Interpreting the Holocaust Dreams of Literary Puzzle Master Georges Perec
Georges Perec was a founder of the so-called OULIPO movement. The publication of “La Boutique Obscure” represents a growing interest in his work.
Sigmund Freud's Best Pupil and His Descent Into Madness
Wilhelm Reich was once Sigmund Freud’s best pupil. A fascinating but disturbing new collection of letters and journals shows his descent into paranoid megalomania.
Fan and Critic Both
John Leonard was America’s most eminent and prolific culture and book critic when he died four years ago. He published an estimated 5 million words in his career.
After Memories, Modernism
Peter Nadas’s ‘Parallel Stories’ is colossally ambitious. Set in Hungary of 1961 and extending to the falling of the Iron Curtain, it encapsulates an entire civilization.
How To Ask for a Raise, Over and Over Again
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise
By George Perec, translated by David Bellos
Verso, $16.95, 96 pages
Monument to Isaac Babel Erected in Odessa
Courtesy of The World Odessit Club
Hungarian Modernist László Krasznahorkai's Inner Animal
For almost a decade now, [New Directions Publishing][1] has doggedly been bringing the late, late Hungarian modernist László Krasznahorkai’s novels of impassioned decrepitude and finely cadenced apocalypticism into English. Next year will see the much-anticipated translation of his “Satantango.” To tide us over until then we now have the publication in the Cahiers Writing and Translation series of “AnimalInside,” his collaboration with German Jewish neo-expressionist painter Max Neumann.
Mind Your ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’
Poets of the Language School have risen to become the dominant avant-garde of modern American poetics. Any young poet needs to take…