The NSFW Files: The Image, by Jean de Berg
This week in my ongoing essay series, I take a look at The Image, by Jean de Berg, a work of minimalist eroticism. Continue reading The NSFW Files: The Image, by Jean de Berg
Tag: France
The NSFW Files: Story of O, by Pauline Reage
This week I continue my ongoing essay series, The NSFW Files, with the controversial classic, The Story of O, by Pauline Reage, about a woman who desires to be dominated. Continue reading The NSFW Files: Story of O, by Pauline Reage
Commonplace Book: Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
An excerpt from Sam Beckett’s tragicomedy, Waiting for Godot. Continue reading Commonplace Book: Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
The NSFW Files: Our Lady of the Flowers, by Jean Genet
This week at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, I review Our Lady of the Flowers, by Jean Genet, about a drag queen hanging around with criminals and murderers in pre-World War 2 Paris, along with being a classic of the Western Canon. Continue reading The NSFW Files: Our Lady of the Flowers, by Jean Genet
The NSFW Files: The Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille
In this week’s installment of CCLaP’s “The NSFW Files,” Karl Wolff investigates the 1928 Georges Bataille shocker, “Story of the Eye,” a very early precursor to bizarro fiction. Continue reading The NSFW Files: The Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille
CCLaP Fridays: On Being Human: The Trilogy, by Samuel Beckett
This week in the CCLaP series “On Being Human,” Karl Wolff analyses Samuel Beckett’s groundbreaking “Trilogy,” where the famed avant-garde writer sought the essence of what it is to be human by stripping away the setting, plot, and characters of three small novels in a row. Continue reading CCLaP Fridays: On Being Human: The Trilogy, by Samuel Beckett
Translation Tuesdays: The Investigation, by Philippe Claudel
A balding conservatively dressed Investigator comes to an unnamed town to investigate a series of suicides on the grounds of the Enterprise. What follows is an odyssey of frustration, bureaucracy, and confusion. Continue reading Translation Tuesdays: The Investigation, by Philippe Claudel
What I’m Reading 2012 and Other Business
What I’m Reading 2012 Overview: I’m currently reading five books. Each poses certain challenges (in some cases, self-imposed challenges) to me as a reader, reviewer, critic, historian, and aesthete. While New Year’s Resolutions get broken seconds after they’re uttered, these challenges will form an informal backbone to my reading schedule. As it stands, I want to increase the frequency of my blog posts from bimonthly to weekly. (The same goes for my other blog, Coffee is for Closers.) The positive responses from readers has really inspired me to do more. As you’ll see with these challenges, I want to “raise … Continue reading What I’m Reading 2012 and Other Business
The Last Estate by Conor Bowman
The Last Estate by Conor Bowman is a rare miniature treat. The book, little over 160 pages, contains multitudes. It focuses on the story of Christian Aragon, the last surviving son of a Provençal vintner. He is nearly seventeen in 1920 and the shadow of his older brother Eugene, killed in the Great War, looms large. The hot summer has Christian conflicted by the opposing forces of lust and virtue, the former represented by the young geography teacher Miss Playben and the latter by the cantankerous Jesuit priest, Father Leterrier. Fr. Leterrier tortures his students with interminable lectures about Holy … Continue reading The Last Estate by Conor Bowman
Journey to the End of the Night (1932), by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
In the black heart of the Great Depression, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler rose to power, Louis-Ferdinand Cèline set the French literary scene afire with Journey to the End of the Night. By turns darkly comical, hallucinatory, and picaresque, the novel charts the misadventures of Bardamu. From the trenches of the First World War to French colonial Africa to New York City and Detroit, Bardamu experiences each place with his own jaundiced eyes. Eventually he returns back to suburban Paris, a small-time doctor working with impoverished patients. Bardamu is not alone. His friend, one Robinson, accompanies him as … Continue reading Journey to the End of the Night (1932), by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The Driftless Area Review 