Last year, I went on a run where I read nothing
but Clarice Lispector, completely surrendering to her experimental spellcasting
and literary bewitchment. Ukrainian-born and Brazilian-raised, the iconoclastic
Lispector was unmistakably her own as a writer, searching for "the word that
has its light."
This brings me to my favorite of the Lispector books that
I devoured: Água
Viva.It is a happy birthday dirge and
confessional, a sustained incantation punctuated by necessary silences, a
chamber music concert performed in the bluest hours by a splintered soloist.
Or, in the words of Lispector herself, "This isn't a book because this isn't
how anyone writes. Is what I write a single climax? My days are a single
climax: I live on the edge." I read this book three times, craving the balm of
its lyrical hypnosis.
A meditation on the nature of life and time, Agua Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector's, Agua Viva stands out as a particular triumph.
I had long meant to read Bolano’s seminal novel and was not
disappointed.
With a revolving cast of characters, generating cross-currents of
intersecting subplots and drama, The Savage Detectives takes you on a
kaleidoscopic spin through the fringes, lore, and shadowlands of Mexico,
covering different time periods.
Part offbeat odyssey, part crime story, part
derelict dissertation on tropes and archetypes, Bolano’s multi-form narrative
comprises an adventure that is wary of its own movements.
Winner of the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize. Natasha Wimmer's translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times.
New Year's Eve 1975, Mexico City. Two hunted men leave town in a hurry, on the desert-bound trail of a vanished poet.
Spanning two decades and crossing continents, theirs is a remarkable quest through a darkening universe - our own. It is a journey told and shared by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, whose testimonies…
Though not a native of Japan, Lafcadio Hearn became world-renowned for
his Japanese “yūrei” or “ghost stories.” This collection comprises over thirty
tales, including the ones that inspired the iconic Japanese film Kwaidan.
Rooted in the folklore, tradition, and supernatural fancy of classic Japan,
Hearns will, at times, interrupt his stories with authorial interjections,
digressions, and ruminations, which creates an intimate feeling (as if the tale is
being orally presented to you in present time).
Covering a range of moods and
tones, from the cryptically bizarre to the ethereally dreamlike to the
phantasmagorically grotesque, this collection served as a riveting gateway into
worlds beyond.
The dead wreak revenge on the living, paintings come alive, spectral brides possess mortal men and a priest devours human flesh in these chilling Japanese ghost stories retold by a master of the supernatural. Lafcadio Hearn drew on the phantoms and ghouls of traditional Japanese folklore - including the headless 'rokuro-kubi', the monstrous goblins 'jikininki' or the faceless 'mujina' who stalk lonely neighbourhoods - and infused them with his own memories of his haunted childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland to create these terrifying tales of striking and eerie power. Today they are regarded in Japan as classics in their own right.…
In
this tale of love, squalor, and erotic surrealism, we meet Alex Fillameno—a man
of many words and few actions—who moved to Taos, New Mexico from New York seven
years earlier. Recently divorced and jobless, Alex has become a regular at The
End of the Road, the bar where he first encounters the alluring and enigmatic
D.J.
Drawn to her mutable sense of reality, the two begin a romance
that starts off relatively normal. Soon D.J. initiates Alex into the realm of
sexual transfiguration—where form follows dysfunction—and their lives are
turned inside-out.
What follows is an anti-hero’s journey into a nesting doll
world of masks and fragments, multiples and parallels, time-locks and trauma.
