E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Literary Gothic: Every New Year’s Eve the Devil keeps a special treat for me. He knows just the right moment to jam his claw into my heart, keeping up a fine mockery while he licks the blood that wells out.
Tag: literary fiction
Nikolai Gogol: Magical Ukrainian Fairy Tale on Christmas Eve
Devilry and mischief pervades a cold winter holiday night in Nikolai Gogol’s magical ode called The Night Before Christmas. A dark entity absconds with the moon hidden in his pocket. Thereafter, he roams around tormenting people as he pleases.
Matt Pallamary: Guaraní Shaman’s Quest for “Land Without Evil”
Matthew Pallamary’s acclaimed novel “Land Without Evil,” recently performed as an aerial acrobatic stage show, narrates the true story of a young shaman of the Guaraní people of South America facing European conquest and conversion to Catholicism in the 1700s.
William S. Burroughs – Commissioner of Literary Addictions
Burroughs wanted to free people from the slavery of addiction, whether to heroin or money or sex. “The Garden of Earthly Delights” was his shorthand for the diseased saturnalia of American affluence. From his earliest writings Burroughs foresaw a time when human beings, drenched in orgasmic “freedom,” would be reduced to their bodies, their minds completely manipulated by advertising and mass media.
Book Review: Monte Schulz’s Roaring 20s Memory Palace “The Big Town”
Monte Schulz crafts an extraordinary picture of urban life in the Roaring 20s, where modern dreamers and their romantic illusions collide with American wealth and decadence on the eve of the Great Depression.
Monte Schulz: Dreaming Jazz America in “The Big Town”
“Monte Schulz’s *The Big Town* exposes decadence, wealth and consumption in Jazz Age America as spiritual myopia — where desperate, haunting characters hinge their lives on impossible dreams. This lyrical, gripping novel is as close to 1920s America as it gets, and penned with such frightening realism that the chaos of a bygone era erupts from its pages.” – Simon Van Booy