Author: Biblioklept

Stephen Dixon’s Interstate (Book acquired, 27 Jan. 2025)

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I finally broke down and bought a copy of Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate via an online bookseller; I’d been trying to pick up a used copy of it or his novel Frog for a while now, after devouring 1988’s Garbage last year. I was able to get a signed first edition for less than the novel’s original price listing, which is maybe a little depressing? The novel has eight sections; I read the first last night, in something like a trance. Here is the novel’s first paragraph:

He’s in the car with the two kids, driving on the Interstate when a car pulls up on his side and stays even with his for a while and he looks at it and the guy next to the driver of what’s a minivan signals him to roll down his window. He raises his forehead in an expression “What’s up?” but the guy, through an open window, makes motions again to roll down his window and then sticks his hand out his window and points down at the back of Nat’s car, and he says “My wheel, something wrong with it?” and the guy shakes his head and cups his hands over his mouth as if he wants to say something to him. He lowers his window, slows down a little while he does it, van staying alongside him, kids are playing some kid card game in back though strapped in, and when the window’s rolled almost all the way down and the hand he used is back on the steering wheel, the guy in the car sticks a gun out the window and points it at his head. “What? What the hell you doing,” he says, “you crazy?” and the guy’s laughing but still pointing, so’s the driver laughing, and he says “What is this? What I do, what do you want?” and the guy puts his free hand behind his ear and says “What, what, what? Can’t hear ya,” with the driver laughing even harder now, and he says “I said what do you want from me?” and the guy says “Just to scare you, that’s all, you know, and you’re scared, right?—look at the sucker, scared shitless,” and he says “Yeah, okay, very, so put it away,” and the kids start screaming, probably just took their eyes off the card game and saw what was happening, or one did and the other followed, or they just heard him and looked or had been screaming all the time and he didn’t hear them, but he doesn’t look at them through the rearview, no time, just concentrates on the gun and guy holding it and thinking what to do and thinks “Lose them,” and floors the gas pedal and gets ahead of the van but it pulls even with him and when he keeps flooring it stays even with him and even gets a little ahead and comes back with the guy still pointing the gun out the window and now grinning at him, driver’s in hysterics and slapping the dashboard, things seem to be so funny, and he thinks “Should I roll the window up or keep it down, for rolling it up the guy might take it the wrong way and shoot, if he’s got bullets in there,” and he looks around, no other cars on their side of the Interstate except way in the distance front and behind, no police cars coming the other way or parked as far as he can see on the median strip, and he yells “Kids, get down, duck, stop screaming, do what Daddy says,” and sees them in the rearview staring at the van and screaming and he shouts “I said get down, now, now, unbuckle yourselves, and shut up, your screaming’s making me not think,” and slows down and rolls the window up and van slows down till it’s alongside him, the guy holding the gun out and one time slapping the driver’s free hand with his, and then the guy points the gun at the backseat with the kids ducked down in it and crying, maybe on the floor, maybe on the seat, for he can’t see them, and he swerves to the slow lane and the van gets beside him in the middle lane, and then he pulls onto the shoulder, stops, shifts quickly and drives in reverse on it bumping over some clumps, and the van goes on but much slower and from about a hundred and then two and three and four hundred feet away the guy steadies his gun arm with his other hand and aims at his car and he yells “Kids, stay down,” for both are now looking out the back, maybe because of the bumping and sudden going in reverse, and bullets go through the windshield. He screams in pain, glass in his head and a bullet through his hand, yells “Girls, you all right?” for there’s screaming from in back but only one of them, and his oldest daughter says “Daddy, Julie’s not moving, Daddy, she’s bleeding, Daddy, I don’t see her breathing, I think she’s dead.”

Lucrecia Smoking — Lucía Maya

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Lucrecia fumando (Lucrecia Smoking), 1990 by Lucía Maya (b. 1953)

 

Mass-market Monday | J.G. Ballard’s Billenium

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Billenium, J.G. Ballard. Berkley Medallion Books (1962). No cover designer or artist credited. 159 pages.

ISFDB credits Richard Powers as the cover artist.

