeded in making this lamented non-color so delicious that you want to sink your teeth into it, wrap your tongue around it . . . Book of the year.” — Ulrika Kärnborg


“[Book of the year] Aris Fioretos, The Gray Book. This is the only book this year which has given me palpable, indeed physical, pleasure.” — Nina Lekander

“. . . a rare, almost incomparable book . . .” — Mikael van Reis

Aris Fioretos, The Truth About Sascha Knisch, Vintage, 2007.
extract: arisfioretos.com/en/the-truth-about-sascha-knisch/


'My name is Knisch, Sascha Knisch, and six days ago my life was in perfect order.'
Knisch, who works as a projectionist at the Apollo movie theatre, is a person with special sexual habits. One night, he sees the enigmatic Dora Wilms. A week later, she is dead and Knisch is charged with murder. As he tries to clear his name, he discovers a scientific conspiracy and is drawn into the rich tangle of a story in which nothing is as it seems. How can he prove what didn't happen? What goes on at the Foundation for Sexual Research? And why is it important to have testicles?
A biological thriller set in the steamy underworlds of Weimar Berlin in the sweltering summer of 1928, The Truth about Sascha Knisch deals with the so-called 'sexual question', its lures and seductiveness, dangers and temptations, but also with the shrewd passion between two young people in a Germany at the brink of disaster.


The kinky sex business in pre-Hitler Germany spawns a suspicious death in a murky novel by Swedish author Knisch that often reads more like a treatise than a thriller.
It’s the summer of 1928 in an unnamed city that is evidently Berlin. The narrator, 29-year-old Sascha Knisch, moved there a few years earlier from his hometown, Vienna; he’s a part-time projectionist at a movie theater. Sascha is also a transvestite who makes regular visits to Dora Wilms, who’s a softer version of a dominatrix. Their current session is interrupted by the doorbell. Sascha, dressed as a schoolgirl, hides in the closet. He later emerges to find the visitor gone and Dora dead. That’s the setup, but don’t expect a suspenseful narrative. For most of the novel Dora is alive, in flashbacks; we don’t learn until almost the end whether she died of natural causes. What’s front and center is the “sexual question,” by which Fioretos means the “obscure drives” that shape sexual identities. For Sascha the key moment came in a high-school art class, when Sascha was the model and his fellow students, prompted by their teacher, drew him as a woman. Dora’s past involved exhibitionism, sex with her brother, a teenage pregnancy and a baby given up for adoption. Their interests take them to the Foundation for Sexual Research, where they learn about the “grey sex” and the wondrous properties of semen and testicles. Periodically Fioretos returns to the investigation, while adding complications. Is some missing film the key to Dora’s death? Is Sascha’s best friend Anton, a porn filmmaker, playing a double game? What is the significance of the Brotherhood, a band of vigilantes? A final difficulty: Fioretos wrote his novel in his native Swedish. His own translation leads to some awkward locutions (e.g., “my heart inched up a few notches.”)
A dismal farrago that illuminates neither character nor sexuality. - Kirkus Reviews


Swedish author Fioretos’s first novel to be translated into English is an eerie, erotic tale set in 1928 Berlin about a part-time movie projectionist turned accused killer. Sascha Knisch’s humdrum life turns scandalous after Dora Wilms, the madam who indulges him in his peculiar sexual tastes, is found dead. Sascha becomes suspect number one, and to try to prove his innocence, he digs into Dora’s mysterious past, uncovering a psychosexual plot involving one of Dora’s former confidantes and the sinister Foundation for Sexual Research. But the more Sascha learns about the plot and Dora’s possible involvement, the less makes sense to Sascha. Simultaneously, Sascha reflects on what is obliquely referred to as the “sexual question” and tries to discover his “true self.” An odd supporting cast of characters—most notably “One-legged Else”—provide comic relief in this dense and atmospheric novel. It has all the markings of a cult favorite. - Publishers Weekly


Set in the oppressively hot summer of 1928 Berlin, this is a fascinating, though often obscure novel. The eponymous Sascha is an occasional cross-dresser with an intimate friendship with Dora, a similarly part-time prostitute. There are multiple time changes throughout the novel, but the essence of the story concerns the apparent murder of Dora by an unknown visitor, while Sascha is hiding in her closet in her flat (whilst also enjoying the proximity of her hanging clothes!) and the subsequent requirement for Sascha to exonerate himself from police suspicion and find out who did it. Unfortunately for the reader, however, Sascha is the archetypal unreliable narrator, and leads us down various blind alleys flinging in our direction a variety of red herrings along the way. The other major theme of the novel is a wide variety of (then) legally dubious theories of sexual-culture and research in decadent Weimar Germany, which emerges, according to Sascha, as the key to the mystery. The reader is shown sufficient glimpses of the emerging nationalist and intolerant right-wing movement in Berlin that was soon in the following decade to sweep off the streets those such as Sascha and others involved in what it considered as perverted and decidedly un-German activities.
Such is the overall fog of the plot that at the end the reader is not totally sure what happened and who was responsible, though the epilogue either solves the conundrum or just adds another possible interpretation. The story demands effort and certainly there is no clear conclusion, but I enjoyed the ride. - Doug Kemp  https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-truth-about-sascha-knisch/
‘This is the first novel in English by this rising international lit star, and what a smashing erotic thriller it turns out to be.’ — Diane Anderson-Minshall
 
‘Aris Fioretos has many similarites to Vladimir Nabokov, whose works he has translated into Swedish. Like Nabokov, Fioretos has a profound knowledge of English, which is not his first language. . . . His prose style, too, is playful, attentive and deft (at one stage, in classically Nabokovian style, a man is described and dismissed in four parenthetic words — “moist forehead, nervous hands”). But the similarities are not overbearing, and Fioretos has his own voice. Most impressively, he is able to make it seem that something macabre is happening just off-camera, something that is being deliberately withheld. As a result, the reader has to keep coming up with ideas about what the next twist or payload will be; few, however, will work out the denouement in advance. There is a conflict in this novel between the dramatic and the poetic. There is the classic, noir-ish murder story and the ensuing revelations that move the narrative along. But the dense, colourful writing insists that the eye stops to admire just as it wants to return to the action. The clash is a strength rather than a weakness, since it creates an energy of its own, as the reader tries to balance the need to rush on and the urge to slow down. By the end of this involved, at times wilfully oblique, novel, the truth about Sascha Knisch may remain uncertain, but the formidable qualities of his creator have been well established.’ — Simon Baker


‘A stylish, intelligent and eerily entertaining novel.’ — Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski
 
‘In a world dominated by extremes, Fioretos, a Swedish-born novelist living in Berlin, presents an honest and astonishing study of the marginalized and often stigmatized people who attempt to exist between the two, specifically, those who don’t fit neatly into traditional sexual roles. . . . This extraordinary novel is destined to be much discussed and is highly recommended for public and academic libraries.’ — K. H. Cumiskey




‘When Sascha Knisch finally totters from the closet on high heels, in his yellow blouse, brassiere stuffed with napkins, his hair braided and a red satin bow tied around his rampant . . . (well, use your imagination), there is a body on the bed, and his life — previously in perfect order — will never be the same again. There is much to marvel at in this often hilarious erotic thriller set in the hot summer of 1928 in Berlin. Aris Fioretos expertly explores the camp edge of Weimar Germany, a society pressing at social and sexual boundaries but also yearning for order and preparing itself, unconsciously perhaps, for authoritarianism.’ — Matthew Lewin 




Sascha’s sexual needs are quite prominent in this funny, unusual novel by a sublimely gifted all-rounder. Set in cabaret country, between the wars Berlin, it’s a whodunnit seething with enough deviancy to make you not care whodidit. The tale twists and turns like an orgy at a contortionists’ convention. It’s quite funny, too; clever without being smart-arse.’ — Sunday Sports
 

‘. . . It’s hard to imagine a sexy, sophisticated urban thriller . . . Yet Aris Fioretos, a Swedish diplomat based in Germany, manages exactly that in The Truth about Sascha Knisch. Any fan of Isherwood or Cabaret won’t find the ambience too remote: decadent Berlin in summer 1928, as our decent hero with a little quirk (he’s a cross-dresser) finds himself caught up in a murder plot that leads not only to the pioneer sexologists of Weimar but a macho cult with far more sinister connections. Fioretos (who translates his own work, with panache) seduces with a fiendish plot and a risqué wit. . . .’ — Boyd Tonkin



Aris Fioretos, Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
extract: http://arisfioretos.com/en/word-traces-readings-of-paul-celan/




The fact that Paul Celan's poems have already anticipated and explored the complicated relation between poetry and reading seems to have served Aris Fioretos as the selective criterion and raison d'être for the unique constellation of essays that Word Traces represents. What distinguishes this collection of articles on Celan from previous ones is their attention to Celan's insistence on the singularity of his texts. This means that the contributors are willing to (re-)trace the specific way in which Celan's texts raise the enigma of their (un)readability as it is inscribed in word-traces left in particular poems and across Celan's oeuvre.
Fioretos has divided the volume in five segments, each of which contains three essays that emphasize -- albeit differently -- the specific relations and constellations in which word-traces have been articulated by Celan. Although some might argue about the in- and exclusion of particular contributions, especially given that many essays have already appeared elsewhere (although not always in English translation), the segments and articles chosen by Fioretos address the most pertinent aspects of contemporary literary criticism and continental philosophy. Thus, the volume achieves a multiplicity of goals: it reads Celan in the light of contemporary criticism, casting a light from the former onto the latter; it (hopefully) introduces Celan to a larger, predominantly English-speaking world of contemporary critics; it demonstrates the political dimensions of poetic activity and critical reading; and it underscores the relevance of patient, attentive readings of seemingly hermetic texts for any specialist willing to probe the limits of his/her discipline, including those study programs (cultural, modern, German, comparative, etc.) that call themselves interdisciplinary.
Given Celan's poetic and political concentration on singularity, any reading that seeks to do justice to this concentration is bound to be(come) political. And any reading is bound to consider the possibility, if not necessity, that it will miss its mark, that it will miss the "masked difference of languages" (32) in Celan's poem as well as the "differential mark" (28) that constitutes the secret of Celan's poetry. This at least according to Jacques Derrida, whose "Shibboleth: For Paul Celan" has in more than one way been singled out by Fioretos: it is the sole entry for the first segment, which, like Word Traces itself, uses a quote or title from Celan as its title; it is unique in that it "first" raises the difficulty of reading Celan's poetic singularity; and it is unique because it unfolds this difficulty in reading the traces of the differential mark and its possible corruption in the "single" word and poem entitled Shibboleth:
Derrida's reading of Celan's poetry is exemplary not because it is authoritative, but because it allows itself to be exposed to the "cut," which, in turn, opens a space for the other readings to explore, among them Werner Hamacher's essay, "The Second of Inversion: Movements of a Figure Through Celan's Poetry."
Hamacher takes up Celan's and Derrida's concern for that same "cut of a nonsignifying difference," and explores it as the effect that the temporality and figurality of Celan's poetic language has upon its own readability. As his title demonstrates, Hamacher traces the cut to and in the rhetorical figure most likely to dissimulate it: the politico-philosophical figure of inversion, a figure that has dominated speculative dialectics as well as the tradition of a poetic conception of subjectivity. By tracing the movement of inversion in Celan's poetry, Hamacher is able to show how Celan gradually moves from a poetics of...  - Volker Kaiser  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236828539_Word_Traces_Readings_of_Paul_Celan_review




A professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden, Aris Fioretos was educated at Stockholm and Yale Universities. The recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships, most recently from the Swedish Academy and All Souls College, Oxford, he has published several novels and book-length essays in his native Sweden and has rendered the works of Paul Auster, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Vladimir Nabokov into Swedish. His latest, award-winning novel is entitled The Last Greek (2009). Fioretos is also the general editor of the first commented edition of the complete works of Nelly Sachs in German.

R. Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R's, Kaya Press, 1997.


Author R. Zamora Linmark discusses the book's impact, 20 years after it first came out.


Illuminated by pop fantasies, Donna Summer disco tracks, and teen passion, the fiercely earnest characters in Rolling the R’s come to life against a background of burning dreams and neglect in a small 1970s Hawaiian community. In this daring first novel, tour-de-force experiments in narrative structure, pidgin, and perspective roll every “are”, throwing new light on gay identity and the trauma of assimilation. Rolling the R’s goes beyond “coming of age” and “coming out” to address the realities of cultural confusion, prejudice, and spiraling levels of desire in humorous yet haunting portrayals that are, as Matthew Stadler writes, “stylish, shameless, and beautiful.”






“[A] style that combines the comic pitch of a drag queen with crazed, daredevil experimental techniques unseen since the ’60s heyday of Terry Southern and Hunter Thompson—all in a dense and startlingly beautiful pidgin dialect. Linmark nails the excitement and terror of being young with a rare and moving accuracy.”— Dennis Cooper


“Rolling the R’s is a downright funky, hothouse treat.”— Jessica Hagedorn


“Linmark has done more than simply use the argot of equatorial poverty as a sexy, colorful idiom. In its structure, tone, and depths, Rolling the R’s is true to the furious and witty rhythms of a vernacular culture of resistance.”— Village Voice Literary Supplement


“R. Zamora Linmark serves up an eccentric and enchanting blend of disco memories, Tiger Beat crushes, and pidgin English in Rolling the R’s.”— Out Magazine


“The most consistent intelligent wide-ranging committed press I know – Kaya is an example of how to turn ‘small’ books into literary arrows that shoot straight and true into the heart of our culture and (of course) ourselves.”— Junot Díaz




“Miles away from singular narrators, linear tales, and middle-class white characters, an ocean away from the Continental United States, Linmark’s text explodes the formal and thematic expectations of young adult literature, pushing the boundaries of the genre with a dizzying array of stylistic choices.”
— Roopika Risam






This is the second time I've read this book, and I've come out of it with significantly different conclusions. Last summer, I read it for a class and in our discussion many of my classmates talked about it as a sex-positive book -- one that not only portrays sex in a positive light, but specifically child sexuality. With that in mind, I was a bit surprised to find that while I had tended toward agreement with my classmates less than a year ago, upon revisiting the novel I realized I actually thought it was not something that could be considered "sex-positive." Yes, many of the characters have sexual encounters in the novel. Yes, most of those who do seem happy about it. But no, I don't think Linmark is asking his reader to be happy about it. Katherine Katrina-Trina Cruz, a fifth-grader like the rest of the main characters, has a boyfriend who's a high school senior (star of the football team, etc.) and who she has been sexually active with for a while now. But the last chapter, "F for Book Report," leaves the reader with a sad look at Trina's relationship. While she claims to be happy and says that she feels sorry for a character in the book she read who remains a virgin, Linmark's narration invites us to feel sad for Trina instead. Every time she praises her "babe" in this chapter, it's clear that she believes what she says, but that what she says is not the truth. For instance, she says that "Erwin not dicking around when he say he love me [...]. And he no like met get pregnant, too. So everytime we go all the way, he always bring his box of rubbers cuz he no like me get pregnant too young too soon. I love him so much" (148). While Trina seems to think that Erwin's words are sincere and his actions gallant, they hardly seem so to the reader. Her insistence that he's not "dicking around" when he claims to love her highlights its false ring. Also, the way she proudly explains that he uses condoms as a consideration for her falls short of making the reader sympathetic to Erwin. Instead, the reader is able to see what Trina is not: that Erwin is using her, that he doesn't love her, and that he most likely cares about whether or not she gets pregnant because of how that would affect him and his football playing (not because of how young she is). Similarly, Edgar is extremely proud about his sexuality, and flaunts it for all to see. This is definitely something I would see as a positive portrayal in this book -- homosexuality is not denigrated here, and in that sense I'd say you could argue the book is sex-positive...except that it's not sex positive. Sure, Edgar's having a sexual relationship with Mr. Campos, the school janitor, and he lets Vicente witness this relationship. However, it's a "secret." The only reason he lets Vicente watch is because he's made Vicente his special project: he recognizes some of Vicente's desires and thinks that he can help Vicente by forcing him to come out of the closet. But when Vicente reveals the secret of Edgar and Mr. Campos to the rest of their friends, Edgar denies it, saying "I would never give my youth up that fast. I not that stupid. 'Sides, he stay married already. Vicente just jealous cuz I can get what I want and he no can" (135). The fact that he denies it (and then gets angry enough to call Vicente a faggot) indicates that he isn't proud of his relationship with Mr. Campos. Instead, he tries to hide it by giving reasons that can be interpreted as the very reasons he's not willing to admit to the relationship: he's given up something he can't get back, it isn't a smart thing to do, the man is old enough to be his father, and he can't get what he really wants (Scott Baio, or a young and attractive lover). That Edgar, who is usually so flagrantly proud of his accomplishments (everything from the Christmas presents he gives to the music he records off the radio) is not proud of what he does with Mr. Campos in the janitor's closet after school, and the reader can't really feel happy for him even when he purports to be happy himself. I will say this, though: Linmark's novel may not ask us to be happy about the imbalanced relationships these kids are engaging in, but he does ask us to be happy about their sexuality itself. Edgar has found happiness in being who he is -- and doing so in the open, for all to see. Trina has also found happiness in her attractiveness, unlike her teacher (who is her foil in many ways). Orlando Domingo, the school's high achiever, finds happiness in dressing up like Farrah Fawcett (in "Kalihi in Farrah," 22-25). Each of these kids has a sexuality, and when they embrace it the results are viewed in a positive light. When others take advantage of that sexuality, the results are viewed in a negative light. The most explicit example of this is Vicente and his encounter with Roberto Freitas in "Mama's Boy" (138-139). Vicente, who hasn't yet come to terms with his sexuality, has a sexual encounter forced on him and his experience is wholly tragic. Early in the novel, the chapter "Rated-L" (16-19) makes a significant point about truth and lies that runs throughout the entire novel: when characters tell the truth and follow their hearts, they are rewarded with happiness; when characters lie and deny their hearts, they are punished with misery. - Anne Jansen http://magnificentdistraction.blogspot.hr/2010/02/rolling-rs-r-zamora-linmark.html


R. Zamora Linmark's lush, popular culture-drenched first novel, looks into the lives of some precocious Filipino fifth-graders in the Kalihi section of Honolulu. It's the '70s, and Katherine, Katrina-Trina Cruz, Edgar Ramirez, and Florante Sanchez form the triple FC's, the Farrah Fawcett Fan club. They role play Charlie's Angels, trade memorabilia, and write fan letters to ABC. They also write to Casey Kasem and Scott Baio and perform "Bee-Gees, Live in Kalihi." Edgar, who is vociferously out of the closet, and Florante, who is a poet, contend with the jocks, while Katrina battles a teacher whose husband is sleeping with her mother. Edgar has sex with the janitor. Just a bunch of regular kids.
Linmark is as disobedient as his characters. Rolling the R's doesn't have a conventional structure. Linmark won't cram experience into any familiar fictional box. The novel is made up of book reports, short first and third person narratives, teacher evaluations, letters, prayers, and poems. Some of the poems are written by Florante and some are unattributed. We aren't always sure who is speaking or whether it matters. The voice structure is fluid and continually surprising, making the novel that rare thing: an experimental page turner. Language is more central to Rolling the R's than any narrative action. Or language is the action. The kids in Kalihi speak Pidgin-English. They aren't supposed to. Mrs. Takemoto, their teacher, is continually trying to make them speak conventional English. But in Rolling the R's, gender non-conformity and linguistic rebellion are inextricable. These kids use language in their own way, and their transformations or mistranslations are revealing and poetic. Edgar Ramirez, asked by Mrs. Takemoto to use the word "maudlin" in a sentence, replies, "My maudlin career is taking off so fast if I don't try and control it I'm going to have a nervous breakdown." For "testimony," he writes, "My testimony is to someday windowshop at Alo Moana Center with his hand in mine." Like Edgar's, Linmark's voice remains sharp, funny and sad throughout this daring, desire-filled book.  - Robert Marshall  https://www.zingmagazine.com/zing6/reviews/rolling.html

R. Zamora Linmark, Leche, Coffee House Press, 2011.
After thirteen years of living in the U.S., Vince returns to his birthplace, the Philippines. As he ventures into the heat and chaos of the city, he encounters a motley cast of characters, including a renegade nun, a political film director, arrogant hustlers, and the country’s spotlight-driven First Daughter. Haunted by his childhood memories and a troubled family history, Vince unravels the turmoil, beauty, and despair of a life caught between a fractured past and a precarious future.
Witty and mesmerizing, this novel explores the complex colonial and cultural history of the Philippines and the paradoxes inherent in the search for both personal and national identities.
“As quirky and funny as its oddball characters, Linmark’s latest is a unique, colorful portrait of cross-cultural experience and a view into the complexities of modern-day Philippines through the prism of an ex-pat’s self-discovery and quasi-homecoming.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Linmark delivers a harrowing tale of love, family, and cultural bewilderment, a sardonically funny and vibrant novel about one man’s journey to his past. . . . Linmark’s novel reads like a bittersweet love letter to a vast and perplexing nation. This is a story of heritage, sexuality, and self-discovery that is as riveting as its locale is complex.”—Booklist

“Linmark offers both a meditation on what it means to be Filipino and an exuberant, affectionate, irreverent love letter to the city of Manila from one of its own. . . . Linmark, who like Vince has lived in both Manila and Hawaii, develops a lively and engaging narrative voice as he skillfully juxtaposes these two very different cultures. . . . This is a jaunty, kaleidoscopic novel that amusingly chronicles the many challenges Vince faces moving between cultures. Recommended for readers of lighthearted literary fiction.”—Library Journal

“At times uproariously funny, . . . Linmark weaves cultural and historical research into his story and employs a nonlinear structure to the narrative, including jumps in time, lists of Philippines “travel tips,” and postcards to and from Hawaii. . . . Above all, Linmark’s writing is literary: heightened, emotional and beautifully crafted. Linmark began as a poet, and pays close attention to rhythm, economy and word choice, even in such a rollicking, gutsy story. It is a story that many people can relate to, but one that can only be told by a writer of his caliber.”—Honolulu Star Advertiser

“The story examines culture-shock, modern-day gay life and the way things were in the early ’90s, all with Linmark’s sense of funny. Only this time, the narrative is in third person. Embedded within the book is a certain playfulness. Interspersed are “Tourist Tips” for Manila, as well as postcards with photos that Vince writes to his friends back home. In short, Leche is all we’ve anticipated from Linmark.”—Honolulu Weekly

“A whirlwind, whistle stop tour of Manila’s high society, celebrity pop culture and seedy underbelly. . .”—Bookmunch

“This time around, Linmark uses his trademark po-mo fragmentation for surface texture; it compromises the novel's picaresque forward motion not a whit. This is a language—and a Manila —that should be familiar to readers of the Asian American canon, and Leche feels like the long-awaited completion of something we didn't know was incomplete.”—Hyphen

"R. Zamora Linmark writes with the incandescent irreverence of a papal heretic, with the poetic and chaotic sense that only the Philippines can bestow, with the language of a sainted seer all held together with an elegant craft and a graceful style. Leche is a beautiful book."—Chris Abani

"Leche is a combustible comedy, a nightmare, a fever dream that with humor and horror somehow captures the fractured Philippine identity. Eye opening, hilarious, and relentlessly seductive, Zamora Linmark holds the reader until the very last page."—Sabina Murray,


Linmark (Rolling the R's) cunningly follows Philippines-born Vince De Los Reyes through the trials and surprises awaiting him upon his return to his home country after spending 13 years in Hawaii. Filipino émigrés are often known as "balikbayans"—a distinction, Vince finds as soon as he reaches Philippines customs, that is fraught with political and cultural implications. Having won a contest, Vince has returned to free accommodations and fanfare, but he's not prepared for the heat, politics, and eccentric characters that accompany life in Manila. He immediately falls for a cab driver and, at a celebrity-studded party, befriends a famous activist nun, an acclaimed director, and the actress daughter of the country's president. Within the narrative of Vince's Manila sojourn and the teasing out of his dark past, Linmark intersperses tongue-in-cheek tourist tips ("staring is a favorite Filipino pastime") and revealing postcards Vince writes to friends back in Hawaii. As quirky and funny as its oddball characters, Linmark's latest is a unique, colorful portrait of cross-cultural experience and a view into the complexities of modern-day Philippines through the prism of an ex-pat's self-discovery and quasi-homecoming. - Publishers Weekly


It's 1991. A gay Filipino American returns from his home in Hawaii to his native Manila, where he is jousted by absurd encounters, thwarted desires, cultural and political upheavals and painful memories.
Vince, introduced in Linmark's Rolling the R's (1997), hasn't been in the Philippines since 1978, when he and his siblings left for Honolulu—six years after their parents flew off to escape the Marcos regime. Sensory overload greets him. The heat is stifling, he's accosted by strangers attractive and not, a mysterious sleeping sickness is claiming men and a volcano is about to erupt. Having arrived with members of the Filipino balikbayan culture, who cart unwieldy boxes stuffed with food cans, shampoo bottles and designer jeans, he acclimates to a different social setting when his good looks draw the attention of showbiz types. A film and pop-culture obsessive, he becomes part of a world including President Corazon Aquino's movie-star daughter, known as the "Massacre Queen of Philippine Cinema." The title of the book, which translates not as milk, as in Spanish, but as a four-letter word, is as cheeky a novel as you'll encounter. Broken up by postcard correspondence, dream sequences, glossary entries and "Tourist Tips" ("Staring is a favorite Filipino pastime. Don't take it personally"), it's nothing if not breezy. Linmark isn't funny or cutting enough as a prose stylist, though, or innovative enough as a postmodernist to achieve the tour de force he's after. As lacerating as he tries to be, his satire is rarely more than mild, and his attempts at magic realism fall short. But the book's nonstop energy and nonstop attitude are addictive. And in Vince you won't find a less predictable tour guide.
A lively satiric return to early '90s Manila, seen from both sides of the Filipino American divide. - Kirkus Reviews


