Literature

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.

Gérard de Nerval

Gérard de Nerval was a man with a pet lobster.

Kathasaritsagara

Kathasaritsagara is a 11th-century collection of Indian legends, fairy tales and folk tales as retold by a Saivite Brahmin named Somadeva. It consists of 18 books of 124 chapters and more than 21,000 verses in addition to prose sections. The principal tale is the narrative of the adventures of Naravahanadatta, son of the legendary king Udayana. A large number of tales are built around this central story, making it the largest existing collection of Indian tales.

Berton Roueché

Berton Roueché was a medical writer who wrote for The New Yorker magazine for almost fifty years.

Blaugast

Blaugast by Paul Leppin is the story of ruin. A bored clerk, Klaudius Blaugast, pursues his desires down a path spiralling into complete degradation. Homeless and destitute, having lost everything to the evil prostitute Wanda, he seeks redemption in a Prague that has become alien to him. Flashbacks to incidents in his past, hallucinatory revelations of the meaning of events long forgotten, point to the seeds of his eventual downfall.

Catullus 16

Catullus 16 by the Roman poet was considered so explicit that a full English translation was not openly published until the late 20th century.

Augustus Hare

Augustus Hare was a travel writer, a storyteller and memoirist of the first order, and his work is a record of a lost way of life amongst the strangest upper classes of English society.

Edward Lear

He was known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime