The Oracular Room

The Oracular Room

Something has gone wrong in the “pre-established harmony” between Divine Plan and the Best of All Possible Worlds! Souls and even material objects are being reborn in a chaos of cross-identities and anarchic phantasmagoria: historical epochs and personalities kaleidoscope and intertwine, and, most spectacularly, 17th century philosopher-mathematician Leibnitz’s “windowless monad”...

False Documents

False Documents, by Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey), is a series of “Borgesian” and “Nabokovian” fictions, each pretending to be a “document” from various literary, commercial, or otherwise culturally-pertinent contexts...

Tequila Mockingbird

Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Carter Ratcliff’s Tequila Mockingbird is a sexy, urbane, hilarious tale crossed with a fast-paced, camp, social comedy, with a touch of thriller, told in the unforgettable voice of fashion model Fiona Mays...

Weather Forecast For Utopia And Vici

HORSE SACRIFICE

ZEBRA STORYTELLER

FORM OF TAKING IT ALL

HEGEL'S FAMILY

Vivid elements evoke remembered scenes or imagined constructions from history, dream or chance. Unlikely characters show up. A 15th century Dutch painter walks the streets of Providence; a young girl goes to sleep in a dark room; Charlemagne appears in a mythic terrain of sheer language...

CHINA BEACH

IF THERE WERE ANYWHERE BUT DESERT

UNAVOWABLE COMMUNITY

The Unavowable Community is an inquiry into the nature and possibility of community, asking whether there can be a community of individuals that is truly "communal." The problem, for Blanchot, is that the very terms of an ideal community make an "avowal" of membership in it a violation of the terms themselves...

Night of the Broken Glass

A fictionalized account of Nazi Germany as experienced by a German Jewish family, their half Jewish son, a German aristocrat and his wife, and a lower middle class Christian bus conductor who found himself unable to just standby and watch the barbaric gansterism of the Nazis.

SCREAMING HAWK

Scribble Death

In what has been called a post-modern Gothic experimental novel, Franz Kamin interlaces dream-narrative with death-event vignettes and revelations concerning the composition of the text. He links the scribbling of children, artists and dreamers with the hopes and terrors of obsession and delirium. Through all of this one may almost detect a somber chuckling from the authorial domain...

VIOLENCE AND DEFIANCE

DISTRACTED

SCORPIONS

BRILLIANT SILENCE

A legendary storyteller and writer who has charmed New York audiences for decades, Holst first evolved his oeuvre in the 1950s-60s milieu of Greenwich Village, influenced as much by sophisticated poets/writers (e.g. Hart Crane, Jorge Luis Borges) as by fairy tales/tall-tales which his writings superficially resemble...

Death Sentence

This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II, is the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them...

WHEN THE TIME COMES

WHEN THE TIME COMES ostensibly chronicles the troubled relations between the narrator-a very ill man-and the two women whose lives he invades. As in all of Blanchot's intensely subjective fiction, the true subject of the work is the narrator's consciousness and the process by which his tale emerges through its telling...

The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me

This work takes the form of a conversation, an interview. An obsessive questioning back and forth builds up Blanchot's narrative, with its sense--shared with Kafka's famous doorkeeper parable--that behind each question lies the spooky possibility of a further, more imposing, more insoluble question...

Vicious Circles

These early parables of Maurice Blanchot provide a rewarding introduction to a modern master; they also illuminate with hallucinatory intensity certain consequences of the hopeless and irresistible human longing to communicate through language. The world is still haunted by the ghosts of unspoken and unspeakable words emanating from the deaths here recounted almost fifty years ago.

Thomas the Obscure

Before Sartre, before Beckett, before Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot created the new novel, the ultimate post-modern fiction. Written between 1932 and 1940, Blanchot's first novel, here brilliantly translated by Robert Lamberton, contains all the remarkable aspects of his famous and perplexing invention, the ontological narrative--a tale whose subject is the nature of being itself...

Madness of the Day

Jacques Derrida writes (in Deconstruction and Criticism)of The Madness of the Day that it is a story whose title runs wild and drives the reader mad.la folie du jour, the madness of today, of the day today, which leads to the madness that comes from the day, is born of it, as well as the madness of the day itself, itself mad....