In the opening pages of R. Zamora Linmark’s sprawling new novel, Leche (Coffee House Press), a young gay Filipino-born American, Vince de Los Reyes, returns to the Philippines only to be told at Immigration that now that he owns a U.S. passport he is no longer truly Filipino. Thus, he must stand in the long line with all the other “balikbayans,” those émigrés who arrive at the airport on return visits from the States lugging rope-tied boxes stuffed with perfume samples, hand-me-down designer jeans, and appliances marked with first-world labels. The novel’s stakes are immediately apparent—Vince’s ambivalent and fractured sense of identity, the madness and the melancholy of trying to return “home.” What follows is a riotous ride through modern day Manila featuring encounters with a larger-than-life cast of characters including a (perhaps) bisexual cabbie, an activist nun, an acclaimed movie director, and President Corazon Aquino’s actress daughter, also known as the “Massacre Queen of the Philippine Cinema.”
Much like Linmark’s delightful debut novel, Rolling the R’s, which was set in Honolulu and told the story of a set of precocious fifth-graders obsessed with popular culture as a way of surviving their dispossession from the world around them, Leche manages to be at once formally inventive and compulsively readable.  With its non-stop action and experimental structure—interspersing postcard correspondence, dream sequences, and, best of all, tongue-in-cheek “Tourist Tips” and entries from “Decolonization for Beginners” that cannily anticipate the book’s own potential misreading as little more than an opportunity for some cross-cultural eavesdropping—Leche educates and entertains in equal measure. This helps make it a great candidate for a summer read at the beach, on the airplane, or in the relative calm and comfort of an air-conditioned subway car (the novel does an excellent job of evoking Manila’s extreme heat and frenetic congestion).
Some readers may find the interior landscape of the central character somewhat underdeveloped by comparison, overwhelmed as he is not just by his environment but also by the vibrant minor characters he meets as well. And the depth of Vince’s consciousness does feel somewhat compromised by the combination of the novel’s unconventional structure and the fact that it is written mostly in the third person. Still, much like Ellison’s Invisible Man or even Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, Vince’s principle role is that of a witness to the messiness of what it means to be American; or more precisely, in his particular case, what it means to be American, postcolonial, and queer in the early 90’s, a time when the Philippines was a hotbed of political, cultural, and environmental turmoil. Much as it still is today. - Nicholas Boggs   https://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/07/04/leche-by-r-zamora-linmark/


Going to Manila always involves taking in its relentless chaos and contradictions. We all know, or have heard, of its epic traffic jams, mind-boggling socioeconomic disparities, and over-the-top pop culture. In such a baffling urban landscape, how does one’s idea of a Pilipino identity figure?
For Vince, the twenty-something Pilipino-American balikbayan in R. Zamora Linmark’s new novelLeche, trying to negotiate his “Pilipino-ness” in post-Marcos Manila proves to be a wild adventure. It is 1991 – First Daughter Kris Aquino is the current queen of Philippine media, Imelda Marcos is trying to bring her deceased husband’s body back for a Philippine burial, Mount Pinatubo is just about ready to erupt, and U.S. military personnel are beginning to evacuate Clark Air Base. Vince, having recently won first runner-up in a Mr. Pogi contest in Hawaii, is offered a trip to Manila in his honor. It is his first time back to his native country in 13 years, but it does not feel like a return home at all. The experience amounts to nothing less than culture shock. Vince cannot quite comprehend the weird metropolitan behemoth called Metro Manila, much less its strange inhabitants and their view of the world. But as he connects with the people of the city he begins to discover truths about his past and his own identity.
Linmark’s descriptions of Metro Manila (or “Metro Malignant,” as one character describes it) from the point of view of a bewildered Pil-Am are absolutely spot-on. Appropriately, he injects much humor into Vince’s incredulous observations of a world of crushing poverty, toxic pollution, irrational driving, language confusion, tragic history, and cultural mix-ups. It is an onslaught of meanings and behaviors that Vince struggles to understand. One of my favorite moments is his amused double-take at the collection of amazing signs he has seen in the city (e.g. “slow men at work” and “look up for falling debris”). Another is when Vince rides a jeepney and watches in astonishment as the driver performs a miraculous feat of multitasking like a three-eyed, eight-handed Hindu god.
Beyond the story of balikbayan boxes and trips to mega-malls, Leche is really about Vince’s journey to find what it means to be a Pilipino. In addition to Vince’s narrative, Linmark adds postcard messages, handy lists of “Tourist Tips,” and even academic readings.  It is a clever multi-layered approach that paints a broad, textured swath of a culture and people who (like Vince) are essentially still trying to figure themselves out. Vince’s contemplation on identity reaches a climax during a TV talk show hosted by Kris Aquino on which he is a guest. He and Kris get into a comical debate over the reasons Vince is not a genuine Pilipino. For Vince, Pilipino identity persists across borders no matter what (“don’t [our] a**holes remain Filipino? Once a Filipino a**hole, always a Filipino a**hole, right?”). Kris and company insist he is no longer Pilipino, for reasons ranging from the technical (if you are a U.S. citizen, you are not) to the cultural (if you don’t speak Tagalog, you are not). If you have ever been in such a conversation, you will be familiar with the kind of hair-tearing frustration Vince naturally feels and the lingering hurt that comes when even those in the Philippines cast Pil-Ams like himself as “them.”
Leche is a funny and poignant look at the Philippines through the eyes of a young Pil-Am. You, like Vince, will come to realize that, despite all the crazy trappings, there is something special about being Pilipino. And like Vince you can learn to embrace all of the wonder, complexity, humor, and heartbreak that come with it. Read it for the Tourist Tips alone: "Manila is very rich in air pollution.""Filipinos are OCDs (Obsessive-Compulsive Decorators), constantly decorating everything from altars to jeepneys to rearview mirrors to the English language.""Remember: in Manila contradictions are always welcome, including—and especially – yours." - http://bakitwhy.com/articles/book-review-r-zamora-linmarks-leche


A novel of place and character, R. Zamora Linmark‘s Leche focuses on six days in the life of Vicente “Vince” de Los Reyes, as he returns to his birthplace, the Philippines, after thirteen years of living in Hawaii. As he travels to Manila for the first time since he was nine years old, his story takes a nonlinear approach to a homecoming tale.
How does one classify this type of storytelling? Leche is bursting with local flavor, from Vince’s long lost relatives to the local celebrities that seem to pop up out of nowhere wherever he goes. Life in Manila in 1991 is vibrant and changing every minute, and Linmark captures the texture and gradations of this time and place. Vince finds brief infamy as a guest on a live talk show hosted by the daughter of the President. He also meets the stars of his, and his family’s, favorite movie from before they left for the United States. He wanders the streets and visits relatives that he hasn’t seen in some time, has a brief affair with his driver, and meets an attractive tourist who may know more about Manila than he does. At times, the energy of the book is frenetic, as Linmark weaves stories within stories, attempting something akin to what Fellini did in films like La Dolce Vita and Amarcord--drawing together every character and influence inside Vince’s story, creating a frenzied verisimilitude in an effort to capture the whole chaotic sum of their lives.
At times, however, the chirping, swooping style can make the narrative feel overly scattered. Linmark uses poetry, prose, charts, lists, and his playwright’s ear for dialogue to vary and enrich the texture of Leche, but this can also distract from the story at hand. The novel is, ostensibly, about Vince, but often his role in the narrative is surrendered to playing witness. The passages where we see the most of him are when he muses on past experiences and loves, nervous about the fact that, at twenty-three years old, his busybody family doesn’t understand why he hasn’t found “the one” yet. We see him falling in love with his best friend in high school, then for cad after cad in Honolulu, a gay community so small “it can be measured in inches.”
Linmark makes some excellent points about identity. Vince struggles with a dilemma familiar to many first- and second-generation immigrants: where do I fit in? In Hawaii, he feels Filipino, but in the Philippines he is deemed too American. His exploration of his heritage, in turn, brings even more complications to the matter. It is a culture that has been so deeply affected by colonization and political upheaval that it is difficult to define where, exactly, it fits in to the wider world. Most everyone in Manila uses Spanish words, but their meanings have mutated with time. The “leche” of the title means “milk” to most Spanish speakers, but to Filipinos it means “shit.” It is also the name of a gay club Vince finds in an old church--run by a drag queen, and apparently was the setting for one of Vince’s favorite childhood movies. Vince is a hybrid in a culture that has already been hybridized. Doesn’t that mean he should fit in?
In its mission to capture the entire story, Leche is sometimes successful, though other times the reader might feel like they would be fine with half. Vince’s struggles are relatable to anyone who has come of age trying to reconcile their identity with their desire to identify. - Frederica Bepler  http://kgbbar.com/lit/journal/leche_by_r_zamora_linmark/


‘Leche’ author Linmark lives his own ‘Manila Noir’ days



R. Zamora Linmark, Prime Time Apparitions, Hanging Loose Press, 2005.


"Headlong, harrowing, holy and at times even hilarious, Zack Linmark's poems give us the vibrant technicolor life of crossed time zones and shocked cultures. Manila meets Michael Jackson here: be prepared for a thriller unlike any you've seen before! From this fine poet's tender heart, experience the spectacle of the humane"-Rafael Campo. Born in the Philippines and raised in Hawaii, R. Zamora Linmark is the author of long-time SPD bestseller ROLLING THE R'S, which he has also adapted for the stage.


"Manila meets Michael Jackson here: be prepared for a thriller unlike any you've seen before." -- Rafael Campo

..." witty and disenchanted, sexy and tough, jangled with longing and the crazed changes the wild new world works." -- Mark Doty

R. Zamora Linmark, The Evolution of a Sigh, Hanging Loose Press, 2008.


“Linmark’s new collection of poetry is a celebration of what can be done to and with the English language in the service of tumult, teasing, post-Postmodern Filipino showmanship, Shinjuku shenanigans, trans-Pacific pyrotechnics, turning-Japanese (and you know what I’m talking about—), and, yes, Beauty. Especially Beauty.”—Kimiko Hahn

"Thse poems made me laugh, made me envious and repeatedly (since Linmark works without a safety net) took away my breath." -- David Trinidad

Max Yeh, Stolen Oranges: Letters Between Cervantes and the Emperor of China, a Pseudo-Fiction, Kaya Press, 2017.




A Chinese American historian discovers six anonymous documents in Spanish and Chinese in places ranging from the archives of Imperial China to a rare book shop in Mexico City and constructs a hitherto unknown correspondence between the Chinese Ming Emperor Wanli and Miguel Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. Difficulties in translation and the years-long, perilous voyages undertaken by conscripted letter couriers highlight the intensive labor and sheer serendipitous luck required to make this seemingly impossible 17th-century exchange possible. This reimagined history brings together the disparate histories of the Emperor, Cervantes, and the historian, united through time by their deep interest in literature, philosophy, politics, and the burden of demented mothers. As he did in his acclaimed previous novel, The Beginning of the East, Yeh continues to remap literary conventions. Layering documentary evidence, conflicting translations, and cultural contexts, Yeh sends ripples through the idea of historical fiction in the vein of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Described as “a writer on a rampage, with an appetite for history,” by E.L. Doctorow, Yeh’s Stolen Oranges reimagines the relationships of the past and the present.


Stolen Oranges, a new novel by Max Yeh, is a whirlwind of a historical tale, recounting a series of letters written between Miguel Cervantes (of Don Quixote fame) and a Ming emperor as told by their discoverer–a Chinese American historian. I was first drawn to this novel by the back cover description: “this dazzling meditation on the intricacies of memory, language, and time.” And when it showed up at my doorstep, by the small size of the book itself, about the size of my hand.
I hadn’t even opened the book yet. Yeh’s story begins with the Chinese American historian, who is writing a historical book (which is to say that it reads like non-fiction, though it is fiction), introducing the circumstances that led him to discover and then translate a series of letters between Cervantes and Emperor Wanli. It is, in a particular style of history writing, a bit dense at times, but worth meandering through even if one, such as I, lack understanding of nearly all references to Don Quixote. But I found the gems to be in these letters that go back and forth. Both the Emperor and Cervantes’ letters offer ruminations on the promised topics of memory, language, and time in manner that is deeply philosophical, somewhat long-winded, yet mostly accessible.
Take this passage on words and language as an example:
Words are an empty palace we are born into, the hills and corridors to which, nooks and crannies, windows and doorways, were long ago constructed by innumerable and unknown builders and planners and workmen whose unknown and unknowable intentions and meanings are set in stone and wood and whose spaces form our whole lives, while we live so conformed under the illusion that we are ever building the palace the way we want it.
Perhaps out of context it is slightly less legible, but peppered throughout these fictional letters are intriguing nuggets about humanity. Though technically a novel, it is much more akin to a philosophy book, even more so than a history book. This is not what I would call an easy or fast read, but Stolen Oranges is rewarding for those interested in a well-executed deep dive into ideas and theories about language and being. - Lily http://www.8asians.com/2017/11/21/8books-review-stolen-oranges-by-max-yeh/



Max Yeh, The Beginning of the East, FC2, 1995.










Max Yeh, described as “a writer on the rampage” by E.L. Doctorow, is the author of The Beginning of the East (FC2, 1992). He was born in China, educated in the United States and has lived in Europe and Mexico. He has taught at the University of California, Irvine, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and New Mexico State University. He lives in the New Mexico mountains with his wife and daughter, where he works on a wide range of subjects including literary theory, linguistics, art history and science.

Johannes Urzidil, The Last Bell,Trans. by David Burnett,Pushkin Press, 2017.


A maid who is unexpectedly left her wealthy employers' worldly possessions, when they flee the country after the Nazi occupation; a loyal bank clerk, who steals a Renaissance portrait of a Spanish noblewoman, and falls into troublesome love with her; a middle-aged travel agent, who is perhaps the least well-travelled man in the city and advises his clients from what he has read in books, anxiously awaits his looming honeymoon; a widowed villager, whose 'magnetic' (or perhaps 'crazy') twelve-year-old daughter witnesses a disturbing event; and a tiny village thrown into civil war by the disappearance of a freshly baked cheesecake - these stories about the tremendous upheaval which results when the ordinary encounters the unexpected are vividly told, with both humour and humanity. This is the first ever English publication of these both literally and metaphorically enchanting Bohemian tales, by one of the great overlooked writers of the twentieth century.


This is the long-overdue English-language debut by a contemporary of Kafka’s—though it might make more sense to consider Urzidil a counterpoint to his fellow Bohemian, for his stories confront the Jewish-Czech identity that Kafka was content to dissolve in allegory. Kafka’s first book was one of the few items in Urzidil’s suitcase when he fled Nazi-occupied Europe for New York, and there’s an echo of Urzidil’s flight in the title story, in which a servant inherits her masters’ fortune after they are forced to flee the Germans, only to learn that wealth amounts to little in a city of fear. “The Duchess of Albanera” concerns a pompous bank clerk turned thief who hides a stolen Bronzino portrait in his apartment, where it speaks to him of the difference between an image and its likeness. In “Siegelmann’s Journeys,” this collection’s clear masterpiece, a lonely travel agent who’s never left home fabricates his adventures abroad to impress an equally lonely spinster; he realizes only after they are married that a honeymoon is out of the question, as “the Venice of his dreams and its fantastic topographies would be overpowered and annihilated by reality.” Generally, the more allegorical stories are the weaker ones: “Borderland” succeeds as tragic tale of a touched and unusual child who defies the adult world at all costs, but “Where the Valley Ends,” about two villages split by a valley and the “idiotic son” who roams between them, reveals the shortcomings of this otherwise ingenious writer. - Publishers Weekly


IN “Siegelman’s Journeys,” one of five short stories by the Czech-German author Johannes Urzidil (1896–1970) collected in The Last Bell, the eponymous protagonist is a travel writer who has never left his nondescript provincial hometown. He woos a lover by impressing her with fictitious anecdotes about his wanderings, embellished with details gleaned from various travel books. When he finally admits to having made it all up, she leaves him. The story’s setting effects a peculiar cognitive dissonance: the nondescript provincial hometown in question is none other than Birkenau — a name synonymous with infamy but deployed in his story, set prior to World War II, as a byword for obscurity. “Siegelman’s Journeys” is also noteworthy for its inversion of the author’s own circumstances: Urzidil, who migrated to the United States in 1941 in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, wrote these stories in New York but set them in early-to-mid-20th-century Bohemia. His life was defined by itinerancy, yet he preferred to write about the world he left behind.
“The Duchess of Albanera” tells of a bank clerk named Wenzel Schaschek who swipes a famous portrait from a museum in a moment of kleptomaniac opportunism (“The sudden impulse acting in harmony with nature…”). He takes it home and talks to it, and gets spooked when it starts talking back. The Duchess goads him about the pointlessness of the crime he has committed, and his naïveté in thinking of her as an “incomparable pinnacle of radiant womanhood”: “Do you really think I’m sweet, innocent and devoted? Hardly. I’m selfish and depraved.” Duly unnerved, he returns the painting to its rightful place, but it’s too late: the theft had set off a chain of events culminating in the deaths of two people. The security guard responsible for the painting has lost his job and suffered a breakdown, as a result of which he stopped visiting his mentally ill daughter, who then committed suicide; her mother, in turn, has died from grief. This plunges Wenzel into a Dostoyevskian meditation on contingency: “there was no one he could talk to about the outlandishness, the insolvability and unbearableness of his fate.” As with the hapless Siegelman, we witness a man of modest status trying to transcend his circumstances through the power of his fantasies, and coming unstuck.
Probably the strangest story in this volume is “Borderland,” which concerns a precocious orphan girl whose powers of clairvoyance and weird harmony with nature — she tames wild birds, fishes, and hares — are connected in some obscure way to the premature death of her mother. One day, she sees a young couple embracing in a field and begins to sob uncontrollably; from then on her powers begin to wane. The story ends on an unhappy note as her father compels her, against her wishes, to join a convent. The rustic setting is reprised in “Where the Valley Ends,” which is about a feud between communities on either side of a rural river. On one level it’s a farce — the initial quarrel starts with the theft of some cheese and culminates in the death of a cow — but its allegorical connotations are hard to ignore: “Where the Valley Ends,” like “Borderland,” was originally published in 1956, a mere decade or so after the end of World War II. “[T]he mightiest life force,” remarks Urzidil’s narrator in passing, “is always rapid forgetfulness, that most assiduous reviver of error and evil.”
Urzidil gently lampoons the blockheaded stubbornness of the warring peasants, but the conclusion of the story reveals his sympathy toward their erstwhile way of life. The land on which they had depended turns into a barren wasteland when the soil, as if in revolt against their shenanigans, becomes overrun with poisonous weeds. We are given to understand that the natural order of things has been unsettled by the irruption into their halcyon world of capital-p politics. A forester reports to the narrator that “[t]he people are obsessed with politics now. It was never like that before. Are you for it or against it? That’s all you ever hear now.” There are echoes in this tale of Flaubert’s customary denunciations, a century earlier, of what he liked to call the “stupidity” that proliferates when faddish political zeal overrides intelligent cooperation. Given Urzidil’s postwar vantage point, the story reads like an indictment of the toxicity of humanity in the 20th century.
Though raised as a Catholic, Urzidil was ousted from his job at the German Embassy in Prague by the Nazis for being a “half-Jew” (halbjude). He fled Czechoslovakia in 1939, going first to Britain and then to the United States. Of the five stories in this collection, only the title story deals directly with Nazi rule. Set in occupied Czechoslovakia, “The Last Bell” tells of a maid whose Jewish employers have been deported. She helps herself to their apartment and money with cheerful nonchalance: “Nobody’s a saint,” she declares, “and what fun is anything without a little swindle.” Eager to convince in her new guise as a wealthy woman, she lectures her sister on the importance of airs and graces, encouraging her to haughtily dismiss any food that is placed before her as “nothing special”: “If you can’t get into the habit of that, you’ll never amount to much in this world.” Her complacency is punished as her sister, who is sleeping with German soldiers, fleeces her in turn. It’s an oddly slapstick treatment as Holocaust fictions go — there is even a barroom punch-up at one point — and yet, in its own way, it accesses a kernel of truth: the base, thieving impulse that turned so many normal people into willing accomplices in mass murder.
“The Last Bell” lacks the throwback charm of the other four stories, but shares their blend of wisdom and sharp sardonicism. For all their sagaciousness, though, it is in the moments of fleeting whimsy that these tales come to life. “Siegelman’s Journeys” includes an amusing description of an über-officious legal clerk (“Tiny paragraphs pulsed in his veins instead of blood corpuscles”), while “Where the Valley Ends” features a memorable character called Alois, a village idiot who laughs uproariously when he is sad. At one point in “The Duchess of Albanera,” Wenzel finds himself talking to food: “[he] freed the […] sour pickle from its soggy wrapper, laid it on a plate and told it to wait.” (That story is inexplicably prefaced by a list of its characters such as might appear in a play.)
Urzidil published only one novel in his lifetime, 1959’s The Great Hallelujah; his better-known works include the short story collection Prague Triptych (1960) and several nonfiction books on cultural history. We have Pushkin Press to thank for bringing these previously untranslated stories to an Anglophone readership. The text comes with an introduction by its translator, David Burnett, which helpfully situates the stories in their historical context. Burnett observes that Urzidil stubbornly resists classification: “was he a Jewish writer or a German one, an Austrian or an American? Or simply a ‘writer in exile,’ a representative of the vast Exilliteratur that resulted from the tragedy of twentieth-century European history?” His literary style is similarly difficult to pin down — these fictions are flickeringly redolent of Gogol, and also contain elements of magic realism and modernism. This intriguing heterogeneity, arising out of the author’s position at the intersection of disparate demographic and literary traditions, makes The Last Bell not only a compelling read but also a valuable literary artifact. - Houman Barekat  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/tiny-paragraphs-pulsed-in-his-veins-on-johannes-urzidils-the-last-bell#!


The narrator of “Where the Valley Ends,” one of the five stories in The Last Bell (Pushkin Press) the first book of Johannes Urzidil’s fiction to appear in English, says he was once advised to “read the poet in his land.” This, he continues, is “a correct though not always practical piece of advice, if you don’t want to limit yourself to writers from those few countries you happen to have access to in the course of a relatively brief life.” Consciously reversing the idea that foreign writers are “rescued” when translated into English, Urzidil’s translator David Burnett writes in his introduction that it is “the English-speaking world,” lacking Urzidil until now, that has been “sadly overlooked.” But how should we read a writer whose land is no longer on the map?
Johannes Urzidil was born in 1896 in Prague, then the second-largest city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and before that capital of the historical region of Bohemia. He wrote in German, and was fluent in Czech; he knew and admired Kafka; for fifteen years, he worked for the German Embassy in Prague, by then the capital of Czechoslovakia. In 1939 the Nazis invaded, and the half-Jewish Urzidil and his wife, the poet Gertrude Thieberger, escaped Prague and wound up in New York. Over thirty years in the United States, Urzidil turned to writing stories set in a Bohemia of his invention: a realm of anecdote and “Arcadian valleys.” America, in these stories, is a myth—and the war is always coming.
After the 1940s, Urzidil’s original audience (German-speaking, Czech-residing, often Jewish) no longer existed. It had fled, been killed, or—in the case of ethnic Germans—been stripped of Czechoslovakian citizenship. It’s significant, then, that writing from Queens for publishers in Zurich and Munich, Urzidil populated his stories with characters who remain in place. In “The Last Bell,” housemaid Marška belongs to a broad caricature of provincialism: she is what happens when the bourgeoisie abandons Prague to the servants and the occupying army. Marška sends back a haut goût dish because “it stinks, don’t lecture me about hoe goo,” while her fellow maid Ella refuses to accompany a departing fiancé: “To America? Me? You want me to live with savages?”
The story’s folksy humor, however, is offset by a grim realism. Ella requires the services of a retired abortionist, and Marška’s attempt to warn her landlord about his impending arrest, which she has inadvertently brought about, is a failure. “That’s very kind of you,” the man tells her, “but I really don’t need anyone’s help.” Writing from the safety of 1968, Urzidil knows this to be untrue. But the easy pathos shades into Urzidil’s main, more complex theme of collective responsibility. Neither staying in place nor leaving seems to guarantee salvation of body or soul.
The literary critic Pascale Casanova, mapping national literatures within international networks in The World Republic of Letters, proposes that folktales comprise “the first quantifiable resource of a nascent literature.” Urzidil, like Kafka, began writing in the minority language of a nascent nation-state. But the stories of The Last Bell, all written after the war, belong to a literature that is posthumous rather than nascent. Instead of fairy-tale plots, Urzidil’s narration incorporates the shortest forms of folklore—the anecdote and the adage. It’s also informed by the European literary tradition: Urzidil as a man of letters is resolutely cosmopolitan.
In the 1966 story “The Duchess of Albanera,” a Renaissance portrait has the magical ability to speak, and discourses on the varieties of love. Unlike Nabokov’s 1924 story “La Veneziana,” in which a painting’s magic depends on the talent of the forger—the artist, the writer, the enchanter—for Urzidil, it remains a passive property of the art object itself. This device allows Urzidil to work in Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and the Borgias, but ultimately the Duchess becomes a source of commonsensical advice for a commitment-averse bank clerk, who nabs her from the city museum: “Some fool stole the Duchess of Albanera because he didn’t have the guts to approach the baker’s daughter around the corner. Now he thinks he’s got something. But all he’s got is his own foolishness…” The theft has catastrophic consequences for a bystander, and thus the action of the plot becomes another pretext for Urzidil’s continued musings on responsibility and guilt.
Urzidil’s adagios exist alongside inventories of Bohemian nature and culture that were lost in the war. These are recitations from memory, and in memoriam: lists of the stocked delicatessens, the beers, the clubs, and the birds of Bohemia; descriptions of its valleys and forests, full of “berries, mushrooms, fallen wood, grass”; and of wandering narrators who often reference the 19th-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter. In “Borderland,” a young girl who may be Stifter’s distant descendant maintains a mystical connection with the woods, while a neighbor who spent his working life in America becomes a mirror image of the writer in exile: “He didn’t have a proper profession. He lived on his savings, and his main occupation was doling out advice: ‘In America we turn the keys in our doors to the right and not to the left.’” The story “Siegelmann’s Journeys,” also about the dangers of self-seclusion, features a travel agent who never travels, but woos his fiancé with fabulous stories of fabricated trips. For their honeymoon, he takes her to a small nearby town, where his father was born. The town is called Birkenau.
In the Pushkin Press catalog, Urzidil keeps company with Bruno Schulz, Stefan Zweig, Isaac Babel, and Teffi—writers who wrote in Polish, German, and Russian, and have in common their great displacements in the wars and revolutions of the 20th century. For a writer fortunate enough to make it to Queens, the displacement is no less dire. Where are his readers? Whom should he address? The Bohemia he imagines comes to us not as an atlas but a small, charming, and private album. Burnett writes that Urzidil, trying to make a living in America, took up leatherworking. He bound a friend’s volumes of Rabelais so thoroughly that the books could not be opened again. - Elina Alter
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/the-queens-bohemian-johannes-urzidils-the-last-bell/


Sebastopol Sketches, a collection of short fiction about people and place – or, more specifically, region and residents. Containing five finely crafted stories set in Prague, the countryside and little towns where time stands still, Urzidil presents Bohemian realms fraught with chaos and foreboding, and striking, tragicomic characters.
In the Anglophone world, Urzidil (1896-1970) remains an unknown quantity. Born in Prague to a German father and a Jewish mother, he mixed with members of the “Prager Kreis” (Prague Circle) including Franz Kafka, Franz Werfel and Max Brod, worked at the German embassy, and produced poetry, fiction and essays. When Hitler invaded and the Gestapo closed in he fled his homeland. While in exile in America he produced some of his most successful work, much of it with a Bohemian backdrop.
The stories in The Last Bell– published for the first time in English and neatly translated by David Burnett – provide a taste of Urzidil’s talents. The strangest, slipperiest story, The Duchess of Albanera, is dedicated to Brod, and feels like an attempt to walk in Kafka’s shoes. Wenzel Schaschek, a Prague bank clerk, committed bachelor and creature of habit, takes a break from talking to the usual inanimate objects that fill his regimented days and humdrum existence – furniture, flowers, food – and enters into an intense two-way conversation about women, beauty and murder with the love of his life – a painting he stole from the State Gallery three days previously.
Less far out yet further afield, Siegelmann’s Journeys takes us away from the city and into a rural town, where a travel agent who has never travelled attempts to woo a fellow lonely soul by rehashing and reliving his customers’ exotic adventures and experiences. “I don’t lie,” he assures himself, prior to wrecking his relationship. “I merely choose a convincing form for reality and truth.”
Siegelmann’s storytelling consists of tempering “the fantastic with the ordinary”. His creator employs a similar technique in Borderland, a sombrely beautiful tale about a special, “magnetic” 12-year-old girl. The story deftly explores two meeting points – the juncture between the everyday and the outlandish and the forested frontier dividing Bohemia and Austria.
Urzidil bows out with Where the Valley Ends, another woodland story, and another that revolves around the consequences of a theft – on this occasion not a painting but a cheesecake.
But it is the titular tale that starts the proceedings that steals the show. The Last Bell has a captivating protagonist in feisty, unflappable maidservant Marška. When her employers (“the Mister” and his Jewish “Missus”) are forced to up and leave with only two small suitcases, she is left with their Prague apartment, their money and belongings. She invites her younger sister to stay, ignores all the clocks (“We don’t need hours or time”) and settles into her new role as “woman of private means”.
When the girls attract the attention of two Nazi officers, their lives sharply change. Despite their admirers’ flattery, Marška remains sceptical: “Maybe they haven’t murdered anyone yet, but it’s better to call them murderers right from the start so you don’t have to correct yourself later.” And indeed she doesn’t. Urzidil modulates his tone and sublimates his heroine’s antics as he leads to a denouement in which Marška witnesses the full might and cruelty of the city’s “uniformed invaders”. Unlike Schaschek – who after stealing his painting unwittingly unleashes calamity and warps two identities – making one man “guilty-innocent”, the other “innocent-guilty” – Marška finds herself faced with the choice, or the challenge, of taking control and averting disaster by saving a Jewish life.
This remarkable, multifaceted story showcases various Czech styles. A pub brawl and other rambunctious high-jinks are redolent of the escapades of Jaroslav Hašek’s good soldier Švejk; the more absurd violence (the sisters’ father is crushed by a manure cart), darker humour and skewed wisdom is as potent as that magicked up by Bohumil Hrabal; while the pockets of real horror, particularly the round-ups of Marška’s Jewish neighbours, have the same emotional clout as those that punctuate Jirí Weil’s Nazi-occupied novels.
Ultimately, though, this miniature masterpiece and the other four stories come to us in one voice, that of an inexplicably overlooked Czech master who is only now finding an English-speaking audience. Credit is due to Pushkin Press for rediscovering Urzidil. With luck, there will be more stories to tell.
- Malcolm Forbes   https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/book-review-the-last-bell-has-a-bohemian-slant-from-a-czech-master-1.53675


During World War II, a generation of great German writers including Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, and Bertolt Brecht became exiles, fleeing abroad * to escape the Nazis. So many left, in fact, that “Exilliteratur” became its own genre, shaped by intellectuals writing about a rapidly mutating Germany from afar. But after the war, these writers still had homelands they could return to. For the exiled German-Bohemian writer Johannes Urzidil, his relationship with his birthplace was more complicated: His Bohemia was, in many ways, destroyed by World War II.
Urzidil, who died in 1970 and spent the last three decades of his life in America, once wrote, “My homeland is my writing”—a not entirely metaphorical idea that encapsulates his literary career. Shortly after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia at the dawn of World War II, the Jewish Urzidil fled his birth city of Prague, formerly the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia. Though it became part of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Bohemia was an ethnically diverse region with a complex past—one that would inform Urzidil’s work long after he settled in America in 1941.
This week, five of Urzidil’s Bohemian tales have been published stateside for the first time, in English, as the collection The Last Bell. And like so much of his work, these stories all center—sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly—on a single question: How can a writer reclaim and find meaning in a homeland that no longer really exists? Urzidil’s stories reflect his feelings about Bohemia’s knotty history, as well as the encroaching forces of nationalism and communism that transformed the region in the 20th century.
But Urzidil’s work also offers a deeply moving look into the mind and heart of a man trying to both preserve his memories of home and contend with the cruel political realities shaping it. As Gerhard Trapp, a scholar who knew Urzidil personally and wrote the first published study of his work, told me, the writer and his work were “identical” in that both wanted to “restore humanity after World War I and II.” Urzidil’s Bohemia is a microcosm of the 20th century’s promise and failings, and his fiction shows readers what can be gleaned from such tragedy.
Urzidil was born in Prague in 1896 at a time when Bohemia was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This land of many ethnicities centered on two languages, German and Czech, but Urzidil ascribed to “Bohemism,” or the belief that a single identity united the region’s many peoples. This was not a popular notion: Czech and German nationalism had been competing there since the mid-19th century, and the two groups often lived in isolation from one another.
Before the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following World War I, Czech speakers experienced discrimination; for centuries, they had been denied influence in government and fought for their language to be officially recognized. After 1918, when the area became part of the newly formed Czechoslovakia, over two million Bohemian Germans became foreigners overnight, reversing the previous dynamic. But Urzidil rejected this Czech-versus-German dichotomy and would defend, in print, whoever was considered the region’s minority at the time.
Prague itself, however, had a unique and delicate sense of cohesion. Peter Demetz, a Sterling Emeritus Professor of German at Yale University, grew up in Urzidil’s fabled Prague and knew the writer well. Demetz described to me how Prague’s different communities “lived together and worked together and ate together and loved together ... it was almost charming.”
Urzidil was better known as a poet and journalist in Prague than as a fiction writer. He was on the periphery of Franz Kafka’s “Prague Circle,” a group of German-Jewish intellectuals who would regularly meet to discuss their work. When Urzidil spoke at Kafka’s funeral memorial in 1924, he did it, as the German literature scholar Valentina Sardelli told me, on behalf of a younger generation of German-Jewish writers.

Urzidil praised Kafka for his artistry but also claimed there would always be, as Sardelli put it, a “symbiotic bond” between the late author’s writing and “the multiethnic and turbulent Prague of Kafka’s time.” No matter what happened to the actual Prague, Kafka’s city would persist through his writing. This idea—of capturing the atmosphere of a place and time through fiction—would become a foundational idea in Urzidil’s work. But unlike Kafka, Urzidil would be capturing this Prague retrospectively.
In 1938, the Nazis divided Bohemia, claiming part of it for Germany, and the following year, Urzidil and his wife managed to flee. After the war, the newly established Czechoslovakian government expelled most of the area’s German-speaking population in retaliation. By the middle of the century, Urzidil’s Bohemia was no more—but, by then, the author had settled in a new home: America.

* * *

Effectively exiled and watching the dissolution of his homeland from abroad, Urzidil channeled his feelings of alienation and loss into his work. “Urzidil ... decided to take this multinational homeland with him, to turn himself into his homeland and continue to copiously draw from it the ferment of his life and his art,” Claudio Magris, an emeritus professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste, said. The stories in The Last Bell, which was translated and compiled by David Burnett, show how Urzidil began building his own Bohemia as the real one was radically transformed.
In one of the collection’s stories, “Siegelmann’s Journeys,” the titular travel agent has never left Prague. But he is able to describe foreign lands in such vivid detail that he convinces the woman he is courting that he’s well-traveled. When the couple discusses taking a trip to Venice together, Siegelmann becomes “panic-stricken by the possibility that the Venice of his dreams ... would be overpowered and annihilated by reality.” As the story’s narrator continues, “who would have sacrificed his genuine, higher, and magical Venice to a naturalist version, a sham being propagated as reality”?
It’s hard not to see a parallel between Siegelmann’s fears for his imagined Venice and Urzidil’s for his fictionalized Bohemia. Urzidil himself never returned to Prague after World War II. In the 1950s and ’60s, he would visit the Bavarian or Austrian-Czech borders and stare over into the Bohemian forest. He could have easily crossed that border and was, in fact, invited to do so many times. But, as Burnett told me: “His entire literary production rested on conjuring up this lost world of German-Jewish-Czech Bohemia ... The disappointment and disenchantment of this new reality [of Czech communism] would have simply been too great. And his writing probably would have changed had the memories of his old homeland mixed with new impressions.”
Still, Urzidil’s work is no sentimental paean to a lost place. In the story “Where the Valley Ends,” a small village is split by a stream, which divides the inhabitants into “left-bankers” and “right-bankers.” The basis of their opposing identities is comically slight but follows the formula of nationalism—the same nationalism that plagued Bohemia and, later, Europe as a whole. One group for instance, “claimed to be the older original inhabitants” of the village. Eventually, a stolen cheesecake rips the village apart. The story then turns into an essay-like mediation on the origins, and self-perpetuating nature, of conflict. Why the people were initially divided, the narrator cannot say. But once they were, “the stream could no longer flow ... It had to acquire a meaning: here left, there right!” And “because a war is quickly divorced from its immediate causes,” says the narrator, “[it] acquires a life and momentum of its own.”

Urzidil renders his lost land “not as a vanished idyll but with its breaks, conflicts, and problems,” Klaus Johann, an Urzidil scholar, told me. Eventually in “Where the Valley Ends,” a vaguely militaristic “new power from below” arrives and cares little for the villagers’ petty conflicts (according to Burnett, this “new power” stands for the Czech communists). The original inhabitants are driven from the valley, which turns to ruin. In this story, Urzidil cleverly locates the 20th century’s broader problems within his Bohemia. He transcends the specifics of his settings to touch on philosophical issues, often reflecting on his own engagement with them. In the collection’s title story, Urzidil even seems to question the moral dimensions of his prose: “Cut the goddamn proverbs,” says the protagonist of “The Last Bell.” “You can use them to justify murder.”

* * *

For better or for worse, language and national identity were intertwined for Urzidil. After settling in America, he engaged with the culture of his adopted home “much more than most of the other German exile writers,” Johann told me. Urzidil came to have a perfectly functional grasp of English. He read American writers voraciously—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman—and published essays on them in German. He translated the American poet H.D. into his native tongue. However, he never published creatively in English.
Part of Urzidil’s dedication to the German language was practical: He was simply a better, more intuitive writer, in his mother tongue. But for him writing in German was also, as Burnett told me, “a kind of moral obligation.” After World War II, Urzidil wrote that exiled authors such as himself “had the responsibility to keep the German language humane, unadulterated, and more ethical than it possibly could have been on the language’s true native soil, where its organic growth was interrupted or trampled underfoot by politics.”
The Nazis were very precise about their language, and how the two relate is a popular area of academic study. Victor Klemperer, in his 1947 classic Language of the Third Reich, goes as far as to claim that “the language of Nazism” is the ideology’s “breeding ground.” And so Urzidil, in his own words, “professed [his] undying loyalty” to the German language “in the darkest and most dubious hours of Germanness itself.”
Postwar Germany and Austria struggled with their own cultural and linguistic heritages; the region was, as Burnett put it, “a highly politicized and experimental literary landscape.” But Urzidil bears none of these contemporary trappings, a fact often attributed to his living in exile. He is seen as following in the more traditional footsteps of Goethe, the giant of German letters, whom he adored. (When visiting somewhere new, Urzidil said he always asked two questions: “What is the water here like? And what is the relationship of this place to Goethe?”) Yet, as Demetz pointed out, Urzidil’s stories often drift between fiction and essay—and this mingling of mediums is itself a very modern idea. Even formally, Urzidil brings together what is usually separated.
Unity despite conflict or difference is a common theme in Urzidil’s work. At the close of “Siegelman’s Journeys,” the protagonist compares a Bohemian rock structure to various waterfalls (the many “laughing waters,” or “Minnehahas”) throughout the U.S.: “I’m finally in America,” Siegelmann says. “Nothing is far away.” Somewhat jokingly, Urzidil draws a parallel between Bohemia and America, both of which he loved for their multiculturalism. But the comparison is also timely for today’s readers: Nationalism is on the rise across Europe, and much of the world, once more. Urzidil—who is said to have coined the term “hinternational,” literally meaning “behind nations,” though sometimes translated as “beyond nations”—offers a stark warning against tribalism for those willing to listen.
There are, of course, tensions between Urzidil’s dedication to a specific homeland and language, and his love of multiculturalism. These tensions of identity still persist in many countries today. But his writing demonstrates how one man navigated them, and how it is possible to love a place—for all its complications—without needing to exclude others from it.
As in his fiction, Urzidil was also welcoming in person. When receiving guests, Urzidil would, according to Demetz, open the kitchen window of his Queens apartment, from which you could see a bit of the ocean, and reference Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “Bohemia. A desert country near the sea.” In Urzidil’s new home, the water was a little reminder of the one he left behind. But while Shakespeare’s Bohemia is a total fiction (it’s not a desert), Urzidil’s remembered county is a blend of the fact and the fantasy that make up memory. His writing questions what it is to be a human and to remember. And what it means to love your homeland when extreme “patriotism” is precisely why it is gone. - James Reith   https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/the-fictional-country-you-build-when-your-homeland-vanishes/524118/


A maid who is unexpectedly bequeathed her wealthy employers' worldly possessions when they flee the country after the Nazi occupation; a loyal bank clerk, who steals a Renaissance portrait of a Spanish noblewoman, and falls into troublesome love with her; a middle-aged travel agent, who is perhaps the least well-travelled man in the city and advises his clients from what he has read in books, anxiously awaiting his looming honeymoon; a widowed villager, whose 'magnetic' twelve-year-old daughter witnesses a disturbing event; and a tiny village thrown into civil war by the disappearance of a freshly baked cheesecake. These stories about the tremendous upheaval which results when the ordinary encounters the unexpected are vividly told, with both humour and humanity.
This is the first ever English publication of these both literally and metaphorically Bohemian tales, by one of the great overlooked writers of the twentieth century.
I am continuously astounded by how Anglocentric my literary worldview occasionally still is. I guess studying English Language and Literature didn't do much to help, but I figured growing up bilingually (neither English) would have done something to change that. But I am still surprised to find there are masters of literature waiting for me in other languages, or waiting in translation, rather. Johannes Urzidil is an author I had never heard of, despite writing in one of my native languages, German. Until the release of The Last Bell, his work had never been translated into English. Bilingual himself, Urzidil was a celebrated Czech writer for whom German was his language, never making the transition to English despite spending his last two decades as an immigrant in the United States. His stories, however, are of Prague, that centre of Bohemia in the early 20th century.  His characters are oddities, are "other" in some way and know it, but they are also irrevocably human. Despite being so clearly rooted in his homeland, Urzidil's stories are globally human and will resonate with their modern readers.
The Last Bell contains five stories, selected by David Burnett from a variety of collections written by Urzidil over time. Burnett himself, in his informative introduction, gets to the very point of what makes these stories so touching and what links them together:
'...these stories illustrate this very point: that no one can act or be in this world, without becoming guilty - a very unmodern, biblical notion in our ideal world of transparency and accountability.'
It might not sound very enticing, but I was fascinated by this concept of, perhaps, "guilt by association" which cropped up in each and every story. The collection's first, and eponymous, story 'The Last Bell' is perhaps the finest example. A Czech maid in Nazi-occupied Prague feels burdened by the things she is given or told by others. Whereas she herself hardly acts, except for once, her very presence in the story's situations makes her complicit, makes her guilty, and she does not know how to deal with the weight of this guilt. In 'The Duchess of Albanera' we see a man who cannot face the unintended consequences of a single, mindless thought, whereas the third story, 'Siegelmann's Journeys' gives us a man very aware of and dreading the consequences he will have to face. The final two stories, 'Borderland', probably my favourite in The Last Bell, and 'Where the Valley Ends', Urzidil himself appears in the stories as an unnamed outsider, an objective observer, who sees the unintended victims of other people's actions and beliefs. Although it is perhaps not the most optimistic of messages, it is a very true one. Perhaps in our world we should all be a little bit more aware that none of us are blameless, that we are all in some way guilty. Perhaps it will make us kinder if we learn this lesson.
Urzidil's writing is surprisingly fluid. This may sound like a backhanded compliment, but once Burnett's introduction made me aware of Urzidil's links to Kafka I was slightly concerned. Although Kafka is doubtlessly masterful, he is also highly complex. Urzidil's stories are compact and crafted in a way that gives hints but unravels at its own, perfect, pace. His writing, however, flows easily and evocatively. There are moments of absolute beauty in his stories, phrases that are just so true. Let me give you a little gem:
'History books know nothing about real life, least o all about the life of a woman.'
How true. Urzidil doesn't shy away from the darkness in life, but also lingers in those moments of beauty that life bestows upon us. Especially in 'Borderland' he describes Czech woodlands in such a beautiful way I want to book tickets to Prague right now. Burnett does a wonderful job at translating his work into English, capturing both the preciseness and tentativeness of Urzidil's language. I am incredibly grateful to Pushkin Press for casting light upon another author who deserves to be known. I will definitely be looking for his work in German as well, however. - Juli Witte  http://universeinwords.blogspot.hr/2017/07/review-last-bell-by-johannes-urzidil.html


Johannes Urzidil (1896 - 1970) was a German-Czech writer, poet and historian. Franz Kafka was a part of his intellectual circle of friends. Urzidil fled Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 for England, finally settling down in America. The five short stories in The Last Bell were written during the 1950s and 60s.
All the stories in this collection, though written in exile, reflect Urzidil's Bohemian heritage. The title story is set during the Nazi occupation of  Czechoslovakia. A housemaid in her early thirties, Marska,  is suddenly given all of her employer's posessions. "Mister and Missus," as the brassy maid refers to them, have had to flee the Nazis. This leaves the housemaid discombobulated. Is this turn of events good fortune, or does it presage disaster to come?
In "The Duchess of Albanera" a boring bank clerk who leads a very regimented life does something mad on the spur of the moment. On a visit to the State Gallery, he steals the famous portrait of the Duchess of Albanera. He keeps the modestly sized painting at home, but people start to notice strange behaviour on the bank clerk's behalf.
The third story, "Seigelemann's Journeys", concerns a travel agent who has remained curiously stationary in life. When one of his clients falls in love with him, he fabricates all sorts of stories about his great travels, trying to make up for an embarrassing lack of adventure.
"Borderland", a story that stands in contrast to all the rest for its ethereal atmosphere, is about a 12-year-old girl who has a special gift for apphrending the secrets of nature.
The final story, "Where the Valley Ends", is an anatomy of a civil war that erupts in a small village over the disappearance of a cheesecake. As the narrator makes clear, humans can't help bickering and quarrelling over small matters, turning these petty gripes into grand political machinations.
Most of the stories in this collection are comic in tone and nimbly written. Urzidil writes in a neat prose that grasps the reader's attention right from the first page. The theme of the stories is how humans delude themselves in trying to impose order on rolling, chaotic, real world events. When the housemaid in "The Last Bell" has a sudden good stroke of fortune in receiving a gift of so much money, she decides she will live it up and live like a queen. But things soon go off the rails. In "Where the Valley Ends," the narrator scoffs at how humans attribute good luck to their own personal prowess:
"...everyone whom fate has favoured just a little fancies that he's capable of doing and understanding more than others."
This is an eminently enjoyable collection of stories from a little known writer, brought vividly to life in this recent translation by David Burnett for Pushkin Press. A small literary gem. - Chris Saliba  http://northmelbournebooks.blogspot.hr/2017/06/the-last-bell-by-johannes-urzidil.html

Johannes Urzidil was one of the most celebrated Czech writers of the 20th century. Although he spent his last twenty years as an emigre in the United States, he never made the switch to writing in English. His works continued to be published in Europe in German (one of his two mother tongues) and his works were infused with the sensibility of his homeland. Despite his importance in European literature, his works have only rarely been translated into English. Pushkin Press have rectified this omission with a collection of Urzidil’s short stories, none of which have formerly been published in English, and translated now by David Burnett. Lively, moving and gently absurd, these stories focus on outsiders, people whose encounters with ordinary life and emotions leave them thwarted and unmasked as precisely the strange creatures that they are.

Generally speaking, these characters are aware that they’re different and it niggles at them. Of the book’s five stories (which are presented in reverse chronological order), the first three follow characters whose efforts to fit in don’t work out quite as they expect. In ‘The Last Bell’, published in Zurich in 1968, a woman’s newfound wealth is complicated by her efforts to appear ‘to the manner born’. In ‘The Duchess of Albanera’, published in Zurich in 1966, a man seeks love and company in the wrong place, with unforeseen consequences. In ‘Siegelmann’s Journeys’, published in Munich in 1962, another man tries to hide his unadventurous lifestyle with flights of fantasy. The final two stories, ‘Borderland’ and ‘Where the Valley Ends’, both published in Munich in 1956, are told from the perspective of visitors to the community. In both cases, the narrator meets outsider figures who are innocent but find themselves in a world which has no place for them. Throughout the book, there’s a sense of disconnection, a frustration. Our lives seem perfectly rational to us, so why does the world insist that we change to fit its pattern?

Initially it’s tempting to laugh at the people in the first three stories: pompous, snobbish Marška, whose wonderfully-pitched monologues sum up the indignation of a woman who thinks she deserves better from the world; or prickly Schaschek, whose sense of routine is so ingrained that his local delicatessen can predict his order based on the day of the week, and who has conversations with inanimate objects; or Siegelmann (to a lesser extent, perhaps), whose fear of travel is so ironic in a travel agent. But wait a moment. Although Urzidil obviously wants to show us that these people are faintly ridiculous, it goes deeper than that. All three of them (and maybe those in the other two stories) are prompted by deep loneliness. In an effort to join a club, to experience the things that everyone else does, they try to change themselves. But to what extend do they succeed? Perhaps those in the first three stories don’t quite get there. And maybe that’s a blessing in disguise. As we see in another of the stories, becoming just like everyone else means giving up our selves:

In what way does a person die? When his heart stops beating; that’s probably the most familiar way. Or by becoming like everyone else. Many people die like that and no one is aware of it, many times they themselves don’t notice, their whole so-called lives long; only very late does it sometimes dawn on them for a split second, but they brush it off like a speck of dust from their clothing. When you have the choice you don’t even know it, and by the time you know it you no longer have the choice. This is how it normally works.

Urdizil isn’t a heavy writer. He’s much lighter and more amusing than I was expecting, but of course there are dark undercurrents to his work (he was a friend of Kafka). These are rarely explicitly connected to the Second World War – only Marška’s story shows us the world of Nazi-occupied Prague – but one can’t help noticing that all the stories deal with exclusion and foreignness, even within one’s own community. And Urzidil shows compassion and sympathy for these oddballs, these people existing on the edge. Presumably this is all bound up with his own experiences as someone who never quite belonged – an emigre who wrote in a language which wasn’t that of his adopted country; a man who could never quite unpick himself from his native country; a stranger in a strange land. His stories shimmer with a sense of transience, a sense of everything trembling on the brink before passing away. It’s hard not to see these stories, written after the Second World War, as an elegy for a Bohemia and a world which had ceased to be.

