Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
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.
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.
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.
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.
We feature the popularized story version of the French fairy tale ‘La Belle et La Bête’ (Beauty and the Beast), which became a classic 1946 Jean Cocteau film accompanied by composer Philip Glass’s mesmerizing 1994 score.
Watch the 1967 supernatural horror story “Viy” based on the 1835 novella by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, where a student philosopher from the Christian seminary encounters a young woman with dark powers who can summon the ogre, King of the Gnomes, which the author claims comes from Ukrainian folklore tradition.
In “Angel Baby Blues,” from Wanda Coleman’s collection Heavy Daughter Blues, she offered a take on the failed promises of her home in Southern California. A prolific poet, fiction writer, and journalist, she was considered for a time Los Angeles’ unofficial and controversial Poet Laureate.