Expatriate writer, composer, and traveler Paul Bowles (1910-1999) stepped away from it all and reported back to us through his novels and short stories and is featured here in a documentary ‘Let it Come Down’. He lived 52 years in Tangier, Morocco, and wrote evocatively of the place and its peoples. His most famous for his influential 1949 novel, The Sheltering Sky, was filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci.
Literary
Corridor of the Surreal: Silver Webb and Jack Eidt Talk ‘City of Illumination’
Jack Eidt talks with Silver Webb on his surreal trip to the Underworld story “City of Illumination,” published by Borda Books in Delirium Corridor, A Dark Anthology, curated by Max Talley. It includes fifteen tales of psychological suspense, altered states, noir crime, and the surreal.
Courting Delirium: Max Talley and his Dark Zeitgeist
Jack Eidt from WilderUtopia.com had a chat with novelist Max Talley about the recent book he curated and contributed two stories to, called Delirium Corridor, A Dark Anthology, from Borda Books/Santa Barbara Literary Journal.
Samuel Beckett, Confessions and the Human Condition
Samuel Beckett’s legacy endures, and reaches far beyond the written word. Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett’s work represents the most sustained attack on the realist tradition, dispensing with conventional plot and the unities of time and place in order to focus on essential components of the human condition.
‘Medicine Walk’ Featured in Santa Barbara Literary Journal
Santa Barbara Literary Journal releases Bellatrix: Volume 3 this June, which among adventurous fiction, poetry, essays, and lyrics, features an excerpt of Jack Eidt’s psychic-animism fiction, Medicine Walk. Join us for readings and other entertainments in SB on June 14.
Mild Satire, Outrage and Hostility, with Philip Roth
His alter-ego Zuckerman, unconsciously frightened of success and of failure, frightened of being admired and also despised, frightened of being frightened, he unconsciously suppressed his talent, frightened of what it might do next. On the passing of Philip Roth, we look into his often black comic chronicles of an imagined life, his taking down and reshaping the meaning of ‘Jewish American’, and his play at historic re-creating the zeitgeist within the form of the novel.
Stranger in Tangier: Paul Bowles Under The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles during his life (1910-1999) remained aloof from all the hipsters and hypesters of U.S. letters. Living in self-imposed exile in Tangier, he had cast a spell over such talents as Tennessee Williams, Libby Holman, Truman Capote, and Allen Ginsberg. We revisit an essay penned by Jay McInerny in 1985, on how the inimitable expatriate writer-composer’s dark arts retain their power, even more so 32 years later.