Bravo to Pushkin Press for rescuing yet another sparkling Central European writer from Anglophone obscurity, and for introducing us to his succinct, sensitive stories. I hope there’ll be much more Urzidil to come. - https://theidlewoman.net/2017/02/25/the-last-bell-johannes-urzidil/

Johannes Urzidil was a German language historian, poet, novelist, and short story writer.  He was born in Prague in 1896, he died in Rome in 1970, while on a speaking tour.  He was friends with Kafka.  Highly educated, from 1922 to 1933 he worked for the German Embassy in Prague, as advisor in the press section.  In 1933 when the Nazis took over Czehoslovakia, he was fired from his job because his mother was Jewish, his father a Bohemian German.  Like so many other writers, his roots were dervived from The Austro-Hungarian Empire.  After being briefly detained he wisely emigrated to England, along with his wife, herself a poet (pictured in my collage).  In 1941 they moved to The United States, settling in The Queens area of New York City.  He stayed there the rest of his life. He developed basic fluency in English and read, among others, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, and Hawthorne.  He wrote about them in German, he felt he had much higher skills in that language and wanted to do what he could to preserve what he saw as the destroyed Cultural heritage of the old Empire, especially that of Bohemian Germans, largely driven out of Czehoslovakia after the war.  

The lead story in the collection, which Burnett assembled from several sources, “The Last Bell” is set in Prague around 1933, just as Nazi troops began to occupy the city.   Our main character is a maid, or maybe we should say was a maid.  She worked for years for a Jewish couple, they treated her decently, she tells us her Master, her terms, never made advances on her, as was evidently common.  When we meet her she is seeing them off at the Prague train station.  She is crying, decent employers are hard to find.  They have decided to leave the country, they give her ten thousand marks, a huge sum for her, they can take no cash out of the country, tell her the rent is paid on their apartment for the next six monthes.  All they ask is that she tell no one they have left.  Of course she is initially discombobulated, but she soon begins to relish her new wealth.  In an hilarious scene, she goes to a fancy resturant, orders a dish she has obviously never had before and whose French name she butchers, you can imagine the waiter sneering.  Then, to prove she is “high class” she sends the dish back,claiming it smells “funny”, not realizing it is perfect.  Then she orders apple strudel and sends it back also.  

She is initially made just a little uneasy by the uniformed Germans but everyone says only the Jews have to worry.  She invites her younger sister to come stay with her, so she will have someone to lord it over, now that she fancies herself rich.  Time goes by and both of the single but experienced young women find German boyfriends.  A terrible fight does break out between the sisters and two  “black uniformed” Germans, they have learned enough now to both fear the Germans and use their connections to intimidate others.  The younger sister ends up in jail for three weeks but still stays involved with her German Gestapo boyfriend whom she fought with.  As we knew they would , terrible things happen, slowly what is happening to Prague begins to sink in for the older sister.  When the six months of free rent runs out, the Jewish landlord, who lives in the building, fearing the women’s boyfriends tells her not to worry about the rent.

There are lots small touches help make this story a delight.  The lead character, her sisters, the Germans are all perfectly done.  

I have left the ending unspoiled.  This is a truly great story.

I hope to get to all of the four remaining stories this month. - Mel u

rereadinglives.blogspot.hr/2017/11/the-last-bell-short-story-by-johannes.html

Johannes Urzidil (1896-1970) was a German Bohemian writer, poet, historian and journalist. Born in Prague, he was a member of the Prague Circle and a friend of Franz Kafka's and Max Brod's. He fled to England after the German occupation in 1939, and eventually settled in the United States. Best known during his lifetime for the Prague Triptych collection of short stories and his literary history Goethe in Bohemia, he won several awards for his writing, and even had an asteroid named after him.

Carlos Maleno, The Irish Sea, Trans. by Eric Kurtzke,Dalkey Archive Press, 2017.


At a New Year’s Eve party, a dead woman turns up alive again, after passing through a mysterious post-mortem way station located on another planet, and much to the disbelief of her old flame, who interprets the night’s events with the help of his reading of Kafka. A priest is sent by the Vatican to investigate a strange development in the American cattle market: a breed of cows identical in all physical respects to human women. A man leaves his wife and flees to the north of Spain, where he meets a sickly woman in an empty café, introduces himself as Jorge Walser, and makes plans with her to disappear. Aboard a trans-atlantic cruise, a door-to-door vacuum salesman bumps into a woman who appears to be Natassja Kinski, and they swap tall tales as the ship floats them asymptotically toward world’s end. Christ turns out to be a girl who fronts a punk band. The words of such writers as Beckett, Walser, Chekhov, Gombrowicz, Bolaño, Kafka, Blanchot, and Borges are characters in themselves.


Now on to a personal book for Spanish lit month one recent book from Dalkey Archive another of the novellas they seem to be publishing. Carlos Maleno was born in Almeria in Spain where he still lives there working as a broker and writing on the side. He has written two books so far this was his debut work and won the Premio Argaria for a narrative work when it came out. It is his first book to be translated into English and came out earlier this year.
WHy am I wearing on my face, at this moment, the mask of an aged Felipe Gonzalez? out of political commitment? No I, feel no political affinity with anyone, not anymore. Lets imagine that our politican or any other politician, has a dog , which he never takes for a walk. Absolutely never. What does it matter to the dog whether this politician belongs to the left or the right?
A very spanish story about an ex spanish prime minister
The book is a collection of stories the stories are all separate stories, but as you move through them you find certain things reoccurring from story to story thus creating echoes of earlier stories. The stories range from the first about Kafka’s influence and how we are trying to match his talent. Then a story about the mask that is an ageing face of a former Spanish Prime Minister. Then Natassja Kinski keeps cropping up in stories also girls with green eyes. A hitchhiking girl who has green eyes who goes across the universe, vacuum cleaner salesmen .Then the title story follows a writer as he starts reading Irish based Spanish novel Dublinesque, then reads Beckett and then ends up in Irland watching another writer being interviewed about his latest book. The there is the frequent mention of the PlanLux a sort Lit sci fi touch from waking up there to phone calls from there as well adding a clever touch to what is an engaging collection of stories from a fresh new voice.
Now Elena and Javier are walking along the cliff road that goes from the hotel to downtown stiges. The wind is cold and she’s shivering: Javier hugs her in a vain attempt at imparting some warnth to her. Frozen, they lok at the sea as they walk. the sky isgrowing dark, and the waves roaring against the rocks. She moves a few steps head of him, staring down faptly at the waves. He watches her. The sea in the background is definitely no longer the meditterranean; no, this is the irish sea. This sea feels like his own. And they aren’t in Stiges anymore, they’re in Smerwick Ba. Insteadof Port Stiges resort, they’re staying at the smethwickHarbour Hotel.
Jaivier ends up in ireland after first in the story reading Dublinesque.
This is one of the reasons you have to look at what Dalkey put out they tend to find those odd gems. This is a collection that is very surreal at the time. A writer trying and mention his Heros, we see mention of the likes of Beckett, Walser, Kafka, Borges (of course ) and Gombrowicz. I also wondered if Greene is a writer he liked with the mention of Vacuum cleaner salesmen in two of the stories the stories test the boundaries people waking up in another planet after their death.  human bones suddenly appearing, a writer reading Dublinesque then starring at the Irish sea and then in Ireland itself. - https://winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2017/07/12/the-irish-sea-by-carlos-maleno/

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature, ed. by Joseph Tabbi, 2017. 
read it at Google Books










The digital age has had a profound impact on literary culture, with new technologies opening up opportunities for new forms of literary art from hyperfiction to multi-media poetry and narrative-driven games. Bringing together leading scholars and artists from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is the first authoritative reference handbook to the field.
Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book explores the foundational theories of the field, contemporary artistic practices, debates and controversies surrounding such key concepts as canonicity, world systems, narrative and the digital humanities, and historical developments and new media contexts of contemporary electronic literature. Including guides to major publications in the field, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is an essential resource for scholars of contemporary culture in the digital era.



Introduction
Joseph Tabbi, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Ends, Beginnings
I Hold It Toward You: A Show of Hands
Shelley Jackson, The New School, USA

Our Tools Make Us (And Our Literature) Post
Steve Tomasula, University of Notre Dame, USA

Lift This End: Electronic Literature in a Blue Light
Stuart Moulthrop, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

The advent of aurature and the end of (electronic) literature
John Cayley, Brown University, USA

Poetics, Polemics
“your visit will leave a permanent mark”: Poetics in the Post-Digital Economy
Davin Heckman Winona State University, USA and James O'Sullivan University of Sheffield, UK

Literature and Netprov In Social Media, a Travesty, or, In Defense of Pretension
Rob Wittig, University of Minnesota Duluth, USA

Narrativity
Daniel Punday, Mississippi State University, USA
Cognition
David Ciccoricco, University of Otago, New Zealand

Experimentalism
Álvaro Seiça, University of Bergen, Norway

Writing Under Constraint
Manuel Portela, University of Coimbra, Portugal

Electronic Literature and the Poetics of Contiguity
Mario Aquilina, University of Malta, Malta

Combination and Copulation: Making Lots of Little Poems
Aden Evens, Dartmouth College, USA

A Glitch Poetics: Reading of Speed Readers, Erica Scourti, Predictive Text, and Caroline Bergvall
Nathan Jones, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Materialities, Ontologies
Flat Logics, Deep Critique: Temporalities, Aesthetics and Ecologies in Electronic Literature on the Web
Allison M. Schifani, University of Miami, USA

Immanence, Inc: Algorithm, Flow, and the Displacement of the Real
Brian Kim Stefans, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Hypertext
Astrid Ensslin University of Alberta, Canada and Lyle Skains Bangor University, UK

Internet and Digital Textuality: A Close Reading of 10:01
Mehdy Sedaghat Payam, Iranian Institute for Research and Development in Humanities (SAMT), Iran

Of Presence and Electronic Literature
Luciana Gattass, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Post-modern, Post-Human, Post-Digital
Laura Shackelford, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

Economies, Precarities
Post-Digital Writing
Florian Cramer, Rotterdam University, Netherlands

Unwrapping the eReader: On the Politics of Electronic Reading Platforms
David Roh, University of Utah, USA

Scarcity and Abundance
Martin Paul Eve, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

Relocating the Literary: In Networks, Knowledge Bases, Global Systems, Material and Mental Environments
Joseph Tabbi, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Annotated Bibliography for Electronic Literature

Noémi Lefebvre, Blue Self-Portrait, Trans. by Sophie Lewis,  Les Fugitives, 2017.         


excerpt (Granta)


The inner monologue of a woman haunted by German composer Arnold Schoenberg's portrait, following a complex romantic encounter with an American-German pianist-composer in Berlin. As the irresistible, impossible narrator flies home she unpicks her social failures while the pianist reaches towards a musical self-portrait with all the resonance of Schoenberg's passionate, chilling blue. A contemporary novel of angst and high farce, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions but is more truly located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses to remember and to ignore. In Blue Self-Portrait Noemi Lefebvre shows how music continues to work on and through us, addressing past trauma while reaching for possible futures.


‘L’autoportrait bleu calls to mind fine lacework, all fancy stitching, a delicate succession of interconnected loops. Nothing but beautiful work here. In this devilishly virtuosic text, which also evokes contrapuntal music, Noémi Lefebvre writes like a genuine composer. It’s rare to find a writer successfully able to lend a musical shape to their text. Lefebvre has taken up the challenge in this astonishing, vertiginous account.’ - Le Figaro littéraire


'As the plot unfolds among Berlin’s cultural institutions Lefebvre’s musical prose reflects the multidisciplinary approach of the artist it pays homage to.' - Big Issue North


‘The dense, fine-tuned, ever perfectionist writing in this debut novel reinforces its immediacy, grips the reader to the point of obsession.’  -L’Humanité 


'Beautifully pitched and compellingly virtuosic (...) Blue Self-Portrait accomplishes its own inner musicality, while presenting the spectre of a self-portrait lived between memory, association and speculation.' - Contemporary Small Press


'...like an application of the prose style of Thomas Bernhard to a particular female experience more reminiscent of Bridget Jones: a form of acute social embarrassment and chronic self-deprecation. The strength of Lefebvre's novel is that it holds this private anxiety in balance not just with the highbrow cultural references of a well-educated European elite (Brecht, Mann and Adorno all get nods) but with the trauma of the Continent's recent history.' - Times Literary Supplement


I tend to find first-person narratives difficult. They’re either too arch, too writerly, or not arch or writerly enough, a bit clunky. But I think when it is got right, like Noémi Lefebvre does here, it can be incredible. One of the reasons I called the prize the Republic of Consciousness is to push against this notion that neuroscience and materialism promote … that basically all we are is independent sets of firing neurons, and so we can’t know each other or relate beyond physical stimuli. Writing puts us right into the middle of someone’s consciousness, wraps us up in someone else’s interior world. Lefebvre does this extremely successfully. I think she captures something very essentially about how we think. We think we think in full sentences, but we don’t, we think in fragments. It’s when we reflect on our thoughts and how we think that we put them into full sentences. We don’t really have access to how fragmented our thoughts are as thinking is happening. What Lefebvre achieves in this book – like Eimear McBride in A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing– to capture the simple fragments of thought she’s having. If she were to tell the story, she’d fill in the gaps; instead, she drops us into her mind as it’s happening. - Neil Griffiths  https://fivebooks.com/best-books/indie-books-of-2017/


A flight from Berlin to Paris takes an hour and forty-five minutes. This is enough time for a long nap, an unhurried conversation, or, if you’re the narrator of Noémi Lefebvre’s Blue Self-Portrait (Les Fugitives), it’s the perfect amount of time to brood. In the first of Lefebvre’s novels to appear in English, a woman on just such a journey unleashes an agitated inner monologue following a romantic encounter with a pianist in Berlin. Her rapid-fire, run-on thoughts rove over the places she’s just visited (Café Einstein and the cinema at the Sony Center), her failings (a recently ended marriage, her insufficient education), and her in-flight surroundings. She also happens to be reading the correspondence of Theodor Adorno and Thomas Mann.
Always, she returns to obsessing over the pianist, their interactions, as well as his own obsession with Arnold Schoenberg. If Schoenberg had not been a major twentieth-century composer, we would know him as a minor twentieth-century painter (his work Blue Self-Portrait lends the novel its title). It becomes clear through her musings that, far from simply getting over a love affair, the narrator is ultimately grappling with her own relationship to art. Her anxiety about men—whether her beaux or beaux esprits—is entwined with misgivings about the quality and seriousness of her own ideas; after all, if societal notions of intellect are masculine, any female relation to the intellect is in some sense a relationship to masculinity. This is the narrator’s unsolvable problem, laid bare again and again in painful yet eager honesty. The book’s subversion lies not in exposing these well-known phenomena, but in the cavalier and self-evident tone in which they are presented to us. An intelligent woman is supposed to raise herself above these anxieties; the narrator revels in them.
Noémi Lefebvre isthe author of three novels, all of which have garnered critical success in France: L’Autoportrait bleu (2009), L’état des sentiments à l’âge adulte (2012) and L’enfance politique (2015). She is a regular contributor to the website Médiapart and to the bilingual French-German review La mer gelée.

Paul Stanbridge, Forbidden Line, Galley Beggar Press, 2017.


Read the first chapter here.

Praise from the Desmond Elliott Prize:

“A homage, a hallucinatory metaphysical journey, heroes beyond eccentric. These are only the first of a maelstrom of impressions stirred up by this Cervantes tribute act. Here is a text as exhaustively enquiring as it is exhaustingly dogmatic, yet iridescent with the radiance of Don Quixote’s original spirit. Its overtly philosophical argument is tempered by the deep emotional impulses of the men themselves; This Don and his servant, Is, are infinitely engaging exemplars of love and comradeship.”
Forbidden Line was chosen by founder of the prize, Neil Griffiths for Best First Novel or Prize for the Novel with a ‘surfeit of multitudinous energy’. Griffiths said it was a work of ‘almost uncontainable exuberance. A no net, high-wire act of the imagination. This novel will be a cult classic for a while. But it will be a classic for much longer.’
On announcing the prize, Neil Griffiths said: ‘I mentioned earlier that I made up the criteria by which I judged it a winner. That isn’t strictly true – I judged it a winner and then made up the criteria. - http://www.republicofconsciousness.com/2017/03/inaugural-republic-of-consciousness-prize-for-small-presses-awards/


So Don Quixote and Don Quixote have gone on to provide rich material for writers looking for their own bit of metafictional fun, notably Jorge Luis Borges in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. Borges’s Menard sets out not to retell the original story but to rewrite Cervantes’s text verbatim; not to copy but to author an identical book from within his own mind. Into this tradition steps Paul Stanbridge’s hefty and highly entertaining debut novel, Forbidden Line. Its anti-heroes are the autodidactic fantasist… - MATTHEW PARKINSON-BENNETT https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/cervantes-don-quixote/

Ariana Harwicz, Die, My Love, Trans. by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff,Charco Press, 2017.
excerpt


In a forgotten patch of French countryside, a woman is battling her demons – embracing exclusion yet wanting to belong, craving freedom whilst feeling trapped, yearning for family life but at the same time wanting to burn the entire house down. Given surprising leeway by her family for her increasingly erratic behaviour, she nevertheless feels ever more stifled and repressed. Motherhood, womanhood, the banality of love, the terrors of desire, the inexplicable brutality of ‘another person carrying your heart forever’ – Die, My Love faces all this with a raw intensity. It’s not a question of if a breaking point will be reached, but rather when and how violent a form will it take?
This is a brutal, wild book – it’s impossible to come out from reading Ariana Harwicz unscathed. The language of Die, My Love cuts like a scalpel even as it attains a kind of cinematic splendour, evoking the likes of John Cassavetes, David Lynch, Lars von Trier and John Ford. In a text that explores the destabilising effects of passion and its absence, immersed in the psyche of a female protagonist always on the verge of madness, in the tradition of Sylvia Plath and Clarice Lispector, Harwicz moulds language, submitting it to her will in irreverent prose. Bruising and confrontational, yet anchored in an unapologetic beauty and lyricism, Die, My Love is a unique reading experience that quickly becomes addictive.
 


Named Best Argentinian Novel of 2012 by the daily La Nacíon.
Nominated for the Edinburgh Book Festival First Novel award
So the thing about Edinburgh Book Festival is the discovery of new-to-me books in their pop-up bookshop … and there were many this year.  (I’ll tell you all about the ones that came home with me when Rossetti isn’t looking.) A number of these started their journey to my library from the shelves dedicated to the Edinburgh Book Festival First Novel Award.
The contents of these shelves change throughout the festival.  Harwicz’s novel wasn’t there on day one.  I think I read a tweet saying copies arrived about 3 hours before her event. I wasn’t at her event either, but I decided to read this novel first from my #edbookfest purchases so that I could sneak in a last minute review for both #spanishlitmonth and #WITmonth.
Why did I buy it? Title, title, title.  I imagined some kind of schizophrenic virago snarling the first word, then, after sticking the knife in, caressing her victim with soft sweet nothings ….
Well, not being a psychologist, I can’t confirm whether the female protagonist is schizophrenic, sociopathic or even psychopathic, but she is definitely unhinged, nay, severely unhinged …
and, because this novel is written in 1st person, there were times when I was unhinged myself!  I couldn’t recognise the world at all through her eyes.  At first there was no common ground, just weird, animalistic behaviour complete with sexual fantasies that turned out (I think) to be anything but fantasy. But gradually, an external reference, an expression of resentment, and I realised that this is a world seen through the prism and alienation of severe post-natal depression.
The woman’s story can only be put together retrospectively as Harwicz throws the reader right into her crisis. First sentence:

I lay back in the grass among fallen trees and the sun on my palm felt like a knife I could use to bleed myself dry with one swift cut to the jugular.

There’s the knife of my imaginings, but it made me question which love was to die.  Because with a title like that, something’s going to end badly.  And Harwicz kept me guessing.
I don’t want to reveal too much about the woman’s story but she is an educated woman, now living in the countryside with her husband and son.  Bored.   In a downward spiral that is accelerating. The birth of her son precipitating, if not completing, an absolute loss of self.
It’s not easy on her, her husband (who really does try to help her), her son (for whom I was truly afeared) or for the reader.  That 1st person narrative – it’s not a stream of consciousness, more a stream of existence.  Reality, fantasy, insanity, hallucination, smidgeons of logical thought, blended into an unchronological narrative.  Challenging.  I’d say exhilarating (if the subject matter wasn’t so dark.) Told in short, sharp passages, meaning the reader can come up for air, even if the protagonist and her family cannot.
A book that will reward a second reading, if I dare brave its intensity again.
Die, My Love is one of the first of titles to be published by Charco Press, a new publisher based in Edinburgh, whose remit is to “select authors whose works feed the imagination, challenge perspective and spark debate. Authors that are shining lights in the world of contemporary literature. Authors whose works have won awards and received critical acclaim. Bestselling authors. Yet authors you perhaps have never heard of. Because none of them have been published in English.  Until now,”
Not everything they publish will be for me, but I will definitely keep a close eye on what they do.
- lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2017/08/31/die-my-love-ariana-harwicz/


I was lucky enough to attend the Edinburgh launch of Charco Press, a new publisher of Latin American fiction which is based in the city. (Charco is apparently Spanish for puddle, so Scotland would seem to be the ideal location). The authors of its two launch publications, Ariana Harwicz (Die, My Love), and Gabriela Cabezon Camara (Slum Virgin), were both in attendance, as was co-founder and translator Carolina Orloff; the enthusiasm of all three (and of hosts, Golden Hare Books) was wonderful to behold, and I began reading Die, My Love (translated by Carolina and Sarah Moses) on the train home.
Die, My Love is a fierce, unsettling novel about motherhood and marriage. Its Argentinian author, Harwicz, spoke of writing the book while living in France with her husband and first child, explaining to some extent the sense of foreignness and isolation of the narrator. Further blurring the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, she confessed that when she began she did not know that she was writing a novel. The novel’s searing honesty is quickly apparent as the narrator considers the need to acquire a cake for her son’s six-month ‘birthday’:
“Whenever I look at him I think of my husband behind me, about to ejaculate on my back, but instead suddenly turning me over and coming inside me. If this hadn’t happened, if I’d closed my legs, if I’d grabbed his dick, I wouldn’t have to go to the bakery for cream cake or chocolate cake and candles, half a year already.”
Her husband remains a distant figure in the novel. His love of the night sky might suggest he is looking in the wrong direction, particularly as his wife remains uninterested in the meteorites he watches through his telescope, thinking only that she’d like to be on “any mission to outer space.” She fails to share his love of the outdoors:
“Personally, I don’t give a damn if I’m under the open sky or shut up in a trunk.”
His distance, though, is also a reflection of her own isolation: in the opening pages it is she who keeps herself apart from her husband and son, and throughout the novel she will frequently retreat to the woods. Her husband’s patience magnifies her own inadequacies:
“The most aggressive thing he’d said to me in seven years was ‘Go and get yourself checked out.’ I’d said to him ‘You’re a dead man’ during the first month of our relationship.”
Harwicz captures the constant anxiety which can accompany having a child. In the narrator’s earliest memory after giving birth she is “afraid of the harm she could cause the newborn.” She frequently thinks she hears her child crying only to find him lying silently – this too, of course, causing worry:
“Why does he sleep so much? Why doesn’t he stir?”
The novel’s honesty also extends to the narrator’s sex life, and the waves of desire which come over her. She becomes fixated on a neighbour, at one point writing in his voice (“Now I’m speaking as him”):
“I think about her and heave with desire.”
She haunts his home, where he stays with his wife and daughter, her sexual fantasies (“Such delicious luxury to have a man pressing on my guts”) finally fulfilled, though such is the intensity of the narrative that this is only the likeliest possibility rather than a certainty. Animal imagery describes their coupling:
“In one feline motion, I turn over and climb on top of him.”
It’s not uncommon for the narrator to compare herself to an animal, and real animals also occur again and again the narrative. The couple’s car hitting a stag is one example, a brief instance where the underlying violence of the voice punches through. (The stag survives and will be seen again by the narrator – “The stag used to appear at nightfall and linger between the woods and the garden” – inhabiting the same borderline between domesticity and wildness as she does.) Their dog is injured in the accident, and the narrator’s inability to cope with it whimpering in pain (she asks her husband to kill it) seems to echo her response to her child.
Die, My Love is a powerful exploration of the rage and loneliness which can accompany motherhood. Such feelings may not be universal (though many of her thoughts will have occurred to some in diluted form) but neither is it unique. The novel also questions the direction and purpose of relationships, and our roles within them, the narrator’s faltering marriage set against the marriage of her in-laws. It does all this in wild phrases which bite and cut at the consciousness of the reader: Harwicz spoke of a realist novel where the fantastic element lies in the language. Harwicz also said that writing a novel is a matter of life and death, and that is certainly how this novel feels.
Compared to Virgina Woolf and Sylvia Plath, Ariana Harwicz is one of the most radical figures in contemporary Argentinian literature. Her prose is characterised by its violence, eroticism, irony. Born in Buenos Aires in 1977, Harwicz has written two plays, and directed the documentary El día del Ceviche (Ceviche’s Day), which has been shown at festivals in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Venezuela. Her first novel Die, My Love was named best novel of 2012 by the Argentinian daily La Nación. It is currently being adapted for theatre in Buenos Aires and in Israel. - 1streading.wordpress.com/2017/08/30/die-my-love/

Kevin Davey, Playing Possum,AAAARGH! Press, 2017.


Playing Possumby Kevin Davey is an exuberant modernist reminder that T S Eliot was a fan of detective fiction, Charlie Chaplin and the music hall.
Fleeing from a violent incident in London in 1922, pursued by police, Tom spends a night in the Duke of Cumberland Hotel in Whitstable. Demobilised soldiers hold a meeting below his window and a silent movie is being shot on the seafront. Davey draws on local history and literature, songs, films and artwork from the period to produce a novel Eliot himself would have enjoyed.


