Novelistic form: Houellebecq & Lethem
Michel Houellebecq: “This is a skilled insult. Using a big word like plagiarism… always causes some damage. It will always do lasting damage, like accusations of racism. If these people really think that [this is plagiarism], they haven’t got the first notion of what literature is. This is part of my method. This approach, muddling […]
Answers Not Supplied
There are pages in the book that might surprise those who think of Kadare as a product of the “socialist realism” literary school. nothing in The Accident reminds you of the kind of realism usually associated with that milieu. Is Kadare turning to magical realism? Trying to write a classical whodunit? Do his ambiguous relations with the communist regime and his support of the Kosovan people relate to the story in any way? The picture of his country Kadare paints in a few strokes is vivid and he manages to create an atmosphere of the post-communist epoch without reducing the narrative to a treatise on Balkan affairs.
Anna Aslanyan on Ismail Kadare‘s The Accident.
Scrying in Shin Urayasu
Edward Kelley would gaze into a black, table-tennis paddle-shaped piece of obsidian, or into a smoky crystal ball and relate the visions he saw to John Dee, who would write them down. Among proto-surrealistic landscapes and symbolic acts of poppets and monsters, a genuine language called Enochian was dictated to Dee via Kelley…I used a small crystal skull (large enough to lay within my left eye socket), and a crystal ball, and attempted to replicate the conditions of the scrying session and thereby touch the Enochian well-springs, as it were, of the text.
David F. Hoenigman interviews Jesse Glass.