Yes to magic. I’ll take magic wherever I can find it. As a writer I’m always drawn to the irrational, and that’s where I always begin.
Prosopagnosia – Sònia Hernández
Prosopagnosia is a metaphysical novella, a fictional vision of a permanent problem in human experience, rather than a dramatization of social tensions.
Insignificance – James Clammer
By portraying a seemingly insignificant but accurate world, Clammer has managed to produce a novel that in its own charming, offbeat, blue collar way, feels highly significant indeed.
ELADATL – Sesshu Foster & Arturo Romo
Experimentation like this can sometimes lead to cold, hollow results, but ELADATL also contains a heart, as well as beautiful passages befitting a scenic balloon ride through a shared dream.
It’s hard to have the trap attitude when I’m in the plaza exercising with the old ladies and their dogs.
Vormorgen: The Collected Poems – Ernst Toller
Mathilda Cullen’s translation of Ernst Toller’s poetry is a labor of love, recovering the all-but-forgotten literary legacy of an enigmatic figure
The Dog of Tithwal – Saadat Hasan Manto
Manto is an outlier, a freakish occurrence at a freakish time in South Asia.
Instead of approaching these works as cautionary tales that invite us to be grateful for what we have, we could read them as a reflection of a violent landscape of desire.
Spring and Autumn Annals – Diane di Prima
Di Prima’s efforts yield an ethnography of the “Beats,” of New York’s mid-century bohemia, but an ethnography that somehow eschews mythologizing, shorn of mystique, and self-aggrandizement.
That is the way a lot of these simple anarchist texts grab a lot of people. There is a sense of a weight being lifted from your shoulders and that things don’t have to be the way they are. You don’t have to fuck people over to survive.