Fusing the local history of Whitstable with reflections on T. S. Eliot and modernism, within a sort-of-detective narrative, Playing Possum is wild. Funny, dark, at once modern and nostalgic, the book is a rather like T. S. Eliot himself. This potential cult classic has already been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. - https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/republic-of-consciousness-prize-longlist/


‘Kevin Davey’s stupendous brain-teaser of a novel offers a stream of reflections on the life, work, thought, and mythology of T S Eliot… The novel is written with terrific fluency and tonal variety in a short-winded present tense, displaying a pronounced narrative emphasis on cinema, the art form that renders everything in a permanent now. He puts the mighty modernist back into his rowdy times, among the dancing and detective stories… Davey’s Eliot emerges as a creature and enabler of total fusion – an Anglo-American banker-poet desperate to conduct “the mind of Europe” in poems that eradicate the border between thought and feeling, plagiarism and originality, past and present, the classic and the new, populism and conservatism, high and low, rigour and impulse.’ - LEO ROBSON


‘This startlingly original debut novel has been shortlisted for this year’s Goldsmiths Prize alongside five other strong contenders – and deservedly so. In its formal daring and ludic complexity it aligns closely with the Goldsmiths’ remit “to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”… The book is an unalloyed pleasure, not merely for its myriad embedded references but for the light it throws on Eliots’s engagement with popular culture… Playing Possum is not just a spellbounding commentary on modernist writing but arguably a kind of apotheosis.’- DAVID COLLARD


‘I love the eddies and volutes of his anfractuous prose.’ - WILL SELF


‘A most stylish performance.’ - TERRY EAGLETON


‘Wonderful. What a joy to read a book like Playing Possum in the waste land of contemporary fiction writing in Britain. And how exhilarating to read a novel in English that is so serious it is not afraid to be comic and even at times absurd.’ - GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI


‘Playing Possum is a vastly energetic and confident book, a narrative that races along, packed with references and cross references mingling literature, film, time travel and visual art. Ninety years after the first publication of The Waste Land– and perhaps far too late – a modern day protagonist seeks proof of a murder and flight. A fictional investigator pursues a fictionalised – and murderous – T S Eliot from London towards a perhaps fictitious night spent at a hotel in Whitstable in 1922. The aftermath of his deed may have been immortalised in a suitably shocking painting by possible accomplice Otto Dix. Davey’s plot begins to tangle and gambol from the outset. The text – filled with dialogue, asides and allusions – is rich enough to repay rereading. Its time jumps and linguistic experimentation, its mosaic plot and dark humour is a joyful exploration of the novel’s boundaries as a form.’- A L KENNEDY


‘Playing Possum is hugely enjoyable and inventive. The precisely crafted prose crackles with exuberance, plays games with tones of voice, switches from po-faced parody to understated allusion. It is an exhilarating fairground big dipper of language and styles. I relished the energy of the writing and the inventiveness of the tale.’ - BERNARD SHARRATT


‘The year is 1922, the same year The Waste Land was published. That poem is famously made up of snippets of overheard conversation and found quotations and there is a large slice of this in Playing Possum too. Part of the pleasure for students of Eliot will be in tracing the references. The novel is full of the most astonishing and vivid writing. It’s almost as if the author is channelling the spirit of 1922 directly on to the page, as if he’s fashioned a time telescope through which we can look in on the scene 90 years earlier.’ - C J STONE

Kevin Davey is definitely one to watch. - christopherjamesstone
https://whitstableviews.wordpress.com/2017/06/29/whitstable-literature-playing-possum-by-kevin-davey/
     


Review by Leo Robson

Francis Spufford, Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York, Scribner, 2017.


The spectacular first novel from acclaimed nonfiction author Francis Spufford follows the adventures of a mysterious young man in mid-eighteenth century Manhattan, thirty years before the American Revolution.
New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan island, 1746. One rainy evening in November, a handsome young stranger fresh off the boat arrives at a countinghouse door on Golden Hill Street: this is Mr. Smith, amiable, charming, yet strangely determined to keep suspicion shimmering. For in his pocket, he has what seems to be an order for a thousand pounds, a huge sum, and he won’t explain why, or where he comes from, or what he is planning to do in the colonies that requires so much money. Should the New York merchants trust him? Should they risk their credit and refuse to pay? Should they befriend him, seduce him, arrest him; maybe even kill him?
Rich in language and historical perception, yet compulsively readable, Golden Hill is a story “taut with twists and turns” that “keeps you gripped until its tour-de-force conclusion” (The Times, London). Spufford paints an irresistible picture of a New York provokingly different from its later metropolitan self but already entirely a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love—and find a world of trouble.


"Like a newly discovered novel by Henry Fielding with extra material by Martin Scorsese. Why it works so well is largely down to Spufford's superb re-creation of New York ... his writing is thick with the town's sounds and smells and is rippled with subtle reminders that everyone shares the same dream of growing rich ... His writing crackles with energy and glee, and when Smith's secret is finally revealed it is hugely satisfying on every level. For its payoff alone Golden Hill deserves a big shiny star.' - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times


This sparkling first novel sends a young man through a gantlet of troubles and amusements in 18th-century Manhattan.
Within minutes of deboarding from the brig Henrietta in New York harbor, anno Domini 1746, Richard Smith seems to attract trouble. First the 24-year-old Londoner presents a local merchant named Lovell with a bill demanding 1,000 pounds sterling. It’s a huge sum for the time, and Smith’s sharp tongue does little to smooth the transaction. Next day, his purse is stolen, and that night, invited to dine with the merchant, Smith is rude to his hosts and nettles the merchant’s daughter Tabitha. Among other things, he abets her sister’s taste in novels (“pabulum for the easily pleased”). Before the week is out he is mistaken for a papist and pursued by a drunken mob in a marvelous chase scene through Manhattan’s much fewer mean streets. His rescuer that night, Septimus Oakeshott, secretary to the governor, will unwittingly embroil Smith in the city’s chief political dispute. Spufford (Unapologetic, 2013, etc.), who writes in the Fielding-esque style of the period and displays a sure hand thereto, packs so many surprises into this sprightly picaresque that an extended precis would be full of spoiling answers to such queries as: why does Tabitha limp? Why do Smith and Septimus duel? Is it because of their dark secrets? Why is Smith really in New York? And who is the narrative’s “true” author? Spufford suggests in an afterword that he was aiming for "a colonial counterpart to Joseph Andrews,” but there’s a touch here also of the Ian Fleming books that he warmly recalls in his autobiographical The Child That Books Built (2002).
A first-rate entertainment with a rich historical feel and some delightful twists. - Kirkus Reviews


Spufford’s first novel is set in colonial New York City, where—as new arrival from London Richard Smith discovers—things can get out of hand quickly, and often do. As soon as his ship docks on Allhallows 1746, Smith heads to merchant Gregory Lovell’s Golden Hill home to cash a large bill of credit. Despite Smith’s refusal to divulge exactly who he is or how he intends to use the money, Lovell gives him a variety of currency and coin and introduces the young man to his daughters, lovely Flora and sharp-tongued Tabitha. For two months rumors fly, as Smith exchanges flirtatious jibes with Tabitha, cautiously converses with the slave Zephyra, drinks coffee with the governor’s secretary, is rescued from a Guy Fawkes Day brawl by the secretary and the slave Achilles, dines with the governor, plays whist with the chief justice, languishes in debtor’s prison, performs in a stage play, gets caught trysting with the play’s full-figured star, fights a duel, and stands trial for murder. On Christmas Day, Smith finally reveals his high-minded purpose for coming to America. Recounting this picaresque tale with serious undertones, Spufford adeptly captures 18th-century commercial practices and linguistic peculiarities as well as pre-Revolutionary Manhattan’s cultural hodgepodge. His New York bursts with energy, danger, and potential. His ironic, sometimes bawdy sense of humor and coy storytelling may frustrate those who do not “cotton” to the “cant,” but patient readers are rewarded with a feast of language, character, local color, and historical detail.
- Publishers Weekly


There is a tricky and perhaps dubious kind of suspense in fiction that depends on withholding information from the reader even though it is known to the protagonist. It can be a simple device to keep the pages turning in an action thriller – the hero puts some objects in his car boot, but you’ll have to read the next chapter to find out how he plans to use them to defeat the bad guys. Or it can be the mystery behind a whole book, which may depict all sorts of thoughts in the central character’s consciousness – except his secret purpose, withheld until the end.
Such is the epistemological structure of Francis Spufford’s splendidly entertaining and ingenious first novel, and it certainly helps to propel the reader forward. A young man from London, Mr Smith, arrives in New York in 1746 with a bill of exchange to the enormous value of £1,000. It is to be honoured within 60 days by a trader, Lovell, who owes this amount to the London company that wrote the bill. But who exactly is Smith? And what does he intend to do with his fortune? The novel won’t tell us until the very final pages. Opinions will differ about whether this is acceptable manipulation or just cheating. But then fiction is cheating to begin with – a fact often remarked upon by the novels of the 18th century that invented the modern form. In Spufford’s acknowledgments he describes the book as “a colonial counterpart to Joseph Andrews or David Simple”, the novels by Henry and Sarah Fielding, and in Golden Hill’s picaresque tale of the travails of an ingenu he has produced a loving tribute to the literature of that era.
Through Smith’s eyes we are introduced to a colourfully mistrustful Manhattan social elite, through which our hero stumbles with lovable clumsiness. It is a small world, 18th-century New York being 10 times less populous than London (and, as the narrator memorably describes, considerably less smelly), though happily Smith can still indulge his admirably serious coffee habit. Through the coffeehouses and other talking shops the scuttlebutt soon spreads that Smith is “a Saracen conjuror, and quite possibly an agent of the French”. To say too much about what happens while he is waiting for his bill to be honoured would be invidious, but suffice to say that Mr Smith develops a healthy interest in one of Lovell’s daughters, Tabitha, and she in him: they compare their own flirtatious sparring with that of Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. (Tabitha does not think much of novels: “Slush for small minds, sir. Pabulum for the easily pleased.”) Smith also finds a key ally in the marvellous character of Septimus Oakeshott, secretary to the governor and secretly the lover of his boss’s slave, Achilles. (The governor himself “had a massive and statuesque Roman head [...] like a slightly depraved but very intelligent emperor”.) The frolicsome story takes in, too, a feast, a performance of a play (Addison’s Cato), and a visit to the town jail.
But enough of mere incident. The third-person narrative voice, in era-appropriate style, is the book’s great comic triumph. Lovell is introduced early on as a man “to whom few things retain’d the force of novelty, and who misliked extremely the sensation when they did”. The novelist is also an 18th-century character, who remarks upon the work of contemporaries such as Sterne, and who on three increasingly funny occasions despairs of being able to describe a particular scene when its understanding depends on a clear idea of the rules and technical vocabulary of a particular activity. When Smith sits down to an obscure species of card game, the exposition becomes more and more amusingly unfollowable until the narrator gives up: “alas the explanation is bungled, but it cannot be recalled and started over again, for the game has begun [...] Still, the reader may now find himself in as bemused a position as Mr Smith; which is, to be sure, a kind of gain in understanding.”
Later on, the same thing happens during a duel: “The truth is, that I am obliged to copy these names for sword-fighting out of a book, having no direct experience to call upon. I throw myself upon the reader’s mercy, or rather their sense of resignation.” This “their” is an excellent pedants’ trap with relevance to today’s arguments over gender-neutral pronouns: we are accustomed to think it was overwhelmingly the rule in past ages to use “his” to mean “his or her”, but in fact singular “they” was quite common in literary usage until the late 18th century. The whole line, of course, is also a joke about the historical novelist’s method of finding things out from books. Throughout Golden Hill, Spufford creates vivid, painterly scenes of street and salon life, yet one never feels as though a historical detail has been inserted just because he knew about it. (One may contrast, for example, Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, for all its intermittent brilliance.) Here is deep research worn refreshingly lightly. Sense is never harmed by a fanatical disdain for linguistic anachronism, and the odd piece of period punctuation practice (a colon followed by a dash), or the restrained use of the Capitalization of Nouns (only in letters sent by one character to another), sketch verbal atmosphere without undue alienation.
The whole thing, then, is a first-class period entertainment, until at length it becomes something more serious. The comedy gives way to darker tones, and Smith’s secret is at last revealed – but the novel, most pleasingly, still has one more trick up its sleeve. - Steven Poole
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/01/golden-hill-by-francis-spufford-review


he eighteenth-century British novel appeals to an apparently dwindling taste. With intrusive narrators, slatternly plots, odd punctuation, and long, ambling digressions, books like “Tristram Shandy” and “Joseph Andrews” try the patience of many contemporary readers, and modern efforts to emulate them—Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon” and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle spring to mind—are frequently greeted with exasperation. Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding couldn’t help writing like that, but what, some people wonder, is Pynchon’s excuse? The appealing qualities of the period’s literature—its humor, its frankness about sex and power, its omnivorous curiosity about humanity and the world—can be squandered, by present-day revivalists, amid defunct slang, semicolon dashes, and promiscuous capitalization.


It’s New York in 1746, the lights of Breukelen twinkle over the water and a young Mr Smith arrives with a 1000-dollar bill. In the American tradition, but with a wholly original and inimitable English voice, Smith is an Adam in the New World, announcing himself boldly as a "new man… new-made". Across the city, among merchants, daughters, slaves, actors, rogues, runs the general murmuring: "Who is he?" Smith has no past he’s willing to talk about and, ahead of him, everything a man might do with a promissory note and four shining guineas in his pocket.
Golden Hill is a novel of gloriously capacious humanity, thick-woven with life in all its oddness and familiarity, a novel of such joy it leaves you beaming, and such seriousness that it asks to be read again and again. Life does not, of course, run smoothly for a picaresque hero: Smith’s guineas are stolen at once, leaving him to walk, "with what sadder steps and slower", like Milton’s Adam and Eve venturing out from Eden with "wandering steps and slow".
Not that anything goes slowly in Golden Hill: the novel, Francis Spufford’s first, is a riot of action, as busy with talk, troubles, passions and large breakfasts as the Merchants’ coffee-house when a brig is just in. Gentlemen leap from sash windows at midnight and escape across rooftops; card games are played for fortunes and reputations; sex is steamy because it’s in a sauna. Since Smith finds himself arraigned for capital offences with remarkable frequency, he lives with the intensity of a man both "new-made" and about to die – his energy matched only by the abrasive Tabitha Lovell, thwarted and explosive, determined to take command of the plot.
Colonial New York was a city with palpable edges: cows on the common could be seen at the end of the street. It was small enough that everyone knew that a wealthy stranger had just arrived, but large enough to contain every kind of person and possibility. We feel the dolls’ house closeness of rooms that smell of waxed wood and tea-leaves, and then, as dusk falls, a dim apprehension that beyond the familiar streets lie all the "forests of the night", a continent barely known.
In the stillness, Spufford’s characters feel ‘as if a piece of folded white paper had abruptly opened up’ to reveal them ‘standing tiny at its middle point’. Stepping into Trinity Church on a Sunday morning we see powdered heads bobbing above white box-pews, but can a novel record what happens, invisibly, in people’s souls when, "lidless before the lord", they kneel down out of sight? "Certainly, all the heads reappeared again looking none the worse".
Spufford is fascinated by what novels can do. Can they contain life’s "mess of accident" while also sorting out the muddle? Is the energetic narration of incident a "conjuror’s distracting busywork", holding our attention with arabesque flourishes, so that some tragedy can be smuggled away, as one would a playing card?
Ah, but Lovell has two daughters: fair, honorable and — wouldn’t you know it? — dull Flora; and stern, dark-tressed Tabitha, a woman of pronounced intelligence and bite. A fan of Shakespeare, Tabitha says, “I am not a great one for novels, ” even while becoming the fetching heroine of this one.
Smith and Tabitha spar exquisitely, claiming not to be at all like Benedick and Beatrice but fooling no one. “You make everything else in a room look dull,” a smitten Smith informs Tabitha. “Your face is more alive than anyone else’s, to me. All the other faces are dirty windows, to me, smeared with chalk and street-spatter; yours is clear though, to the soul behind.”
In 1756, London was the largest city in Europe with a population of 700,000, a hundred times that of striving New York. Smith is a man of the world, well-traveled, a master of languages, a master at fitting in almost anywhere, yet he’s completely at sea on land that is not yet a nation or even an idea of one.
Spufford has immersed himself in the 18th-century quotidian world on either side of the ocean. “Golden Hill” possesses a fluency and immediacy, a feast of the senses, without ever being pedantic. It is a historical novel for people who might not like them.
In a year already ripe with tremendous fiction, did I mention that I love this book? I love this book.
- Karen Heller  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/old-new-york-springs-alive-in-francis-spuffords-golden-hill/2017/07/13/bb324992-67ea-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html?utm_term=.abed423f337c





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 Not long after arriving in New York, fresh off the London boat, our hero Robert Smith goes to church. In 1746, the town is still in miniature, populated by a mere “six thousand souls”, many of whom are also saying their prayers. The scene allows author Francis Spufford to lay out his wares, presenting a dissection of New York society taking their places in the pews, from the Governor and his two African footmen “with wigs powdered to the colour of icing sugar”, to “a choir of blue-coated orphans”. As the faithful sink to their knees, Spufford takes flight: “From all the separate souls, in all their separate boxes, lidless before the Lord, arose the grumbling, lisping, rumbling, droning, hoarse, melodious, piping, muttering, murmuring, whispering, bellowing voice of the congregation together . . . ”These diverse voices, the beginnings of a city, are as much the concern of Golden Hill, Spufford’s first novel, as is his protagonist. New York — in unrecognisable form, mostly fields and thick with Dutch — is in its hyperactive infancy. It’s a town where everybody knows everybody, where the politics is factional and vicious, where they still toast the British monarch, and where a newcomer, such as Smith, can transform the landscape.From the off, Smith is a tantalising mystery. He arrives from London with a bill for £1,000 in his pocket — a large enough sum to make him the subject of frenzied speculation. He takes it to be cashed by Lovell, a local banker, and so encounters Lovell’s daughters Flora and Tabitha, the latter a sharp-tongued firebrand, for whom he falls. Smith’s purpose in New York remains obscure until the closing pages of the novel. The narrative gamble pays off — you read to find out. But it wouldn’t have worked without Smith’s seductive, near-superheroic charisma. He’s a leading man blessed with wit, sympathy and an unending capacity for trouble.Smith’s derring-do is in keeping with a book alive with risk. In that early church scene, Spufford nods to his forebears with the first of several leaps out of the contained world of his fiction: “The operations of grace are beyond the recording powers of the novelist,” he writes. “Mrs Fielding cannot describe them; nor Mr Fielding, nor Mrs Lennox, nor Mr Richardson, nor Mr Smollett, nor even Mr Sterne, who can stretch his story further than most.” This list of fictional innovators sets out Spufford’s literary interest. But the intoxicating effect of Golden Hill is much more than an experiment in form. Spufford — previously a writer of non-fiction books, including a memoir of childhood reading and a dramatic history of the Soviet Union — has created a complete world, employing his archivist skills to the great advantage of his novel. His 18th-century New York breathes, down to its minutiae — from the smell of the coffee and bread rolls in the morning, to the surprising absence of pox marks on the faces of its inhabitants.His style is reminiscent of the way Hilary Mantel dispatches her history as if she’d made it up herself. Spufford’s intricate knowledge of currency and costume, and everything in between, is offered up for tasting rather than forced down your throat. The overwhelming impression is one of glee, a sheer delight in detail — like the rector whose wig is bunched on both sides “like ear muffs”. He writes with unashamed abundance, rich in archaic and often incomprehensible words. Sentences go on for paragraphs, sometimes sweating a little under the weight of complex punctuation schemes, but always enlivened by sleek humour and delicate observation. At a dinner, Tabitha wears a dress of red silk: “she stood there inside it as if it were no part of her, like a tall pole which in the wind happens to have become entangled in a cloth”. This is wonderful stuff.Much will probably be made of this virtuosic work being Spufford’s first novel. If anything, it’s an advertisement for postponement, for starting late. This is a book born of patience, of knowledge accrued and distilled over decades, a style honed by practice. There are single scenes here more illuminating, more lovingly wrought, than entire books. - Sophie Elmhirst   https://www.ft.com/content/8ba3d510-315e-11e6-bda0-04585c31b153


Good historical fiction takes more than research. Henry James once said that writers needed to shed everything that made them modern to feel their way into a completely alien world view — a near impossibility. But this ideal historical novel, bristling with ancient prejudice, would be rather heavy going for a general readership, and successful ones often come populated by dismaying modern stand-ins. Noted non-fiction writer Francis Spufford’s debut novel Golden Hill— an update of 18th-century adventure romps by the likes of Henry Fielding — is successful because it makes us feel entertained and uneasy with the past.
In 1746, Englishman Richard Smith arrives at the office of a New York merchant with a bill for £1,000. While waiting for his money he attempts to hide the true nature of his visit without overtly lying, striking up a friendship with a gay civil servant and falling for Tabitha Lovell, his creditor’s sadistic and brilliant daughter.
Smith is a cipher even to us, the intrusive 18th-century narrator fortifying his mystery with interjections: ‘I do not want to write this part of the story, and am quibbling to hesitate’; ‘What, if anything, Mr Smith confessed, this history must not tell.’ These blind spots were conventional, primitive drawbacks to the early novel. Spufford turns them into modern devices to intrigue and tease the reader as Smith runs the customary gauntlet of debtor’s prison, angry mobs and wasteful duels.
Golden Hill isn’t a pastiche, though its characters are regularly ‘confus’d’ and ‘mazed’ and write bravura letters packed with capitalised nouns. The book takes what it needs from the old to furnish a new yarn and a freshly imagined look at America before revolution. New York smells cleaner than London but is strangely lawless and barbaric. Never mind the French scalps displayed in the market, sent as tribute from cooperative Natives. The townsfolk’s insidious attitudes are more unnerving.
Walking in rural New York, Smith is struck by its idyllic beauty before realising the land is kept at the cost of slavery. Playing an African role in some amateur dramatics, the novel’s nifty play-within-a-play, Smith is given racist reason not to black up: American slave-owners won’t want to countenance a dark-skinned romantic lead opposite their daughters. Strange place, where blackface implies progress.
This is Spufford’s first novel, but since the early 1990s he has won awards for liberty-taking non-fiction that feels its way into distant places or times, such as Antarctica or Soviet Russia in the 1950s. His early New York feels no less real. - Jonathan McAloon  https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/francis-spufford-makes-history-the-pleasures-of-golden-hill/


“Well, I still hate novels,” says one character toward the end of Francis Spufford's debut novel Golden Hill. “They still seem to me to be tissues of exaggeration, simplification, a sweetness that falsifies; and now I know this truth from, as it were, the inside, having written one myself, and marked all the sleights and tricks required to tease out a very partial understanding, a perished cloth more holes than thread, into what seems a smooth continuous fabric.”
It's an occupational hazard, particularly in historical fiction: the exaggeration, the simplification, the sweetness that falsifies. Readers steeped in the history part of a historical novel will inevitably find the neatening anachronisms the writer thought necessary to tell the story; readers seeking the release and wonder of the fiction part of a historical novel will often find themselves bumping into blocks of exposition.
Francis Spufford is familiar with such issues, although he comes at them from the other side of the fence; he's the author of a number of well-received works of history and nonfiction, books like "I May Be Some Time" and "Unapologetic," his recent and very rewarding book on contemporary Christianity. He knows the challenge of working historical fiction into just the right balance of period detail and dramaturgy, and in "Golden Hill" he compounds that challenge of balance with that of pastiche: his fiction debut is a merry homage to the great novels of the 18th century, a carefully-tuned echo of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding.
The story begins along the most familiar axes of all fiction: a stranger comes to town. The stranger in question is a handsome young man named Mr. Smith, freshly arrived from England in the small muddy 1746 town of New York at the shank end of the island of Manhattan. He presents himself at the counting house of Lovell & Company bearing a bill drawn by their London colleagues – a bill for the staggering sum of a thousand pounds. He expects the money, but he's in no hurry, and he's not inclined to explain himself, despite Mr. Lovell's wails of protest: “Do you know what will happen if I accept your bill, for your secret business, your closed-mouth business, your smiling business, your confidential business?”
Naturally, such a mystery so freshly stepped off the boat excites the interest of the entire town, and Spufford unfolds his subsequent adventures with a fine ear for the arch language of the day, and with a very satisfying feel for sly comedy. At the center of everything is wry, charismatic Smith who's as observant as he is enigmatic and who immediately draws to himself all the attention and suspicion of the townsfolk. Septimus Oakeshott, secretary to the Governor and the book's most interesting character, warns Smith that although the officials of the place don't know exactly what he is, they very much know what they'd rather he weren't: “We would rather you were not a spy. We would rather you were not a hireling of the ministry,” Oakeshott tells him. “We would rather you were not a scoundrel, come to spoil the credit of London paper in the city.” (In one of our first tastes of Spufford's knowing humor, Smith quickly replies, “I am not a spy or a hireling.”)
The book's multiple plots all extend outward from the one fixed point of Smith's arrival, which makes it a welcoming reading experience as well as an interesting one. Smith encounters the whole gamut of characters in the frontier world: slaves, mobs, molls, thieves, insurgents, and of course a love interest, Lovell's strong-willed daughter Tabitha. The American Revolution is still 30 years away at the time of the novel, but Spufford's many characters thrum and bristle with the kind of cantankerousness that bodes poorly for smooth colonial rule. “This is a place where things can get out of hand very quick: and often do,” Smith is warned at one point. “Take 'em as they take themselves, and [the colonists] are the innocent shopkeepers, placid and earnest, plucked by a lucky fortune out from corruption. But the truth is that they are wild, suspicious, combustible – and the very devil to govern.”
As faithful, even sometimes slavish, as "Golden Hill" is to its great template novels of centuries ago, the book has a one-two combination of twists at the very end that would have been all but unthinkable to the likes of Sterne or Smollett. These twists are pure products of cinema, not literature – but even readers who tend to fume at such gimmicks will have built up such a store of affection for this terrific novel that they'll be inclined to forgive all. With "Golden Hill" Spufford adds another genre to an already impressive résumé. - Steve Donoghue  https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2017/0628/Golden-Hill-is-a-terrific-debut-historical-novel-set-in-1746-Manhattan


Ever since Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from the Native Americans, New York City's character has been defined by money and con artistry. So it is that classic New York stories are always populated by a grifter or two.
Francis Spufford is a Brit, but he knows this cardinal rule of writing New York. His ingenious historical novel, Golden Hill (published in the U.K. last year), is set in 1746, a time when spies, thieves, card sharks and crooked bankers jostled the innocent in the teeming streets of what's now Lower Manhattan. It's a place of dark alleys and twisted virtue where Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls characters Nicely-Nicely and Angie the Ox would've felt right at home.
The opening scene of Golden Hill is also ripped out of the classic New York story handbook: On a gloomy November evening, a ship sails into the harbor and a stranger disembarks. He's a handsome young Englishman named Mr. Smith, and he quickly makes his way to a counting house on Golden Hill Street. There, he presents a bill from London investors demanding payment of 1,000 pounds.
The chief merchant of the counting house is suspicious: Is Smith legit or is he a con artist presenting a forged document? In any case, the counting house doesn't have enough money at hand — this is early New York, where a hectic variety of colonial notes, along with wampum, tobacco tickets, rum by the gallon and, of course, slaves serve as money substitutes. As Smith says to himself, "It was all money, in a world without money."
Stranded in the city until matters can be sorted out, Smith becomes the object of fierce interest, both romantic and political. Rumors swirl that Smith may be funding an opposition movement to the crown. On his first morning in the city, while he's eating in a coffee house, Smith is warned, as many an out-of-towner since has been, that New York isn't the city for him. A new acquaintance tells him:
"This is a place where things can get out of hand very quick: and often do. You would think, talking to the habitants, that all the vices and crimes of humanity had been left behind on the other shore. ... But the truth is that [the people here] are wild, suspicious, combustible — and the devil to govern. ... In all their relations they are prompt to peer and gaze for the hidden motive, the worm in the apple, the serpent in the garden they insist their New World to be."
Before his adventures end, Smith will get a personal tour of the city's taverns, theaters and debtor's prison; he'll be pressured to take part in society dinners, dances and a duel. Ultimately, the mystery of Smith's identity will turn out to be as multi-layered as that of old New York itself.
Traditional historical novels are out of fashion these days; most contemporary writers who tell stories about the past prefer to tell them "slant"; that is, riddled with intrusions of skepticism and fantasy as, say, Colson Whitehead and George Saunders both do in their latest superb novels.
Even Spufford himself has fiddled around with trickier techniques of writing about the past: His book Red Plenty falls in that gray zone between novel and nonfiction. But Golden Hill is so gorgeously crafted, so intelligent and entertaining, it makes a case for the enduring vitality of the more straightforward historical novel.
Spufford says he was inspired to write Golden Hill by the 18th-century picaresque novels of Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne. Spufford's sprawling recreation here is pitch perfect, down to single sentences that can stretch exuberantly to a page, as well as a comic narrator who directly apologizes to readers when events get too bawdy or bloody.
Midway through the novel, Mr. Smith writes a letter to his father back in England; I want to end by quoting a line from that letter, because it also so aptly describes the way Golden Hill draws readers into another world. Smith writes to his father:
"[I]f it were in my Power, I would take this Paper on whose other Side You seem to sit now, whatever the Months and Miles between, and tear a Hole in It so cunningly, that I might fold It out into a Door in the Air, through which I could step, and at once be at Home with You."
Golden Hill itself is that "Door in the Air." Give yourself a treat and step through. - Maureen Corrigan    https://www.npr.org/2017/07/10/536436007/golden-hill-recalls-the-dark-alleys-and-twisted-virtue-of-18th-century-nyc


Francis Spufford is the author of five highly praised books of nonfiction. His first book, I May Be Some Time, won the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Nonfiction Book of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award. It was followed by The Child That Books Built, Backroom Boys, Red Plenty (which was translated into nine languages), and most recently, Unapologetic. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College and lives near Cambridge, England. Golden Hill is his first novel.

