We like books. A lot. Here's what's on our nightstand this week.
Witold Gobrowicz's Bacacay: Okay, wow. So, did you know about this Gobrowicz cat, because we did not! An iconoclastic Pole who fled to Buenos Aires days before the outbreak of WWII, Gombrowicz's airy, bizzare anti-nationalist stories read like Kafka filtered through a fairy tale machine. They are quite breathtaking. Once you finish with Bacacay, get yourself a copy of Gombrowicz's first novel, Ferdydurke, about a middle-aged man who is kidnapped by his former school master and forced to undergo the humiliations of middle school a second time. It's available from NYRB with an introduction by Susan Sontag.
Sawako Nakayasu's Texture Notes
Macgregor Card's Duties of an English Foreign Secretary
Roberto Bolano's Monsieur Pain: If the folks at New Directions and Anagrama are to be believed, Bolano produced roughly six thousand original works in the last five years of his life. The fourth Bolano title to be released in English since the author's death in 2003, Monsieur Pain is another literary pyscho-thriller in the vein of Bolano's The Savage Detectives and 2666. The story concerns a stricken Cesar Vajello, hypnotists, occultists and an incurable case of hiccups.
John Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go There You Are: Don't ask....just...don't ask.
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