Ten years ago I read The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard and wrote about them on this blog. At the end of the (exhausting) project (about 1200 pages and just under 100 stories), I made a shortlist of 23 “essential” J.G. Ballard short stories. I included two of the ten stories from Billenium in that list: the title track “Billenium” and “Chronopolis.” Of the latter, I wrote:

“Chronopolis” offers an interesting central shtick: Clocks and other means of measuring and standardizing time have been banned. But this isn’t what makes the story stick. No, Ballard apparently tips his hand early, revealing why measuring time has been banned—it allows management to control labor:

‘Isn’t it obvious? You can time him, know exactly how long it takes him to do something.’ ‘Well?’ ‘Then you can make him do it faster.’

But our intrepid young protagonist (Conrad, his loaded name is), hardly satisfied with this answer, sneaks off to the city of the past, the titular chronopolis, where he works to restore the timepieces of the past. “Chronopolis” depicts a technologically-regressive world that Ballard will  explore in greater depth with his novel The Drowned World, but the details here are precise and fascinating (if perhaps ultimately unconvincing if we try to apply them as any kind of diagnosis for our own metered age). Ending on a perfect paranoid note, Ballard borrows just a dab of Poe here, synthesizing his influence into something far more original, far more Ballardian. Let’s include it in something I’m calling The Essential Short Stories of J.G. Ballard.

Jane Bowles’ Feminine Wiles (Book acquired, 17 Jan. 2025)

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I couldn’t pass up this slim 1976 Black Sparrow Press edition of Jane Bowles’ sketches, letters, and photos — even if a lot of it is reproduced in the later collection My Sister’s Hand in Mine.

I reviewed Bowles’ sole novel, Two Serious Ladies, a decade ago:

Here’s a short review of Jane Bowles’s only novel, Two Serious Ladies: The book is amazing, a confounding, energetic picaresque suffused with sinister humor and dark delight. I read it knowing nothing about the plot on the recommendation of Ben Marcus, who described it as “so insane, so beautiful, and in some sense, unknowable to me. On the surface, it’s not really about much, but the arrangement of words does something chemical to me.” My recommendation is to dispense with the rest of my review and read Bowles’s novel.

Terrible Disaster — Gabriel Fernández Ledesma

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Terrible siniestro (Terrible Disaster), 1928 by Gabriel Fernández Ledesma (1900-1983)

Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories in reverse, Part V

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Previously,

Stories 40-36

Stories 35-32

Stories 31-28

Stories 27-24

23 . “A Few Moments of Sleeping and Waking” (Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, 1968)

I’ve been reading the stories in Forty Stories as kinda-sorta palate cleansers, usually ingesting one or two between novels; my method is to take a few initial notes to come back to, cross-reference against Tracy Daugherty’s Barthelme biography Hiding Man, and then riff on my general impression. Sometimes a few weeks go by from the time I’ve read or reread one of these stories and the time I actually get around to writing about them. Until now, the title alone has activated some memory or aesthetic impression about the story, but “A Few Moments of Sleeping and Waking” was a total blank for me. I suppose in my memory it simply segued out of the story that preceded it in Barthelme’s excellent 1968 sophomore collection, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. That story was “Edward and Pia,” metapseudoautobiographical stand-ins for Barthelme and his third wife Birgit. “A Few Moments” is more droll low-stakes tension between the pair; there’s a little here on films and dreams and their interpretations. The best bit of the story is a moment on cabbage:

Pia was chopping up an enormous cabbage, a cabbage big as a basketball. The cabbage was of an extraordinary size. It was a big cabbage.
“That’s a big cabbage,” Edward said.
“Big,” Pia said.
They regarded the enormous cabbage God had placed in the world for supper.

22 . “The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace” (Sadness, 1972)

A lovely little story, so short and sweet it really can’t be summarized! But I’ll give it a shot: “The Flight” is a comic riff on the audience’s addiction to novelty and sensation. The third-person “we” who narrates “Flight” is a kind of postmodern carnival barker, barking new wonders into existence:

The lineup for opening night included:

A startlingly handsome man

A Grand Cham

A tulip craze

The Prime Rate

Edgar Allan Poe

A colored light

We asked ourselves: How can we improve the show?

We auditioned an explosion.

Barthelme’s not really a moralist, hardly a Hawthorne, but I think he does offer oblique lessons, or warnings really, to his reader. “Flight” culminates thus:

The supply of strange ideas is not endless.