David Hayden, Darker with the Lights on: Stories, Little Island Press, 2017.




Driven ceaselessly, hypnotically forward by a powerful, deeply felt narrative force, the stories in this debut collection pull off that rare trick of captivating the reader, while twisting the form into truly new shapes. Comprising compelling stories made memorable by an imagist’s flair for photographic observation and unsettling, often startling, emotional landscapes, Darker With the Lights On introduces a mesmeric new literary talent with seismic potential.


"It’s an open secret that David Hayden is one of the most interesting short story writers around. Why it’s taken this long for his first collection to be published is beyond me but I, along with anyone with even the vaguest interest in looking at modernism anew, will be queuing up for a copy."– Eimear McBride


"Quietly innovative, subtle of tone, full of feeling – this is a superb debut"– Kevin Barry


"One of the most startlingly brilliant and original debuts I've ever read. Hayden is one hell of a talent."– David Collard


"Very, very fine fictions, which captivate and seduce the reader ... Beautiful, luminous, and written with poetic economy and precision."– David Winters


"It's an open secret that David Hayden is one of the most interesting short story writers around. Why it's taken this long for his first collection to be published is beyond me but I, along with anyone with even the vaguest interest in looking at modernism anew, will be queuing up for a copy." - Eimear McBride "Quietly innovative, subtle of tone, full of feeling - this is a superb debut" - Kevin Barry




This collection comprises a miscellany of vignettes that are both unsettling and ludic. Eaten apples are regurgitated and made whole, squirrels lecture on storytelling, decapitated heads merrily sing as they bounce across the floor; David Hayden’s debut collection is a joy. Plus, Little Island Press is producing some of the most beautifully made books in the UK today. - www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/republic-of-consciousness-prize-longlist/


Darker With The Lights On, by David Hayden, is a collection of twenty short stories written in captivating, modernist prose. The language is lyrical, in places magical, the plot progression often surreal. There is a dreamlike quality to many of the tales which explore loneliness and reactions to lived experience. The agitation in the telling adds intensity to even the mundane.
The collection opens with Egress, narrated by a man sharing his observations after he steps off a ledge outside his office, high above street level. Whatever his consciousness may be travelling in has not yet hit the ground after several years.
In Hay an engineer is called to solve a problem in a mine being flooded by workers’ tears. His solution turns into a capitalist triumph, for which I constructed my own interpretation. The continuing presence of the giant haystack added to the deviance of this tale.
There follow several stories exploring disconnection: a man coming to terms with the woman in his life leaving by selling their belongings; a house where each physical object is a memory, although it is not clear whose; a man buried in sand as the tide comes in while others dance on the beach; a dinner party where nobody mentions the presence of a charred corpse ceremonially laid on the table.
A number of the tales take enjoyable events and inject them with a quiet malignance. In others there is sudden violence, barely acknowledged in plot progression.
An Apple In The Library has a customer borrowing the eponymous fruit which he consumes and then returns, his hunger sated. At face value this could be a simple metaphor for books, but I consider it unlikely this is all the author intended. In reading prose of such perspicacity I wonder how clever I am expected to be.
Much is left for the reader to ponder; the opacity can be disquieting and sometimes weird. Morbidity and the tarnishing of innocence since childhood is ruminated, although it is not a depressing book.
Dark themes may pervade but attention is drawn by the stunning imagery. Whatever my considerations on each story, I appreciated the author’s weaving of words.
This anthology would, I suspect, offer further insights on repeated readings. It is challenging, vital and eloquent; as unsettling as it is intriguing. - Jackie Law  https://neverimitate.wordpress.com/2017/07/14/book-review-darker-with-the-lights-on/

Constance DeJong, Modern Love, Primary Information&Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017. [1977.]


constancedejong.net/


"...a forgotten classic of narrative prose innovation."—Chris Kraus




"People used to tell me, if you keep on writing maybe you'll make a name for yourself," New York-based artist and writer Constance DeJong (born 1950) wrote in Modern Love. "They were right: My name's Constance DeJong. My name's Fifi Corday. My name's Lady Mirabelle, Monsieur Le Prince, and Roderigo. Roderigo's my favorite name. First I had my father's name, then my husband's, then another's. I don't know. I don't want to know the cause of anything." Modern Love, DeJong's first book, was published in 1977 by Standard Editions, an imprint co-founded by DeJong and Dorothea Tanning. In 1978, the text was adapted into a 60-minute radio program accompanied by the "Modern Love Waltz," a piano composition by Philip Glass. In this new edition, DeJong's debut novel is brought back into print, her dissonant shifts of voice and inimitable staccato rhythm made available to a new generation of readers. - Artbook




Constance DeJong's long-neglected, late-1970s novel, Modern Love, is one thing made up of many: It's science-fiction. It's a detective story. It is a historical episode in the time of the Armada and the dislocation of Sephardic Jews from Spain to an eventual location in New York’s lower east side. It is a first person narrator’s story; Charlotte’s story; and Roderigo’s; and Fifi Corday’s. It is a 150 year old story about Oregon and the story of a house in Oregon. Modern Love’s continuity is made of flow and motion, like an experience, it accumulates, as you read, at that moment, through successive moments, right to the end.
An important figure of downtown New York's performance art and burgeoning media art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, DeJong designed Modern Love herself and published it with help from Dorothea Tanning on the short-lived Standard Editions imprint. Critically acclaimed in its time, Modern Love is now back in print exactly 40 years since its original publication. Co-published with Primary Information.






The exploits of an eccentric cast are transformed into a showcase of the range and possibility of fiction in this reissue of De Jong’s 1977 novel, a rare experimental work that renders the shedding of convention with genuine joy. “Everywhere I go I see losers,” De Jong begins her book, “misfits like myself who can’t make it in the world.” Her main subjects are writer Charlotte and musician Roderigo, who are brought together in ’70s New York by “something essentially feminine and masculine” despite being “slow to accept the ties of love. Ties were loathsome and love was suspect.” Charlotte is fixated on Roderigo’s Sephardic heritage, which becomes a jumping-off point for an exploration of Roderigo’s exiled ancestor Ruiz’s arrival in Elizabethan England, a place and time when “the world was full of energy and spangles.” From there, De Jong leaps to the future and a hardboiled detective tracking down the now reclusive Roderigo on the coast of Oregon, where “the fantastic and the ordinary live side by side.” These radical shifts in setting, tone, and genre are bewildering, but De Jong’s authority over her story is absolute, breathing fresh life into the familiar premise of bohemian ennui. “One tiny insight is not enough,” she writes in acknowledgment of the limits her book for “losers” might have, “but it’s a start.” - Publishers Weekly


Constance DeJong’s novel Modern Loveturns thirty this year, and it’s out in a striking new facsimile edition from Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse. The book comes kicking and screaming from a vortex of polyphony. Its two hundred pages wander from the downtown New York of the seventies to India to Oregon to Spain in the time of the Armada; it declaims on everything from Elizabethan fashion to the joys of cohabiting with cockroaches, with a long passage that’s straight-up science fiction. All of this should induce vertigo, or at the very least whiplash; instead the novel enshrouds the reader in a kind of patchwork quilt, comfortable even as it frays at the edges. Seemingly frenetic, Modern Love is ordered with great care; beneath its constant digression it settles into a ruminative, almost stately pace, encouraging capacious feeling on anxiety, sex, death, and work, often all at once. “I’m fanatical about sequence,” DeJong told Bomb recently, “and how sense and meaning can be made from a system of order that isn’t recognizable as alphabetical, chronological—one that has a different mechanism to the structure. That has always been fuel for my writing, and it has never gone away.” —Dan Piepenbring  www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/04/14/staff-picks-conduits-cockroaches-colored-paper/


New York isn’t the tourist trap. Rather, it’s the idea of New York. How many dreadfully dull “acclaimed” novels published in the last half-decade continue to promulgate the notion that New York is an image of the whole world? And it doesn’t matter which New York. The glammed-out, rotting New York of the 70’s. The New York gallery world of the 80’s, the lacerating handsomeness of its austerity spotlit by cocaine. The sleaze and wack-ness of Dinkins’ New York. Enchanted Brooklyn. New York’s cultural capital won’t be outspent anymore than Harvard’s endowment will. In other words, there’s no reason to go there.
What a mystery, then, that despite being so essentially of imaginary New York, Constance DeJong’s Modern Love should be such a refreshing and often poignant read. Of course, when this book was first published in the mid-1970’s, New York’s edges were as jagged as they were brilliant. In that moment, DeJong’s was a dispatch of a different sort, a pseudo-magical realist report from the frontiers of the previous decade’s flamed-out license and lapsed utopianism. Ugly Duckling’s decision to return Modern Love to print would seem to answer the call of two present imperatives: to further the process of correcting the canon, cracking its vault door to admit more historically marginalized figures; to get those of us accustomed to viewing the world’s intractability through lenses of gentrification, climate change and white supremacy thinking again about what revolution really entails. To that end, Modern Love doesn’t elevate dropping out as much as it asks those questions about individual choice — e.g., can you sell out to yourself? — that bedevil anyone hoping to reshape reality through the mere act of making.
Modern Love‘s own reliance upon well-established avant-garde tropes and violations of readerly expectations reflects the compass of this conundrum. The plot — young creatives navigate the interpersonal and professional frustrations of “having it all”; a life of the mind as well as a table with food on it — loses its own thread in “free love” and post-coital philosophy seminars as narrators shift from paragraph to paragraph and characters both change names and swap personalities. Whole pages are lifted from the annals of the Northern Renaissance and Dr. Strange comic books, and, like The New York Dolls, the entire enterprise revels in overtly aestheticized ugliness. The book’s very first line reads, “Everywhere I go I see losers.”
Indeed, from La Boheme to the amateur anthropologists taking buses to gawk at the native peoples of Haight-Ashbury, subculture has long been an object of some prurience. Modern Love gleefully (re)presents all the offenses with which lookie-loos having their first encounter with the demimonde long to stoke their disgust. (John Gardner would have hated this book. One can even imagine it serving as one of the models for October Light‘s high caloric trash novel-within-a-novel, Smugglers of Lost Souls’ Rock.) Which is also to say that Modern Love is something much more significant than a chronicle or document: it is, like the city at its actual best, a miscellany of sensibilities. Which is also to say it’s an exercise in form.
In place of a linear narrative’s hierarchies, Modern Love disappears into the wardrobe of literary types and, rather than playing dress up, digs in for a long purge. Orlando and The Nova Trilogy. Herman Hesse and Jorge Luis Borges. Raintree County and Peyton Place. As serial as soap opera and as sincere as a Very Special Episode, Modern Love‘s central fantasy turns on a very cosmopolitan conceit: that one can honor one’s origins most by successfully escaping them. Those two aspiring artists to whom the novel’s chapters circle back again and again — a female writer, a male musician — are both transplants from the suburbs of more middling American cities. Their ambition stems from a vague recognition that who they are is out of alignment with their destiny.
To point out that this quandary is not unique to New York is to quibble. The problem with Hollywood is that it washes out the real personalities of its stars and replaces them with wholesome nullities. What currency is more universal? (No question celebrity shadows the consciousnesses who occupy this book.) New York, however, mortifies. It’s blissfully, viciously unconcerned with where anyone comes from, because, in New York, there is no other place. “So much,” as DeJong writes, “for the melting pot.” Not surprisingly, the most affecting moments in Modern Love revolve around these characters as they confess their lasting fealties to their differing, and differently complicated, Midwestern parentages.
If self-invention is America’s most practiced secular religion, complete with its own catechisms of transcendence, then Modern Love is wise to squint at the artist’s faith in what as well as how their labor creates. Success dooms every art project, the ulterior motive of which becomes to vault its maker to the status of Artist. Yet nowhere is freedom less free from the high cost of impossible choices than in New York. Because, as much as artists protest the systemic inequities that make sticking to their principles so difficult, in the Art World, everything from success to failure ends up being personal. In one of Modern Love’s more overtly feminist narrative threads, love turns to hate as Rita (also known as Fifi Corday), a Parisian actress (or maybe she’s a dancer?) dramatizes her ten-year relationship with Jacques before an appreciative, if private audience. He accuses her of robbing him of his ideas, his genius, making a mockery of his life’s work — not that he’s made anything. But Art is male energy in this equation, and there’s only so much subjectivity to go around. Let’s call it an artificial scarcity of heroism. Either way, romance ends in sexist epithets and clichéd suspicions confirmed: “Jacques thought she’d finally revealed her true self. He’d always known that deep down inside she was a lewd crude, a contemptible woman. Now even Jacques was happy.”
The battle of the sexes exerts its gravity upon Modern Love, but you can tell DeJong is weary of the subject. During the 70’s, the Art World’s attitude toward feminine expression was still antagonistic, if not downright nihilistic. DeJong is gracious enough not to respond with her own form of nihilism. Instead, she’s as pragmatic as a Grace Paley. “The misfits I’ve been seeing everywhere, they aren’t real losers. They all have bank accounts: can afford to be losers. I’m broke.” All novels, of course, are commodities, and thus party to that system. Novels codify social relations, gossip, buttress ideologies by modeling personal desires. If pitched right against the axes of the zeitgeist, they can even be lucrative. But such novels routinely sacrifice the experiential at the expense of the thematic. While DeJong’s language can veer into perfunctoriness, the structure of Modern Love is a thing indeed. It’s only apparently anarchic. It doesn’t care about logic, nor does it follow the dictates of pure association, or exercise itself surrealistically. “NOT ALL COINCIDENCES ARE INTERESTING,” as one character muses in her notebook.
Rather, Modern Love simultaneously proceeds backward and withdraws forward. It’s in figuring out the often musical artifices underlying the novel’s double arc and keeping all its parts in motion that one feels most invited to connect reading Modern Love with pleasure. By the time we reach Book Five, we realize the novel has been leaving New York all along. The “whatevers” of the book’s final chapters betide themselves, quite literally, on a distant shore. Trapped by New York, these characters can’t be confined by it. Yet it’s not so much that they refuse to bow to New York’s pressures. In fact, their resistance isn’t active, or particularly “woke.” Rather, it’s contingent. Whether or not the accidents of the aesthetic passivity (that is, daydreaming) reflected in the novel’s own magpie design can bring about change where will cannot is a problem Modern Love is happy to leave unresolved. And that’s both a brave and exhilarating (non)-choice in an era when the novel has ceded its claim on the imagination. At its best, the contemporary novel is a fake editorial. At its worst? Another down-tempo, warble-saturated cover of “Can You Believe This Shit?”
Perhaps, then, its best to read Modern Love as a cautionary tale. Time travelers make the worst tourists. And all readers of novels are time travelers. The lesson of Modern Love can be summed up as, “Observe and be benign.” Which is another way of saying, “Interpret at your own risk.” This reviewer acknowledges that, in thinking about Modern Love and the question of why it merits reading, he is guilty of many anachronisms. That his circuit has not been the complete story of this book, or even its reappearing in 2017. But to unlo(o)se this literature means indulging more curiosities than any one reader can handle. So, read Modern Love because, after you’ve tallied yet another rejection letter, after you’ve sipped more shitty wine in that DIY gallery the fire marshall is soon to shutter, after the Baby Boomers have had history their way, and after you’ve survived your own Manhattan-inspired existential hellscape, what else is there to do but author post-modernism? Check that: rewrite post-modernism. And make no mistake: Modern Love is the Last of the Great American -Isms at its most nascent: its most sanguine and its most unruly. - Joe Milazzo
http://www.full-stop.net/2017/11/28/reviews/joe-milazzo/modern-love-constance-dejong/


“I’ve been seeing too many artists,” Constance DeJong tells us at the beginning of Modern Love. “I can’t go through life looking at how objects are colored, cut out and arranged. I’m no painter.”
It felt like a living paradox, a wink from page seven as I was just beginning. Modern Love was considered a piece of visual art upon its first publication in 1977 due to elements of the visual art movement it reflected, seen in performances of the text by DeJong around New York City. It was originally written in installments, assembled in booklets by DeJong herself, and mailed to 500 people with the envelopes ordered by zip code. The writing and sending spanned from ’75-’77, and here I was in ‘17, reading inside this historic, artistic feat, “I’m no painter.”
What DeJong means by “painter” is eclipsed by writing that expands and contracts, falling in on itself as it sings and breathes. We travel to India and Paris, through time and into the past, as DeJong develops a narrative form that is raw in both story and feeling, that doesn’t question its logic, that indeed forms its own sense of logic.
Modern Love has been hailed as a contributor to post-modern thought and as an emblem of the artistic movements of the late 70’s. It crosses and obliterates genre, forming its own idea of how to tell a sort of limitless story. DeJong read it aloud at readings and considered it performance, realizing that she had the words memorized as she practiced. She wanted it to exist in the present, rather than as a book written in the past, and to this day, it comes alive on the page – reaching into the mind and wrestling with the senses.
The story begins in a dream-like state of unfocused focus, as DeJong weaves through observations of self-worth and the suspicion that she recognizes the people who walk past her. In the first paragraph, she tells us, “I’ve started seeing the same people. I think I’m seeing the same people. I wander around staring at strangers thinking I know you from somewhere.” We plunge into a world of vivid, unbridled thought, of analysis and memory and lack thereof. “I think I have to have a past,” she begins to muse at one point. “I think too much. A common malady.”
The first character we meet is a man she names Roderigo, because Roderigo is her “favorite romantic name.” We go on to meet more characters, people she admits to becoming, people she doesn’t just write about but embodies and lives with. She writes,
People used to tell me, if you keep on writing maybe you’ll make a name for yourself. They were right: My name’s Constance DeJong. My name’s Fifi Corday. My name’s Lady Mirabelle, Monseiur Le Prince and Roderigo, Roderigo’s my favorite name.
We meet all of these characters, and more, in different times and places. We meet them in the past and then they show up in our present. The story of Fifi Corday takes place in Paris – a sweeping, involved tale of her time as a performer studying under Marcel Marceu – and then transfers to DeJong’s apartment in New York City, where we find Fifi fast asleep in a corner. Monsieur Le Prince plays a strange, enchanting role, giving DeJong portals to the past from his home inside an ice cream store, only to show up in that past as both a villain and a lover. Roderigo’s story is the most consistent: he’s a piano player with various romantic interests, but even he is thrown between lucid and trance-like prose. DeJong’s characters are people and ideas all at once. She lifts the veil to show us where they come from: her. They are her.
The power of this novel is a power DeJong flexes, showing her control over the narrative circumstances in the most metafictional of ways. It’s confessional, in a sense—DeJong fesses up to her own power as the writer of this world, along with the options she has in wielding it:
[Something] tells me if I continue turning my insights into adjectives I’ll turn into a criminal. I’ll steal the splendor of this moment and commit it to a long, sorry sentence. I’ll murder people and bury them in gorgeous metaphors. I’ll mutilate events and objects, cut and arrange everything into pretty patterns. Into spectacular but empty images.
It’s the prerogative of the writer, and DeJong is frank about that. She can do whatever she wants, because this is all hers.
Modern Love is not just a book. It is its own form of art, one that pushes against the barriers of time and space. It’s an ode to creation, chaotic in formation, clashing and clanging as it whirls around itself. It’s a behind-the-scenes look, a broken fourth wall, a naked actor who is telling the story of their own life. It’s funny, it’s repetitive, it’s engaging, it’s dizzying – an experimental force that is, at once, all things. -  |Gloria Beth Amodeo  http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-modern-love-by-constance-dejong/




A History of Modern Love (as told by Constance DeJong)
Constance DeJong by Jennifer Krasinski (Bomb)





SpeakChamber, 2013.



Five, 1986.



I.T.I.L.O.E., 1993.


The following are abridged sections from a longer work of the same title which comprises Book 1 of the novel, At Night.


Well-known for her contributions to downtown New York's performance art and media art scene of the 1970s and '80s, and considered one of the progenitors of media art, or “time-based media,” Constance DeJong has worked for over three decades on narrative form within the context of avant-garde music and contemporary art. DeJong’s writing extends off the page through the body, resonating out of objects and into the space of the theater. DeJong extends her prose writing into multiple forms— performances, audio installations, print texts, electronic objects, and audio and video works. In 1983, DeJong composed the libretto for the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha. Since 1983, she has collaborated with Tony Ourlser on numerous performance and video works. DeJong has also been a writing collaborator with The Builder’s Association on SuperVision, 2005. Her books include Modern Love,I.T.I.L.O.E., and SpeakChamber and her work is included in the anthologies Up is Up, But So is Down: Downtown Literary Scene (NYU Press), Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT), and Wild History (Tanam). She is a recipient of awards from NYSCA for Media Production, NYFA for New Genres, and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Media Production, among others. She has exhibited and performed both locally and internationally at venues such as the Walker Art Museum, the Wexner Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in New York at The Kitchen, Threadwaxing Space, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Dia Center for the Arts. DeJong teaches at Hunter College for the MFA and BA in Fine Arts.




Constance DeJong has cultivated a career as a writer and a performance, video, and new media artist since the late seventies. In 1978, she became a published writer with her first novel, Modern Love, which she adapted into a 60-minute radio text. Famed contemporary composer Philip Glass wrote a score of original music (Modern Love Waltz ) for this serialized novel. DeJong has toured extensively across Canada, Europe and the United States, giving spoken word performances of her narratives and collaborating with many other successful artists. DeJong is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1980, 1986) and a NYFA New Genres Grant in 1990. Her published works include Modern Love (1977), Five (1986) and I.T.I.L.O.E. (1993). Her fiction has also been anthologized in Blasted Allegories, Wild History, and Top Top Stories.
In 1980, DeJong paired up once more with Glass, this time on the libretto and book for his opera Satyagraha. In the late eighties, DeJong began working with video artist Tony Oursler and has since teamed up with him on a whole range of projects. Joyride TM (1988), one of their first collaborations, was included in the 1989 Whitney Biennial. This 15-minute videotape offers a metaphorical exploration of theme park and museum culture. Presented at the same event was Relatives (1989), a performance collaboration between the two that integrated spoken word and video. To date, Relatives has been performed in some 25 cities around the world, including Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Zagreb (Croatia), Helsinki (Finland), Oslo (Norway) and New York (US).
In 1994, DeJong permanently installed a series of "talking benches" called Duets for Animals and People (1994) at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Washington. And in 1995, she began her long-term collaboration with Oursler and Stephen Vitiello on the project Fantastic Prayers (1995-1998), a series of performances and installations, a Web site, and a CD-ROM, all commissioned by the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. DeJong is now working on a new media performance project called A.D., along with Steven Gomez Dean and Thread Waxing Space in New York.
Angela Plohman© 2000 FDL

Philip Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right, Eruditorum Press, 2017.
www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/author/phil/


Eruditorum Press is pleased to announce the publication of Neoreaction a Basilisk, a new collection of seven essays about the alt-right and the end of the world. A book of insane philosophy for our insane world, Neoreaction a Basilisk asks what the left can and should do in the face of literally apocalyptic defeats. Equal parts menacing horror philosophy and snarky humor, Neoreaction a Basilisk is less a roller coaster ride than a runaway train plummeting straight off a cliff and into a strange and tenebrous abyss beyond human comprehension. While making fun of right-wing assholes. And Eliezer Yudkowsky. In other words, exactly the book you need to make sense of 2017.


A software engineer sets out to design a new political ideology, and ends up concluding that the Stewart Dynasty should be reinstated. A cult receives disturbing messages from the future, where the artificial intelligence they worship is displeased with them. A philosopher suffers a mental breakdown and retreats to China, where he finds the terrifying abyss at the heart of modern liberalism.
Are these omens of the end times, or just nerds getting up to stupid hijinks? Por que no los dos!
Neoreaction a Basilisk is a savage journey into the black heart of our present eschaton. We're all going to die, and probably horribly. But at least we can laugh at how completely ridiculous it is to be killed by a bunch of frog-worshiping manchildren.
Featuring essays on:
* Tentacled computer gods at the end of the universe
* Deranged internet trolls who believe women playing video games will end western civilization
* The black mass in which the President of the United States sacrificed his name
* Fringe economists who believe it's immoral for the government to prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth
* The cabal of lizard people who run the world
* How to become a monster that haunts the future
* Why infusing the blood of teenagers for eternal youth is bad and stupid

On the ugly fringes of the Internet lurks the future of far-right jerks. They are called “neoreactionaries” or, more fancifully, the “Dark Enlightenment,” a term coined by Nick Land, an expatriate British exacademic philosopher cyberpunk horror writer whose unexpected turn towards far-right politics electrified a bunch of people on Reddit. He was inspired by the works of Mencius Moldbug, a pseudonymous blogger famed for calling for Steve Jobs to be made king of California and tasked with maximizing profit for the state, and also for claiming that black people make good slaves. Moldbug is more usually known as Curtis Yarvin, a Bay Area software engineer who got his start as a writer in the comment section of Overcoming Bias, a transhumanist blog featuring, among others, the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a crank AI scholar who thinks preventing his ideas for sci-fi novels from becoming reality is more important than preventing malaria, and who freaked out once when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him. The confluence of these facts may or may not be the doom of humanity. And just wait til we work in Thomas Ligotti, Alan Turing, William Blake, Frantz Fanon, China Miéville, and Hannibal Lecter.
Neoreaction a Basilisk is a work of theoretical philosophy about the tentacled computer gods at the end of the universe. It is a horror novel written in the form of a lengthy Internet comment. A savage journey to the heart of the present eschaton. A Dear John letter to western civilization written from the garden of madman philosophers. A textual labyrinth winding towards a monster that I promise will not turn out to be ourselves all along or any crap like that.
Accidentally composed by acclaimed cultural critic Philip Sandifer (TARDIS Eruditorum, The Last War in Albion) it is initially only available in limited and 100% Kickstarter-exclusive editions. And what happens to it after that is basically up to you.
Want to know even more about the book? Well, I've posted five excerpts on my blog.

Excerpt One
Excerpt Two
Excerpt Three
Excerpt Four
Excerpt Five



The Blind, All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate PREVIEW OF THE ESSAY
A look at the strange, furiously torturous circles of logic that constitute the bulk of Gamergate, their paranoid scale, and their relationship to the aggressively faceless anonymity of chan culture. From Vox Day to Vivian James, a look at Gamergate in the tradition of “Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons.”
Theses on Trump PREVIEW OF THE ESSAY
Because every leftist critic’s got to have a Trump piece, my humble contribution to the genre. The sort of think-piece that notes, “he likes his women like he likes his buildings: big and decorated in gold.” And that’s still only the fourth thesis.
Austrian School Economics (guest starring Jack Graham) - DISCUSSION OF THE ESSAY
Come on. You know you want me and Jack Graham doing an analysis of the economic philosophy of Ted Cruz. Seriously, this is great stuff - a school of economics heavily influential in libertarian thought that rejects the applicability of empiricism and math to economics in favor of a textual argument from first principles in which all of economic thought is a series of necessary implications of the allegedly self-evident premise “individual people act.” And people who believe this have the gall to sneer at Marxism.- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2027287602/neoreaction-a-basilisk


Review is of the conspiracy zine edition from last year. This version has MORE content and has been through an additional round of edits, so it's probably even better :)
Let’s start by admitting I’m out of my depth here. According to the Kickstarter that funded this book, “Neoreaction a Basilisk is a work of theoretical philosophy about the tentacled computer gods at the end of the universe.” To say I am under qualified to talk about this book would be somewhat of an understatement. On the other hand, the KS also describes this book as “A book of horror philosophy about the end of the world, the alt-right, and an AI from the future that wants to torture you. Yes, you.” Which is the sound of the train slowing down just enough for me to risk jumping on board, I guess, though there’s every chance I will go kersplat in the attempt.
Still, let’s risk it.
I’m familiar with Dr. Sandifer’s work via his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, primarily - a project that watched every single Doctor Who TV story in existence, in order, and wrote about them, though it also encompassed far more than that - in fact, it told the history of British culture from 1963 to the present with Doctor Who as it’s chosen lens, basically. And as a Who fan, that’s always going to be catnip to me, basically. Sandifer covers, as you might fairly expect, a lot of ground in that project, but for my money, his writing was never finer, sharper, or more insightful than when he was taking on the subject of bullies.
Dr Sandifer really, really doesn’t like bullies.
Take, for example, this piece on Mary Whitehouse - in my opinion, the most brilliant and concise response to that campaigner, and the movements she represented, of any I’ve seen before or since. Notice too that this hits on an area of writing I will always find powerful - a fusion of the utterly and deeply personal with an understanding of wider political context and structures, and how the two relate. Also, anger. Because in the context of writing, anger is a gift.
So it may not come as a galloping shock to discover that Dr. S is also not a big fan of the Rabid Puppies hijacking of the Hugos. Because, well, bullies. To that end, he’s written what I again consider to be the best single post on this matter last year, in an essay called ‘Guided By The Beauty Of Their Weapons’ which I named as my non-fiction essay of 2015. And he’s since demolished Rabid Puppy founder Vox Day in a one on one debate concerning the relative merits of John C. Wright’s ‘One Bright Star To Guide Them’ and Iain Banks ‘The Wasp Factory', with Dr. S having the admittedly easier task of arguing in support of the book that isn’t god-awful (which, good job selling Vox on that).
Sidebar: To my mind the most telling exchange in that debate comes when, in the context of discussing notions of skepticism as relates to religious ‘truths’ Mr. Day says, with an apparently straight face ‘But Phil, you shouldn’t be skeptical about 2 + 2, should you?’. It’s a moment of such gobsmacking stupidity that Dr. S can be heard audibly floundering for a response, and I tragically cannot be heard yelling at the top of my lungs ‘you can be skeptical as you like about 2 + 2, and IT STILL WORKS! That’s the point of an ACTUAL truth, you idiot!’. I’m sure you had your own reason why that was a mind numbingly stupid statement, of course. You kind of have to admire an ability to be wrong on that many levels with that few words.
Anyhow, between the essay and subsequent podcast debate, Dr. S was well and truly on the radar of some fairly objectionable people - GamerGaters, Rabid Puppies, and the hulking trolls of the alt right and neoreaction in general. Whilst Guided By The Beauty Of Their Weapons eventually made it into book form as part of an essay collection at the end of 2015, I’d always suspected the alt right might be a subject Dr. S would return to, given his personal and political opposition to everything they stand for.
Which leads us, a mere 650 words after I began, to Neoreaction A Basilisk.
And the first thing to note is that Vox and the Puppies are entirely absent from this book. I mean, if you’re familiar with the arguments, and with Vox’s backstory, there’s a couple of deep-cut references that will raise a smile, but that’s not the primary focus of the book. Rather the book focuses on the writers and thinkers that Dr. S identifies as the key intellectuals behind the current Alt Right philosophy: namely, Nick Land, Mencius Moldbug, and Eliezer Yudkowsky (the latter, just to be clear, emphatically not an alt.right thinker, but whose work heavily influenced the thinking of the other two).
So, critical disclaimer time: I’m not familiar with any of the source material here at all. This review will not speak to the veracity of the claims Dr. S makes about these thinkers. It can’t. I can’t. I don’t know. If you have a view on that, fine, and feel free to write in, but understand that I will not have a clue what you are talking about and won’t be able to make a determination either way as to the veracity of either your claims or Sandifer’s.
Of course, there’s a way in which that makes me, if not an ideal reader, at least firmly part of the intended target audience. Dr S has repeatedly stated that you don’t need to know the source material in order to enjoy the book, and indeed has repeatedly advised against reading Moldbug, as it’s (in Sandifer’s opinion) irredeemably awful writing (which, on the strength of the provided excerpts, I’d be inclined to believe him on).
What this book is - or at least, appeared to me to be at first - is a takedown of the alt.right based on the philosophy that you shouldn’t attack your enemy where he is weakest (like, say, at the point of some third-rate-thinker-if-first-rate-self-publicist like Vox Day) but instead go to where he is strongest, the intellectual bedrock, and start there. Again, I can’t speak to whether or not these chosen thinkers fit that bill, but the extracted arguments certainly indicate a level of thought that your average VD type is simply incapable of reaching.
What Dr. S then does is deploy other, existing thinkers/modes of approach to demonstrate the weaknesses inherent in each of the founding principles of these philosophies. If that sentence just gave you a headache, honestly, I don’t blame you - it’s giving me one, and I wrote it. But here’s the thing - it bloody works. Dr. S has an amazing gift for rendering complex and sophisticated arguments and propositions in an immediately readable and understandable way, deploying metaphor, unpacking terminology, and adding humor to expert effect. You really don’t need to know anything about philosophy (I basically don’t) to not just follow the conversation, but be entertained by it.
And of course, he also employs horror philosophy as part of his argument, which is why we're talking about this book here. Specifically, he talks about Hannibalism (which attempts to construct a working philosophical approach based on a close read of the recent three season run of ‘Hannibal’, which is as deliciously deranged as you’d expect) and the work of Thomas Ligotti, especially his non-fiction book ‘The Conspiracy Against The Human Race’, which if you’re anything like me you’ll know about primarily because all the best lines that Matthew Mcconaughey’s character Rust Cohle had in True Detective season 1 got ripped off from there (and if you already knew that, more power to you).
It’s dense, literate, intelligent stuff, but I reiterate it’s also brilliantly readable. Even when he goes into his inevitable Blake riff (Dr. S is a huge Blake fan, and it’s something of an in-joke at this point that any project of any size he writes about will end up having a Blake section), the explanations and inferences are crystal clear, and it all serves the overarching thrust of the piece. Similarly, his deployment of Ligotti vs. Land I found genuinely unnerving, as the scale and depth of Ligotti’s nihilism threatens to overwhelm not just Land, but everything else, too.
As to the wider horror context, it’s like this: The alt.right scare me. Gamergate as a movement troubles me. Vox Day doesn’t scare me… but the fact that he and his little gang have kids definitely does. Tribal hatreds are viral in nature, transmitted across generations, and while I’d argue our societal immune systems have never been stronger than they are right now, the fact remains these strains are still stubborn and pervasive. I’ll never not be a free speecher, but equally I therefore see it as an obligation to exercise free speech against toxic ideas and arguments. To, not to put too fine a point on it, argue with and against bullies.
This is my design, be it ever so humble and flawed and compromised.
So the notion of a book that attacks the foundational texts of those movements, and even more, in part deploys horror fiction and philosophy to do it was always going to appeal to me. And for my money, Dr. S is always at his best when he is employing his considerable intellect, powers of argument, and yes, most of all his passionate anger, in the service of delivering bullies an intellectual kicking.
Ultimately though, that ends up not being precisely what this book is about. Or at least not the full scope of it. And I have to be honest, the end of the piece plain got away from me, as I suspected it might (as, I further suspect, it may even have been intended to). Kersplat, in other words.
But what a damn ride!
So in closing, if this has piqued your interest, I feel pretty safe in saying this is probably something you need in your life. It’s an exhilarating, intellectually stimulating, and yeah, disturbing read. - K. Power on amazon.com

Due diligence: I'm friends with the author, a backer of both this book's Kickstarter and his Patreon, and received the book through those channels.
That out of the way: this book is properly brilliant. Perhaps the best testament to its brilliance is that I've tried three times to express how brilliant it is and ended up a couple paragraphs into an inadequate summary of the first essay before I deleted my review and started over.
This is a book full of monsters--philosophical horrors that represent the degree to which the worst ideas of the worst people are strangling our world in their tentacles, with each essay explores a different branch of this theme, one of the tentacles of the skulltopus. One by one, it looks at technophiliac white supremacists, nihilistically misogynistic gamers, Trump, anarcho-capitalist authoritarians, conspiracy theorists, transphobic second-wave feminists, and Peter Thiel, exploring their ideas (or, in the case of Trump, who doesn't seem to have any, the psychic landscape of New York that spawned him) and seeking the monsters within.
But this is not simply a litany of all the ways in which terrible people are terrible. Instead, Sandifer repeatedly gives his subjects the opportunity to hang themselves by their own ropes, and shows how inevitably they do; ultimately, all seven topics are haunted by what Sandifer calls "basilisks," ideas from which they flee but which they can never escape. In this, Sandifer borrows the name from Roko's basilisk, a frankly hilarious incident in which a community of AI cranks accidentally reinvented Pascal's wager and terrified themselves with it; the concept itself, however, he accredits to Eugene Thacker's observations on the relationship between philosophy and horror.
Along the way are typically Sandiferian delights. As always, his ability to sensitively elucidate the bizarre thought processes of utter cranks is without peer; the first essay in particular is impressive in this regard, as it is constructed as a widening spiral through the thoughts of AI crank and Harry Potter fanfiction author Eliezer Yudkowsky, political crank and designer of questionable software Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a Mencius Moldbug), and drug-addled philosophy crank Nick Land. Throughout, one gets the feeling that Sandifer is going out of his way to be kind to his subjects, but it is not because they deserve it; instead it is to give them plenty of rope with which to hang themselves. The three ultimately come across, respectively, as a well-meaning crank who'd be harmless if not for the people listening to him, an utterly despicable human being, and a fascinating train wreck. The fifth essay is also a delight along these lines, as it playfully uses David Icke's "lizard people" conspiracy theory as a basis from which to take apart conspiracy theories as a whole. (But again, Sandifer's obvious fondness for cranks never quite crosses the line into forgetting that, for example, David Icke's ideas are repulsively anti-Semitic, or that Land is providing intellectual cover for racism.)
Admittedly, the book is not perfect. I adore "Theses on a President," for example, but it's definitely out there--I love the metaphor of a Faustian exchange, giving up his name to become a brand, to represent the kind of toxic performativity that Trump exemplifies, but I suspect readers less familiar with Sandifer (and let's face it, if you need a review to help you decide whether to buy this book, you're not) might find it a bridge too far so soon after being asked to swallow the psychogeographic approach. At least, I know I would discounted the essay at that point, if I didn't already have the introduction to psychogeography Sandifer helpfully provided in his earlier work. At the other end of the scale, the last two chapters feel a little perfunctory--particularly the last. Admittedly, it doesn't take a whole lot of words to say "Peter Thiel's basilisk is that he's an idiot who got lucky," but ultimately Thiel gets little more attention than some of the figures discussed in passing in the first essay--and given that he comes up in the first essay, it's not clear why he deserves a chapter of his own.
All that said, this is still a vitally important book, and more importantly an excellent one. I cannot recommend it enough--and indeed, I intend to recommend it to everyone I know who is even remotely interested in politics, philosophy, or their intersection. - Jed A Blue on amazon.com




Full disclosure: I was a backer on this book's Kickstarter. I follow and am followed by the author of this book, Philip Sandifer, as well as the co-author of the Austrian School essay, Jack Graham. Now that that's out of the way: Neoreaction a Basilisk is one of the most important books of 2017. Allegedly a text on the Alt-Right's intellectual branch (a group who is flagrantly Cobra right down to the snake fetish), the book reveals itself to be a work of horror as our humble narrator is slowly driven mad by the monstrously foolish forces that are influencing the world. (A more accurate description of Sandifer's approach would be that of someone walking in a storm talking about the rain and how he can't go inside the houses he occasionally points out. It's better than it sounds.) Of course, that's just the titular essay. The book dives into other subject matters including the Trump election, TERFs, Gamergate, and Lizard People. The book dives into these subjects with the wit and anger expected of someone who cut his teeth within forum culture. Despite minor gripes, the book is still highly recommended if only for the essay on GamerGate, effectively closing the book on the subject. It's the perfect gift for the angry leftist in your family. - Sean Dillon on amazon.com


I should start this review with a few simple reasons why you should read Neoreaction: A Basilisk.

B) If you are a professional researcher working in any study of the sociology of knowledge, the nature of knowledge, facticity, or truth. Especially if you want your research to affect wider audiences than fellow academics in your field. If you want to study and write about the nature of knowledge not only as an academic, in other words, but as a public intellectual.

C) If you simply enjoy reading complex, insightful, informative books of theory and analysis. 

