Literature

A Humument

In the mid-1960s, Tom Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W. H. Mallock's A Human Document, and began cutting and pasting the extant text to create something new. The artist writes, 'I plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I'd stripped away with visual images of all kinds. I began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love's casualties.' After its first publication in book form in 1980, A Humument rapidly became a cult classic.

Paul Morand

A globetrotter, diplomat, and bohemian, Morand specialized in short stories and travel essays and was one of the best-known French writers during the era between the two World Wars. His work evoked the cosmopolitan atmosphere and energetic social life of the postwar period while creating psychological portraits of hedonistic, often disillusioned characters. His witty, fast-paced descriptive prose is rich in imagery and has led some critics to categorize him as a French modernist and imagist.

Swallows and Amazons

Swallows and Amazons is a series of children's books by English author Arthur Ransome, named after the title of the first book in the series. The 12 books involve adventures by groups of children almost all during the school holidays and mostly in England and Scotland, between the two World Wars. The stories revolve around outdoor activities, especially sailing. The series remains popular today for its idyllic, yet often realistic, depiction of childhood and the interplay between youthful imagination and reality. It is part of the basis for a large tourist industry in the Lake District and Norfolk Broads areas of England, where many of the books are set

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine

The magazine most often referenced as the breeding ground for the group of writers who became known as the Language poets.

Christian Bök

Christian Bök is a sound poet and conceptual artist who has produced numerous artist’s books, including books made entirely of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks. Additionally, he has invented languages for the science-fiction television shows Earth: Final Conflict and Amazon.

Novalis

Novalis is best known in history as the poet of early German Romanticism. In , Novalis Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia, he reflects on numerous aspects of human culture, including philosophy, poetry, the natural sciences, the fine arts, mathematics, mineralogy, history, and religion, and brings them all together into what he calls a "Romantic Encyclopaedia" or "Scientific Bible."

Ring Lardner

Ring Lardner was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical takes on the sports world, marriage, and the theatre.

John Crowley

In John Crowley's The Solitudes we are introduced to Pierce Moffett, an unorthodox historian and an expert in ancient astrology, myths, and superstition. The land that Moffett studies is not the real, geographical Egypt but Ægypt, a country of the imagination. When Moffett discovers the historical novels of local writer Fellowes Kraft, his course is charted. Kraft's books interweave stories of Italian heretic Giordano Bruno, young Will Shakespeare, and Elizabethan occultist John Dee - stories that begin to mingle with the narrative of Moffett's real and dream life in 1970s America. As Moffett's journey in and out of his comfortable reality continues, what becomes clear is revelatory: there is more than one history of the world.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Andreas

Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Andreas is a novel of violence and naivety, pathos and melancholy. Set in the eighteenth century, it tells the story of a young Viennese aristocrat who intends to travel alone to Venice as the first stage of his "Grand Tour". On his journey, he acquires an unsavoury servant who unleashes a trail of destruction and violence which taints and corrupts Andreas's first experience of love. Andreas's loss of innocence takes place in the misty alleyways and gloomy palaces of Venice, whose masked inhabitants confuse and entice him, the women either madonnas or whores indistinguishable behind their masks.

A Sport and a Pastime

Set in post-war France, A Sport and a Pastime is a piece of erotica involving an American student and a young French girl, told as flashbacks in the present tense by an unnamed narrator who barely knows the student and who himself yearns for the girl, and who freely admits that most of his narration is fantasy.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime