Surrealist Occupational Index – Biblioklept
Published in Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, No. 2, Summer 1973.| Biblioklept
“Knocking” by Robert Walser translated by Tom Whalen and Carol Gehrig I am completely beat, this head hurts me. Yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before the day before yesterday, my landlady knocked. “May I know why you are knocking?” I asked her. This timid question was turned down with the response: “You are… Continue reading “Knocking,” a very short story by Robert Walser→| Biblioklept
Man Reading a Newspaper, c. 1957 by Roland Jarvis (1926-2016)| Biblioklept
Thomas Pynchon’s ninth novel Shadow Ticket is out fifty days from now. In anticipation, there’s a piece today in The Guardian by John Keenan ranking Pynchon’s books to date. I undertook a similar silly project just over a year ago on this blog in a post titled “A(nother) completely subjective and thoroughly unnecessary ranking of… Continue reading Annotations on The Guardian’s ranking of Thomas Pynchon’s books→| Biblioklept
From “The Creature in the Tunnels” by Rory Hayes. Published in Bogeyman Comics #1, 1969, Twelve A.M. Publications.| Biblioklept
Self-Portrait, 1952 by Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)| Biblioklept
The Villages, 2023 by Barnaby Whitfield (b. 1970)| Biblioklept
An aphorism from Stanislaw J. Lec’s Unkempt Thoughts with an illustration by Barbara Carr. Translation by Jacek Galazka.| Biblioklept
Our perceptual relationship with the world works because we trust prior stories. We could not fully perceive a tree if we did not know (because others have told us) that it is the product of a long growth process and that it does not grow overnight. This certainty is part of our “understanding” that a… Continue reading Our perceptual relationship with the world works because we trust prior stories | Umberto Eco→| Biblioklept
From “The Lobster” by Jack Cole, Plastic Man #4, July 1946, Quality Comics.| Biblioklept
Paul Kirchner’s surreal comic strip The Bus is a looping, deadpan fugue of modern alienation and mechanical ritual, where a lone Commuter drifts through absurd, Escher-like permutations of transit life. The Commuter’s foil and ferry is the titular bus (which Kirchner himself described as “demonic” in a 2015 essay in The Boston Globe); his Charon… Continue reading Paul Kirchner’s metaphysical trip continues in The Bus 3→| Biblioklept
Published in Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, No. 2, Summer 1973.| Biblioklept
Burning Land, 1973 by Christopher Croft (b. 1947)| Biblioklept
From “They Crawl by Night” by Daniel Keyes and Basil Wolverton, Journey Into Unknown Worlds #15, February 1953, Atlas Comics. Reprinted in Basil Wolverton’s Gateway to Horror #1, June 1988, Dark Horse Comics.| Biblioklept
D.M. Black’s new translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy concludes in this volume. Publisher NYRB’s blurb: Paradiso brings The Divine Comedy to a virtuosic and visionary end. This final leg of Dante’s journey from Hell into the presence of God is for many the most memorable stretch of the poem, a musical and mystical interveaving of mind and heart… Continue reading Dante’s Paradiso (Book acquired, some time in July 2025)→| Biblioklept
The object of art is to make the reader or viewer or listener aware of what he knows but doesn’t know that he knows … And this is doubly true of photography, because the photographer is making the viewer aware of what he is actually seeing and yet at the same time not seeing. So… Continue reading The object of art is to make the reader or viewer or listener aware of what he knows but doesn’t know that he knows | William S. Burroughs on photography→| Biblioklept
I want to comment on the themes and style of William Gaddis’s fourth novel, 1994’s A Frolic of His Own, and I’d like to do so without the burden of summarizing its byzantine plot, so I’ll crib from Steven Moore’s contemporary review of the novel that was first published in the Spring 1994 issue of… Continue reading Cannibals all | On William Gaddis’s novel A Frolic of His Own→| Biblioklept
Debbie Urbanski’s new collection Portalmania is a metatextual tangle of science fiction, fantasy, and horror where portals don’t offer escape so much as expose the fractures beneath family, love, and identity. Her characters navigate asexuality, neurodivergence, and the quiet violence of domestic life against an uneasy backdrop of porous reality. At any moment a portal… Continue reading Thirteen ways of looking at a portal | A review of Debbie Urbanski’s Portalmania→| Biblioklept
My sweetheart and I had sealed our commitment at high noon. My father had raised a cup to our good fortune, issued a stern proclamation against peddlers, bestowed happiness and property upon us and…| Biblioklept
I can’t remember which particular Surrealist I was googling when I learned about Gisèle Prassinos. I do know that it was just a few weeks ago, and I’ve had an interest in Surrealist art and literature since I was a kid, so I was a bit stunned that I’d never heard of her before now—strange, given the origin of her first publication. In 1934, when she was 14, Prassinos was “discovered” by André Breton, and the Surrealists delighted in what they called her “automatic writing.”...| Biblioklept
Max Lawton is the translator of many, many works, including a number of books by the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin. The recent publication of two of those translations, Blue Lard and Red Pyramid …| Biblioklept
1. William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central, 811 pages in my Penguin trade paperback edition (including end notes), is a virtuoso attempt to describe or measure or assess or explain or analyze t…| Biblioklept
17 posts published by Biblioklept and Edwin Turner during March 2024| Biblioklept
“In the Woods” by Ron Loewinsohn The woodsman plods up the hill with his axe on his shoulder. He works for a lumber company and never sees the man who signs his checks, but his knowledg…| Biblioklept
I first read Max Lawton’s translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard in the summer of 2022. It totally fucked me up. I was in the middle of a nice fat interview with Max at the t…| Biblioklept
The following discussion of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (in translation by Max Lawton) is intended for those who have read or are reading the book. It contains significant spoilers; to be ve…| Biblioklept