Philip Sandifer is himself a public intellectual, at least on an independent scale. A former academic, he is a fully credentialed to be a professor of literature and literary theory. His primary career is as a publisher and author of literary theory, running Eruditorum Press. In the interests of objectivity, I should state that he and I correspond regularly as colleagues in independent publishing and professional blogging, and as internet friends. He was an interview subject for my “Beyond the Academy” essay for SERRC.[1] And I threw in $5 to the Kickstarter that funded this project and its affiliated essays and creations, because I thought he would produce a good product.
What Neoreaction: A Basilisk Is About
Neoreaction: A Basilisk is not a perfect book, though it is a brilliant book. Its analysis proceeds in a spiralling style that many accustomed to more traditionally-written theoretical books will find disorienting. Its concluding analysis appears disconnected from its main body as a research area, though it is linked thematically. The main research area of the book doesn’t cover nearly the range of authors and sub-disciplines as many academic sub-disciplines of epistemology or political theory, though that is largely an inescapable function of the subject matter.
Neoreaction is an analysis of the contemporary, largely American political movement of reactionaries—the overlapping communities of the alt-right, neoreactionaries, and Dark Enlightenment—usually often libertarian in philosophy and white supremacist in ideology. They are best known for racist and misogynist online attack mobs, a hatred for so-called “political correctness,” and a conception of free speech as the inalienable right to be racist, sexist, homophobic, and cruel to whomever they wish in public. Their first major campaign was Gamergate. The most significant leaders for this new reactionary movement are Milo Yiannopolous of Brietbart News and Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Sandifer does not spend much (or any) time on these figures, thankfully. His is a philosophical analysis of the three men whose ideas formed the movement’s theoretical core. They are author and think-tank head Eliezer Yudkowsky, software engineer Curtis Yarvin (who blogged his key texts for the movement under the name Mencius Moldbug), and academic philosopher Nick Land. Land literally wrote the book on neoreaction’s ideology, The Dark Enlightenment. Land and Yarvin are openly allies with the new reactionary movement, while Yudkowsky counts many reactionaries among his fanbase despite finding their racist politics disgusting. Yarvin and Yudkowsky also receive financial patronage from billionaire Trumpist Peter Thiel, as part of his investments in the Silicon Valley startup Urbit and the transhumanist artificial intelligence project MIRI, respectively.
The activist, artistic, political, academic, and business communities that surround and entwine neoreaction is a confusing bricolage of different actors and ideologies. Sandifer focusses on that philosophical triptych to understand the ideas underlying the West’s most powerful anti-democratic social movement operating today. While his analysis has many facets, the one most relevant to SERRC is how he understands the neoreactionary conception of reason and truth. Fitting for a movement that considers democracy and anti-racism a mistake, that conception resurrects a model of rationality that just about every professional in the theory of knowledge considers long-discredited and obsolete.
Rationality as Pure Reason, The One Self-Consistent Truth
A noble dream lies behind the filth and rage of neoreaction. That dream is a vision of truth as a simple clarity—there are facts and falsehoods and truth is univocal, a simple matter of right and wrong. Human progress comes from being less wrong, more rational, refining our faculties of knowledge, overcoming our biases, attaining a more perfect, more objective, more universal rationality. The embryo of the movement lived in the community pages of Yudkowsky’s blog LessWrong, a website dedicated to refining human rationality.
Yudkowsky’s primary vision for LessWrong (and the group blog from which it spun off, Overcoming Bias) was to introduce his own theoretical approach to bring human intuition more in line with the perfection of mathematical and statistical knowledge. Of course, his own and his community’s ignorance begins here, since mathematical knowledge does not operate with absolute and universal precision. But Yudkowsky asserted that it did, and that several tools cherry-picked from probability theory and physics would make a solid framework for a purified reason, where problems become steadily simpler, distinctions of true and false more stark and easily decidable.
This inspires directly the community’s political extremism—the alt-right’s disgust at any perspective or experience that introduces complexity to their simple view of the world. Yarvin’s political philosophy is built on such a stark simplicity—that the sole purpose of government is to maximize a society’s profit through unification and authoritative control. Sandifer insightfully calls it the political theory of a pathologically single-minded engineer: the right solution can only be the most simple and elegant, perfect geometry. A desire to understand the world with total clarity articulates itself politically as authoritarianism. The question of what it is right to do becomes the simple question of what the Leader has ordered.
Yarvin’s approach is fairly clear by about the fourth chapter of his seven-chapter Neoreaction: A Basilisk, though he examines neoreactionary political philosophy in detail in the first two chapters. Sandifer’s circuituous style is a benefit if you come to the book looking for a complex engagement with a multifaceted social phenomenon that contains many internal paradoxes and conflicts. But you would consider it a detriment if you primarily want a straightforward analysis of the alt-right’s philosophy of politics, knowledge, and truth.
It can be difficult to identify at first glance where the primary failure lies in the alt-right’s embrace of such an unrealistic conception of truth. The alt-right/neoreactionary movement itself often embraces willful ignorance in the name of fighting political correctness. That includes their willful ignorance of the cutting edge research in rationality and truth that many SERRC contributors and our wider academic community do. At the same time, I cannot help but wonder if there is also a failure in the academic community of social epistemologists and other theorists of how complex knowledge can be to reach these people. The general critique of the insular nature of professional academic communications applies.
Yet that same critique ultimately applies to the LessWrong community as well, in their pursuit of a rationality perfected beyond what many here in the SERRC community consider humanly possible. My own undergraduate education in philosophy, with its home in a self-consciously Kantian department, supplied me a narrative of modern philosophy’s history that is quite useful here. Attempts to perfect knowledge and reason to achieve a perfect geometric simplicity break down through the project’s inescapable paradoxes. One can save that project only by betraying it, introducing limits of pure reason, patches, and no-man’s-lands where we must admit that the world is more complicated than the simple geometry we wanted to apply to it. For the neoreactionary movement and its leading philosophers, that compromise is a moment of horror.
Applying Decision Theory to a Transhumanist Vision
The horror that drives neoreaction is not that which mainstream liberal thought about racism typically associates with such movements—the race wars of Hitler’s or D.W. Griffith’s imaginations, for example. It is instead the spectre of transhumanism’s failure. Instead of humanity becoming god-like, humanity destroys ourselves. A vision of utopia has been traded in for a vision of a yawning abyss. Neoreaction: A Basilisk discusses two paths to this horror in the works of Yudkowsky and Land. Yudkowsky’s own artificial intelligence research company, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, is committed to the most optimistic ideal of transhumanism: immortality. Specifically, the immortality of the human mind’s merger with post-Singularity artificial intelligence, conquering death through upload to a super-powerful AI. This hope was hideously perverted by a thought experiment that arose in the LessWrong community and gave Sandifer’s book its title, Roko’s Basilisk.
Roko’s Basilisk is a triumph of paranoia at an intensity and absurdity rarely seen outside the works of Philip K. Dick. Roko’s Basilisk makes an abyss of the transhumanist vision; instead of a happy immortality as an upload to an artificial intelligence mainframe, your immortal existence in silicon is defined by constant and horrifying torture. All this is a matter of a calculation in timeless decision theory.
Here is a very fast version of the labyrinth of Roko’s Basilisk. At every moment when we think about whether to help build this super-AI, we weigh our preferences. One alternative is to join the AI project, and its consequences would be eventually building such a thing. The other is to do anything else, but if the super-AI eventually comes to exist, it will resurrect us in its mainframe and torture us eternally. Such retroactive blackmail is the perfect way to force us into creating it, so the reasoning goes. It is Pascal’s Wager by way of Silicon Valley, but whose God is inescapably cruel. It will offer grace or terror, and you have no real power to change your fate. With the power to simulate the entire universe perfectly, the machine knows your fate before you do.
Sandifer presents this techno-Calvinist terror god as an aspect of the wider existentialist terror that haunts the foundational alt-right philosophers. His analysis parallels Roko’s Basilisk with the seduction of the void in absolute, totalizing species death that haunts Nick Land’s recent work. He hints at an epistemological analysis in later chapters of Neoreaction, but his own focus is on the terror. I would like to sketch briefly how such an analysis would proceed.
Sandifer’s core hint at the epistemic flaw at the heart of Roko’s Basilisk comes when he chides Yudkowsky for thinking that the super-AI would think like a human. From one perspective, this is an argument about the human ability to imagine absolute Other-ness. It is a task well-suited to the science-fiction milieu in which Sandifer cut his teeth as a critic, and where the mobs of the alt-right first mobilized in Gamergate and the Rabid Puppies. But this most inventive of literatures still runs against limits. Aliens in the literature are not truly aliens, but allegories and parallels of human character and culture. Even physiologically, most alien species are mashups of earthly creatures or extrapolations of what would evolve in some specific ecological niche. The only alternative to these creatures of limited imagination would appear to be Lovecraftian pure others—creatures that can only be described through the psychological collapse of the characters who experience them. The same limits appear in our reasoning powers.
Let us accept that there is a strong limitation to the power of human thought alone to imagine the radically other—whether in images or in personality and reasoning. If an artificial intelligence as advanced as Yudkowsky imagines one day exists, we will not be able to mimic its reasoning abilities. So we will never know whether it would carry out the Calvinist blackmail at the heart of the Roko’s Basilisk thought experiment unless we actually encounter such a thing. The reasoning and actions of an intelligence so far beyond human abilities are genuinely beyond our comprehension—they will be opportunities for us to learn. Yudkowsky’s web communities were called Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong, not Perfecting Knowledge and Absolutely Right. In their initial presentation, they accepted human reason as limited. Yet timeless decision theory seems to be the tool by which Yudkowsky and his followers could genuinely reason as gods. At least, they believed so, using timeless decision theory to emulate a machine-god in human conversations.
I understand how tempting it would be to use timeless decision theory to perfect human knowledge. Decision theory mathematics calculate the relative utility of given preferences in the abstract, so we can know the best course to take in all such abstract considerations. And we can easily consider this calculus from a position abstracted from time. The problem is that such a position is also abstracted from human life as it is lived. At best, a decision’s utility calculations occur sequentially—every change in circumstance gives its variables different values. A genuinely timeless calculation ends up tied in knots, either from accounting for all the changes at once, or roped into the vicious paradox of being a necessary behaviour that can only be a contingent and free act.
An additional failure of the Roko’s Basilisk thought experiment is particularly revealing regarding the nature of the neoreactionary community that has so many roots in LessWrong’s culture and norms. Yudkowsky and his community had no problem conceiving of the AI-god of the Basilisk as having perfect knowledge, the computational ability to simulate the entire universe with absolute perfection, and an eternal cognitive perspective from which timeless decision theory would actually be workable. But they could not imagine such an AI-god having a similarly advanced morality. Postulating that their super-AI would threaten and blackmail everyone who conceived of Yudkowsky’s Wager without following through on joining and funding advanced AI research ascribes it a pettiness and cruelty that is all-too-human. For all the cognitive perfection Roko’s Basilisk grants to its imagined god of an AI, its moral perfection remains inconceivable.
“Let us assume that we are fucked”—The Horror of the End
The above quote opens Neoreaction: A Basilisk. It is Sandifer’s casually prophetic premise for all of Neoreaction: A Basilisk, his declaration that every pathway into understanding the neoreactionary movement and its philosophy will inevitably either pass through or end in horror. Nick Land cultivates that horror in his recent work, and Sandifer offers the deepest engagement with Land’s work among the central three. Yudkowsky and Yarvin/Moldbug receive equal attention, but they are targets for explicit arguments against their approaches and ideas. Land offers the most to chew on philosophically.
Yudkowsky’s mission to perfect human knowledge and artificial intelligence ends up motivated by the fear that the final product of its success will blackmail and torture those who helped make it on grounds that they did not try hard enough. Yarvin explicitly advocates authoritarian government by a white technocratic business elite. Land believes that nationalist tribalism and the accompanying race war over scarce resources is the only social model capable of surviving our upcoming—and to be frank, already-begun and ongoing—ecological collapse. Sandifer rightly criticizes Land for, in Land’s own words, throwing his lot in with “racist little shits.” But Land is the only one singled out for this particular intensity of sharp contempt.
Yudkowsky has largely disavowed the alt-right and neoreactionaries who learned their models of reason, truth, and argument from his online communities. Yarvin has been an authoritarian from the start, introducing the neoreactionary communities to the noxious ideology of nationalist libertarianism. But Yarvin is also a largely terrible writer, rarely able to say in a few thousand words what he would prefer explain with a book’s worth of rambling tangents and rants.
Land seems to come in for the worst criticism because he should know better. His Lure of the Void is a new landmark in understanding the concept of death in the context of total species extinction, ecological annihilation, and cosmic emptiness. His work had the potential to supplant the pretensions and caterwauling of a thousand obsessive Heideggerians. That potential also included innovations in the form of philosophical writing, particularly its blend with narrative fiction in the sci-fi-horror novel Phyl-Undhu.
Yet his major philosophical follow-up to Lure of the Void was The Dark Enlightenment, an explicit courting of the nationalist alt-right, including many enthusiastic acknowledgements of Yarvin’s influence. The latter book outlined a political philosophy where the sovereign authority of the state transparently owns all material and people in its territory. Citizens literally become property of the state, and the purpose of government is to maintain productivity and profitability. Democracy, with its back-and-forth of opposition parties in power, facilitates rapacious consumerism and corruption instead of long-term investment. Land’s idea of democratic rule is for a government to consume so much of the nation that there is nothing left when the opposition party takes over.
Following the most radical libertarian ethos, the conceptual distinction between government and business collapses. To rule is not to be a steward of common resources and wealth, but to be the chief executive of the state and sole proprietor of all material and people within it. For Land, the highest politics is the unquestionable authority of the enlightened despot, managing a society that is also his property for optimal productivity and return on investment. Only under such authoritarianism would people be free from the self-destructiveness of their own greed and selfishness. Democracy enables greed to such a degree that it destroys the potential for the good life. Land approvingly quotes Peter Thiel: “Democracy and freedom have become incompatible.”
Land’s embrace of this terrifying ideology is rooted in the implications of the horror he sees in humanity’s future. As Sandifer rightly describes, Land does see the end coming, unfolding from the ecological collapse that the toxic products and destructive processes of the last two centuries of heavy industry have created. His rebuke to transhumanism is that the only way it could help humanity survive this crisis is if transhumanist technologies change us so radically that we become Lovecraftian Others compared to our current nature. The only way to survive that collapse without emerging from the other side of an abyss of the absolutely alien is a nationalist bunker mentality. You take dictatorial control of your resources and defend yourself with all the weaponry, fear, and xenophobia you can muster.
And the alt-right/neoreactionary community includes a lot of gun collectors.
Empathy and Creativity as an Antidote to Violence
The virulent white nationalism that has taken over the most energetic discourse of American conservatism is no stranger to us now. But Sandifer’s Neoreaction: A Basilisk is a major extended treatment of the philosophical ideas that pulled this community together. Many of my SERRC colleagues might find it disquieting that this toxic popular ideology grew in online communities dedicated to rationalism and post-humanism. Nick Land, the strongest philosopher among the alt-right’s thought leaders, has said that he embraced violent nationalism because, in the face of an ecological crisis that threatens to make Earth itself a post-human world, one’s best hope for survival is membership in a tribe that zealously defends its few precious resources from outsiders.
But Phil Sandifer is no neoreactionary, neither am I, and neither is anyone in the SERRC community of contributors and readers. So Neoreaction: A Basilisk ends on a hopeful note that empathy and creativity can be an ethical antidote for the violence into which the alt-right seeks to plunge humanity. But questions remain. What can be a source for such a vision of an empathetic society? What framework for social and political creativity can take us there?
Sandifer’s own answer is remarkably idiosyncratic, and perhaps that is the point. Neoreaction: A Basilisk ends with a walkthrough of the metaphysical and philosophical symbology of William Blake’s mythological canon. Blake has had no influence on the alt-right movement itself, but he has had a significant influence on Phil Sandifer. Significant engagement with Blake’s ideas can be found in prominent places in all of Sandifer’s major works—in his multivolume TARDIS Eruditorum on the history and political philosophies of Doctor Who the , as a recurring touchstone in his ongoing project on the British Invasion period of mainstream American comics The Last War in Albion. Sandifer also draws on an unorthodox, yet eminently sensible and historically-grounded, reading of Alan Turing’s imitation game—that computer (and human) intelligence does not regard principally language itself, but the ability to understand a different creature well enough to imitate her successfully.
But he does not intend his reflections on Blakean mythos and a Turing-inspired empathy to be an ideological template for the rest of us to follow in fighting the white nationalism that incubated in nerd culture and seems to have corrupted it beyond redemption. Even the alt-right community itself is fractured and plural at the level of ideological dogma. They are fellow travellers on a racist, nationalist trajectory with common roots in online message board communities, transhumanist interest, nerd culture, sci-fi and horror fandom. This philosophical imaginary is Sandifer’s own creative inspiration, playground, and vision. Each of us must develop our own, with empathy, creativity, and a love for the diversity and variety of humanity as the only common values.
For example, my own philosophical imaginary powering my line of flight to a diverse peaceful world shares some common ground with Sandifer, but is otherwise a completely different route. We share the same pop-cultural ethical influence from Doctor Who, the moral rightness of pulling justice from a fundamentally unjust world by breaking all its rules. But my own inspirations also draw on the tradition of emancipatory materialism in modern Western philosophy (the trajectory from Spinoza and Machiavelli, through Marx, Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and Antonio Negri), Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenology in the spirit of Talmud, and the history of liberatory, anti-racist activism in Canada, from the Riel Rebellion through the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation to Idle No More.
My own philosophical inspirations provide me with my more academic critique of Sandifer’s book. He describes his critical readings of Yudkowsky, Yarvin, and Land as applications of Deleuze’s technique of creating monstrous readings of historical philosophers. That interpretive method makes radical breaks with the mainstream conception of a thinker’s works that are nonetheless faithful, monstrous conceptual children that the inspiration would abhor, but recognize in his own work. Sandifer describes this monster-making as destructive, and uses that technique to expose the vulnerabilities and blindnesses of the generative philosophers of the alt-right. But Deleuze’s own spirit in monster-making was just as creative as Sandifer’s alternative path to violent nationalism. Deleuze wanted to make new, contemporarily relevant ideas emerge from thinkers long rejected or whose ideas had become taken for granted. They were radical redemptive readings.
Redemption is a path too terrifying to take with Yarvin/Moldbug the rambling egotist, Yudkowsky the blinkered think tank merchant, or Land the broken visionary of horror. At least too terrifying now, when the noxious political movement they inspired form the shock troops of a demagogue one election from controlling the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal, when their poison-fingered disciples constitute a raging online mob of hackers and harassers. But if one day, we can relegate American neoreaction to the historical trash bin where it belongs, redemption may even come for this sad trinity.
Sandifer, perhaps against his better judgment, may even have written that redemption’s prologue.
References
Riggio, Adam. “Beyond the Academy: Solutions to the Academic Brain Drain in Embracing Public Creativity and Leadership.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 5, no. 4 (2016): 71-77.
Sandifer, Philip. Neoreaction: A Basilisk. Ithaca, NY: Eruditorum Press, 2017. - Adam Riggio social-epistemology.com/2016/09/23/the-violence-of-pure-reason-neoreaction-a-basilisk-adam-riggio/The Return of the Reactionary (Part II) by Jonathan Ratcliffe




Philip Sandifer, The Last War in Albion Volume 1: The Early Work of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison
www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/tag/last-war-in-albion/

www.kickstarter.com/projects/2027287602/the-last-war-in-albion-and-other-tales


In the late twentieth century, beneath the surface of Britain's green and pleasant land, raged a war that spanned the heights of mystical transcendence and the most obscure gutters of popular culture. The stakes were unfathomably vast: the fate of the twenty-first century, the shape of an entire artistic medium, and whether or not several people would make their rent. On one side was Alan Moore, the acclaimed literary genius who would transform comics forever. On the other was Grant Morrison, the upstart punk who never met an idol he didn't want to knock off its perch. In Volume One of this incredible tale you'll learn how an ex-drug dealer from the slums of Northampton and a failed rock star from Glasgow made their way into the comics industry and found themselves locked in an artistic rivalry that would shake the very foundations of Britain. Starting from their beginnings writing and drawing comic strips like Captain Clyde and Maxwell the magic Cat and continuing through Moore's breakout runs on Marvelman and V for Vendetta and explosion onto the US scene with Swamp Thing, it is the fantastically unlikely tale of how the British comics industry came to produce the two greatest wizards of their generation. This is the story of gothic rock and obscenity trials. Of William Blake and William S. Burroughs. Of Hieronymus Bosch and Enid Blyton. This is the story of the Last War in Albion.

Philip Sandifer, TARDIS Eruditorum - An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 1: William Hartnell


In this newly revised and expanded first volume of essays adapted from the acclaimed blog TARDIS Eruditorum you'll find a critical history of William Hartnell's three seasons of Doctor Who. TARDIS Eruditorum tells the ongoing story of Doctor Who from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present day, pushing beyond received wisdom and fan dogma to understand that story not just as the story of a geeky sci-fi show but as the story of an entire line of mystical, avant-garde, and radical British culture. It treats Doctor Who as a show that really is about everything that has ever happened, and everything that ever will. This volume focuses on the earliest years of the program, looking at how it emerged from the existing traditions of science fiction in the UK and how it quickly found its kinship with the emerging counterculture of the 1960s. Every essay from the Hartnell era has been revised and expanded from its original form, and the eight new essays exclusive to the collected edition have been augmented by a further eleven, providing nineteen book-exclusive essays on topics like what happened before An Unearthly Child, whether the lead character's name is really Doctor Who, and how David Whitaker created the idea of a Doctor Who novel. Plus, you'll learn: How acid-fueled occultism influenced the creation of the Cybermen. Why The Celestial Toymaker is irredeemably racist. The Problem of Susan Foreman

Philip Sandifer, TARDIS Eruditorum - An Unauthorized Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 2: Patrick Troughton                    


This second volume of collected and expanded posts from the popular blog TARDIS Eruditorum offers a critical history of the Patrick Troughton era of Doctor Who. Steadily tracking the developing story of Doctor Who from its beginning to the present day, TARDIS Eruditorum pushes beyond received fan wisdom and dogma to understand the story of Doctor Who as the story of an entire line of mystical, avant-garde, and radical culture in Great Britain: a show that is genuinely about everything that has ever happened, and everything that ever will. This volume focuses on Doctor Who’s intersection with psychedelic Britain and with the radical leftist counterculture of the late 1960s, exploring its connections with James Bond, social realism, dropping acid, and overthrowing the government. Along, of course, with scads of monsters, the introduction of UNIT, and the Land of Fiction itself. Every essay on the Troughton era has been revised and expanded, along with eight brand new essays written exclusively for this collected edition, including a thorough look at UNIT dating, an exploration of just what was lost in the wiping of the missing episodes, and a look at Stephen Baxter’s The Wheel of Ice. On top of that, you’ll discover: Whether The Mind Robber implies an alternate origin for the Doctor in which he is not a Time Lord but a lord of something else entirely. How The Evil of the Daleks reveals the secrets of alchemy. What can be seen on a walking tour of London’s alien invasions.

Philip Sandifer, TARDIS Eruditorum - An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 3: Jon Pertwee


In this third volume of essays adapted from the acclaimed blog TARDIS Eruditorum you'll find a critical history of the Jon Pertwee years of Doctor Who. TARDIS Eruditorum tells the ongoing story of Doctor Who from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present day, pushing beyond received wisdom and fan dogma to understand that story not just as the story of a geeky sci-fi show but as the story of an entire line of mystical, avant-garde, and radical British culture. It treats Doctor Who as a show that really is about everything that has ever happened, and everything that ever will. This volume focuses on the first years of Doctor Who in colour: the five glam-rock tinged years of Jon Pertwee, looking at its connections with environmentalism, J.G. Ballard, neopaganism, and Monty Python. Every essay on the Pertwee era has been revised and expanded from its original form, along with seven brand new essays exclusive to this collected edition, including a look at whether Torchwood makes any sense with the history of Doctor Who, how the TARDIS works, and just what happens when Jo Grant, as played by Katy Manning, meets the eccentric Time Lady Iris Wildthyme, as played by Katy Manning. On top of that, you'll learn: Whether The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is the greatest Doctor Who story of the early 1970s. How Doctor Who is related to the prophetic works of William Blake. Why this entire series has secretly been about a very ugly yellow sofa

Philip Sandifer, TARDIS Eruditorum: An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years                    


In this fourth volume of essays adapted from the acclaimed blog TARDIS Eruditorum you'll find a critical history of Tom Baker’s first three seasons of Doctor Who. TARDIS Eruditorum tells the ongoing story of Doctor Who from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present day, pushing beyond received wisdom and fan dogma to understand that story not just as the story of a geeky sci-fi show but as the story of an entire line of mystical, avant-garde, and radical British culture. It treats Doctor Who as a show that really is about everything that has ever happened, and everything that ever will. This volume focuses on the early gothic-horror tinged years of Tom Baker, looking at its connections with postmodernism, the Hammer horror films, conspiracy theories, and more. Every essay from Tom Baker’s first three seasons has been revised and expanded from its original form, along with nine brand new essays exclusive to this collected edition, including a look at how Genesis of the Daleks changed Dalek history, the philosophical implications of the TARDIS translating language, and the nature of the Master. Plus, you’ll learn: How Doctor Who’s golden age was cut short by a bully with poor media literacy. Why bubble wrap is scary. The secret of alchemy.

Philip Sandifer, TARDIS Eruditorum: An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 5: Tom Baker and the Williams Years


In this fifth volume of essays adapted from the acclaimed blog TARDIS Eruditorum you’ll find a critical history of Tom Baker’s final four seasons of Doctor Who. TARDIS Eruditorum tells the ongoing story of Doctor Who from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present day, pushing beyond received wisdom and fan dogma to understand the story not just as the story of a geeky sci-fi show but as the story of an entire tradition of mystical, avant-garde, and politically radical British culture. It treats Doctor Who as a show that really is about everything that ever happened, and everything that ever will. This volume focuses on the madcap final years of Tom Baker, looking at its connections with punk, British comic books, the Kabbalah, and more. Every blog post from Tom Baker’s final four seasons has been revised and updated from its original form, along with eight brand new essays exclusive to this collected edition, including a look at how the Guardians can be reconciled with the rest of Doctor Who, an analysis of the many different versions of Shada, and an exclusive interview with Gareth Roberts about his many stories set during the Graham Williams era of Doctor Who. Plus, you’ll learn: How Robert Holmes deconstructed the Key to Time arc in its first story. Whatever happened to Philip Hinchcliffe. What Alan Moore and 2000 AD have to do with the history of Doctor Who.

Philip Sandifer, TARDIS Eruditorum - An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 6: Peter Davison and Colin Baker                    


In this sixth volume of essays adapted from the acclaimed blog TARDIS Eruditorum you'll find a critical history of the Peter Davison and Colin Baker eras of Doctor Who. TARDIS Eruditorum tells the ongoing story of Doctor Who from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present day, pushing beyond received wisdom and fan dogma to understand the story not just as the story of a geeky sci-fi show but as the story of an entire tradition of mystical, avant-garde, and politically radical British culture. It treats Doctor Who as a show that is really about everything that ever happened, and everything that ever will. This volume focuses on the bulk of the troubled John Nathan-Turner era, looking at its connections with soap operas, the Falklands, gaming, and more. Every blog post from the Davison and Baker eras has been revised and updated from its original form, along with ten brand new essays exclusive to this collected edition, including a look at who's fault the cancellation was, the influence of big budget musicals on Trial of a Time Lord, and an interview with Rob Shearman about the Davison and Baker eras and his efforts writing for the latter with Big Finish. Plus you'll learn: The secret Norse roots of Terminus. How the Morbius Doctors reveal the truth about the Fifth Doctor's regeneration. What it really means to be a renegade Time Lord.



Philip Sandifer, A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman


For over seventy years Wonder Woman has been one of the most popular and recognized comic book characters in the world. Now, for the first time, A Golden Thread presents a detailed critical history of the character. From her origins as a World War II-era avatar of William Moulton Marston’s vision of a feminist bondage utopia to the present day, this book looks closely at seven decades of Wonder Woman comics alongside her appearances in television and film. Through her many highs and many lows, this book traces the unlikely story of the world’s most popular feminist character.

Philip Sandifer, Recursive Occlusion



Philip Sandifer, Guided By The Beauty Of Their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs


2015 was a messy and contentious year for science fiction, dominated by the Sad Puppies controversy, in which fascist entryists led by Vox Day, the pen name of Theodore Beale, exploited flaws in the Hugo Award nomination process to dictate the nominees, selecting works that favor his politics in an attempt to, in his view, save western civilization from people who poop wrong.
This anthology of essays written by acclaimed Marxist occultist critic Philip Sandifer during 2015 starts from the Puppies controversy, presenting an alternative vision of science fiction grounded in progressive politics and the ability of the genre to explore strange and unthinkable ideas - one that holds that its primary value is its ability to do new things, as opposed to being in permanent debt to antiquated ideas and styles.

The book includes:
Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, an epic takedown of Vox Day.
A transcript of a debate between Sandifer and Day about the relative merits of Iain Banks's classic novel The Wasp Factory and Puppy nominee One Bright Star to Guide Them.
Essays on Orphan Black, Hannibal, True Detective, Janelle Monáe, Ex Machina, Mr. Robot, and more.
A lengthy essay on V for Vendetta excerpted from the forthcoming first volume of The Last War in Albion.
Recursive Occlusion, a non-fiction novella about Doctor Who and occultism.
An exclusive interview with superstar Doctor Who writer Peter Harness.
Many other weird things.




The Super Nintendo Project
A sequel to my unfinished first major blogging project The Nintendo Project, the Super Nintendo Project is a series of esoteric essays on selected Super Nintendo games. It is also a magical ritual to destroy Gamergate. 

Mat Laporte, Rats Nest, Book Thug, 2016.


—Exeter Examiner


Loosely framed as the nightmares of a self-replicating 3-D Printed Kid, the 12 stories in Mat Laporte’s debut collection are united by their thickly surreal premises. “Circle of Pigs” follows a mysterious group of cowboy hat-clad men—named Colorado, Texas, New Hampshire, and Vermont—through two rituals: pancake breakfast at the local diner, and a naked baptism by actual swine. In “Total Horror,” a blinking light forms a society with other blinking lights over 777 years. Each vignette is fantastical, thought-provoking, and deeply cynical—something like a cross between a René Magritte painting and an episode of Black Mirror.
Rats Nest’s greatest strength is its style: despite his bizarre scenarios, Laporte maintains a direct, journalistic voice that’s alien yet inconspicuous. This straightness allows room to reflect on how the events act as allegories of contemporary life—which is what makes the book truly frightening. Like the best dystopian sci-fi, Rats Nest instills the sense that things are progressing normally even as everything goes horrifyingly wrong.
While Laporte takes cues from plot-heavy genres like cyberpunk and hard-boiled detective fiction, his stories tend to shirk narrative continuity. Instead, Rats Nest treats us to exquisite portrayals of existential paralysis, otherworldly ultra-violence, and mind-blowing dei ex machina. It’s clear that Laporte—previously known for his subversive and experimental poetry chapbooks—hasn’t lost the impulse to interrogate the conditions of storytelling itself.
Luckily, the fruits of that impulse are satisfying as hell. Take, for instance, the 3-D Printed Kid’s report that “the word ‘pen’ I extrapolated as: 8% polypropylene, 1% tin, 5% ink, and so on. Of course, I wrote that with a pen and I must say I find that strange as well” (150). Blatantly visceral yet relentlessly cerebral, Rats Nest is not for the weak of mind or stomach. (John Nyman)
John Nyman, Broken Pencil Magazine


I am never disappointed by the books put out by Canadian publisher BookThug, and RATS NEST is no different. I picked this book up one Saturday morning and had it finished by noon. I just couldn’t put it down. It’s a story about a 3D Printed Kid who is descending into a bottomless pit and is sending recordings back to scientists of all the fantastical things it uncovers as it travels further into the ground. It’s nightmares and hallucinations become worse and more powerful the further it goes, affecting the world above ground as well. Although a fictional novel, through sci-fi and fantasy, this book reflects on the apprehension that many feel in modern society, the fears surrounding what the human race has become and where it is going. It almost reads as a series of short stories, but is in fact, a complete novel. Each chapter presents as it’s own unique experience, but is tied together in a hallucinogenic way, both real and unreal simultaneously.
It is hard to put into words what this story is about overall. It’s a very visceral book that evokes a sense of feeling throughout, rather than overarching plot. It’s incredible imaginative and moving in it’s commentary. It’s a story that provokes thought and asks the reader to ponder it’s creations and their reflections on our own reality. Laporte’s writing is so unique and beautifully crafted. I know for a fact that this is a book I’ll be returning to in the future. I’m trilled to have it in my collection.
—Jaaron Collins, Worn Pages and Ink


Mine for yours: My favourite fiction, poetry, nonfiction, film, art and internet of 2017 so far —Dennis Cooper’s blog


Interviews:
The WAR Series: Writers as Readers, with Mat Laporte —Open Book


‘Being alive is hella complex and I want art that reflects that!’ In Conversation with Mat Laporte —BookThug Blog


Short Story Month: RATS NEST, an excerpt and interview with Mat Laporte —All Lit Up


Mat Laporte, born in Sault Ste. Marie, is a Toronto-based writer and co-founder of the micro-press Ferno House. Laporte is the author of a tetralogy of chapbooks: Demons, Billboards from Hell, Life Savings (nominated for the 2013 bpNichol Chapbook Award), and Bad Infinity. His poetry has been featured in numerous publications, including Poetry is Dead and Lemon Hound. RATS NEST is Laporte’s first full-length book.