Literature

Memoirs of a Public Baby

Memoirs of a Public Baby is a book by Philip O'Connor. Seldom has a writer described his own chaotic boyhood and early manhood with so much self-flagellating mockery. Abandoned by his Irish mother, a "fallen gentlewoman," O'Connor grew up in a seedy hotel, in a brewery, in a cellar, in a French peasant woman's pastry shop. In London, he developed an intense dislike of English snobbery as he ran into "a wall of nervous, persnickety tabus" that stifled social interaction. His contempt for bourgeois values and conformity is reflected in wickedly mordant comments on himself, his friends and acquaintances. Like new suits of clothes, he dons and discards intellectual fashions - surrealism, communism, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence. He spends six months in a mental hospital, then has a sexually frustrating affair with a cultured, unbalanced woman who nearly axes him and is herself hospitalized. We leave him in 1945, "started . . . on a halting road to conformity."

Villa Villekulla

Villa Villekulla is a fictional house that is the home of Pippi Longstocking. The garden where the filming took place and where Villa Villekulla stood can still be seen.

G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton stood 6’4″ and weighed about 300 pounds, usually had a cigar in his mouth, and walked around wearing a cape and a crumpled hat, tiny glasses pinched to the end of his nose, swordstick in hand, laughter blowing through his moustache. And usually had no idea where or when his next appointment was. He did much of his writing in train stations, since he usually missed the train he was supposed to catch.

Loeb Classical Library

The Loeb Classical Library is the only existing series of books which, through original text and English translation, gives access to all that is important in Greek and Latin literature.

Jonathon Green

Jonathon Green is a British lexicographer of slang and writer on the history of alternative cultures. Jonathon Green is often referred to as the English-speaking world’s leading lexicographer of slang.

Antaeus

Antaeus was a literary quarterly founded by Daniel Halpern and Paul Bowles.

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel is the first novel by Serbian writer Milorad Pavić, published in 1984. There is no easily discerned plot in the conventional sense, but the central question of the book (the mass religious conversion of the Khazar people) is based on an historical event generally dated to the last decades of the 8th century or the early 9th century when the Khazar royalty and nobility converted to Judaism, and part of the general population followed. However, most of the characters and events described in the novel are entirely fictional, as is the culture ascribed to the Khazars in the book, which bears little resemblance to any literary or archeological evidence. The novel takes the form of three cross-referenced mini-encyclopedias, each compiled from the sources of one of the Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism).

Bottom’s Dream

Bottom's Dream is a novel published in 1970 by West German author Arno Schmidt. Schmidt began writing the novel in December 1963 while he and Hans Wollschläger began to translate the works of Edgar Allan Poe into German. The novel was inspired by James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake. The gargantuan novel was published in folio format with 1334 pages. The story is told mostly in three shifting columns, presenting the text in the form of notes, collages, and typewritten pages.

Le Grand Meaulnes

Le Grand Meaulnes is the only novel by French author Alain-Fournier who was killed in the first month of WW I. It is somewhat biographical - especially the name of the heroine Yvonne, with whom he had a doomed infatuation in Paris. Fifteen-year-old François Seurel narrates the story of his friendship with seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes as Meaulnes searches for his lost love. Impulsive, reckless and heroic, Meaulnes embodies the romantic ideal, the search for the unobtainable, and the mysterious world between childhood and adulthood.

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime