Three decades after his death, the work of Romanian writer Max Blecher remains largely unavailable in English. Ricky D’Ambrose writes for The Nation about Blecher’s work. As he puts it, “Max Blecher is an obsessive saboteur of the breach between two seemingly irreconcilable positions: revulsion and lust.”
Adventures in Surrealism
Emily Gould’s Favorite Memoirs
Emily Gould, author of the new memoir And the Heart Says Whatever, lists the best memoirs ever at the Daily Beast: “A few themes run throughout: druggy, decadent bohemia, forbidden or strange sex, art, and power, and, um, cooking.”
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Still Fighting It
The “Albums of Our Lives” series from The Rumpus has produced a couple gems. In this newest edition to the series, Andrea Laurion takes on the Ben Folds classic Rockin’ the Suburbs.
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‘Tis the Season…
If your honey-bun doesn’t need another iPod or bottle of perfume this Christmas, consider Heifer International, a non-profit that lets you give the gift of heifers, sheep, goats, bees, rabbits, or water buffalo.
To Train Up a Child
The self-proclaimed Christian parenting book, To Train Up a Child, has come under fire in the wake of the three child deaths. Critics started an online petition asking Amazon chief Jeff Bezos to stop selling the book; over 9,000 people have signed it.
To the Edge of Sanity
Edmund Wilson famously said of the works of H.P. Lovecraft that “the only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.” In time, however, Lovecraft developed a substantial following, which raises the question of what attracted readers to his work. The answer? “The weird realism that runs through his writings undermines any belief system – religious or humanist – in which the human mind is the centre of the universe.” Related: Ben Dooley on the scariness of House of Leaves.
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A Reader’s Rebellion
“Trusting the literary press and the mechanisms of the market to curate the books we read and study is to hand over whole regions of literary curiosity and judgment before one even picks up a book.” On refusing to read. We’re not prepared to go quite that far, instead preferring our own Sonya Chung‘s practice of not finishing books.
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