The development of new wonders is not like the production of canned goods. Some things appear to be wonders in the beginning, but when you become familiar with them, are not wonderful at all.

The story concludes in the threatening specter of newly-contracted volcano.

21 . “At the Tolstoy Museum” (City Life, 1970)

Like “Flight,” “At the Tolstoy Museum” is one of Barthelme’s literal cut-and-paste collage stories — that is, a story to include the author’s own visual collages, juxtaposed against his verbal collages. In “Flight,” the collages seem incidental. They aren’t exactly affectations, and they don’t add anything to the story–but they don’t detract either. The visual collages in “At the Tolstoy Museum” are deployed more judiciously, serving as punchlines that resound off of the narrator’s flat, affectless pose:

I was eating a sandwich at the Tolstoy Museum. The Tolstoy Museum is made of stone—many stones, cunningly wrought Viewed from the street, it has the aspect of three stacked boxes: the first, second, and third levels. These are of increasing size. The first level is, say, the size of a shoebox, the second level the size of a case of whiskey, and the third level the size of a box that contained a new overcoat. The amazing cantilever of the third level has been much talked about. The glass floor there allows one to look straight down and provides a “floating” feeling. The entire building, viewed from the street, suggests that it is about to fall on you. This the architects relate to Tolstoy’s moral authority.

Tolstoy’s Coat

In Hiding Man, Daugherty relates that after “At the Tolstoy Museum” was published in The New Yorker (24 May 1969) “a family from Holly Hill, Florida [wrote to the magazine to learn the location of the Tolstoy Museum.” About two weeks later, Tolstoy’s daughter, the Countess Alexandra L. Tolstoy sent a more indignant letter to the magazine, referring to the story as “Donald Barthelme’s absurd article…What is the aim of such an article? To make people laugh? … How funny! Ha, ha, ha.” Great stuff all around.

20 . “The Wound” (Amateurs, 1976)

A surreal sketch featuring a bullfighter, his mother, his mistress, a bishop, and a famous aficionado (of, implicitly, bullfighting, and, explicitly, breasts), as well as a cast of grumbling minions and peons. Barthelme’s stories are often collage-like, anti-real, hyper-real, or outright absurd, but they are, at least in my estimation, rarely dreamlike. But “The Wound” moves like a dream — a brief, stifled dream, one that reveals something about himself to the dreamer, who later might lament, But I already knew that, like the Bishop who laments his therapy:

The Bishop begins to talk about his psychoanalysis: “I am a different man now,” the Bishop says. “Gloomier, duller, more fearful. In the name of the Holy Ghost, you would not believe what I see under the bed, in the middle of the night.” The Bishop laughs heartily. The torero joins him. The torero’s mistress is filming the Bishop. “I was happier with my whiskey,” the Bishop says, laughing even harder.

The Queen of Gypsies arrives, claiming wounds. There’s “An ecstasy of shrinking” and the final vision of “an immense black bull” blocking the door way. It “begins to ring, like a telephone.”

“The Wound” is a short example that might be handed off to any young person clamoring for meaning or theme or symbolism from every text they read. Sometimes it’s just a dream, a goof, an aesthetic gesture. Sometimes there’s just a surreal punchline that needs to erupt, like a giant black bull ringing like a telephone, blocking the only exit in sight.

“Frog in Prague” — Stephen Dixon

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“Frog in Prague”

by

Stephen Dixon

They stand still. “And Kafka?” Howard says.

“Kafka is not buried here.”

“No? Because I thought—what I mean is the lady at my hotel’s tourist information desk—the Intercontinental over there—and also the one who sold me the ticket now, both told me—”

The man’s shaking his head, looks at him straight-faced. It’s up to you, his look says, if you’re going to give me anything for this tour. I won’t ask. I won’t embarrass you if you don’t give me a crown. But I’m not going to stand here all day waiting for it.

“Here, I want to give you something for all this.” He looks in his wallet. Smallest is a fifty note. Even if he got three-to-one on the black market, it’s still too much. He feels the change in his pocket. Only small coins. This guy’s done this routine with plenty of people, that’s for sure, and he’d really like not to give him anything.

“Come, come,” the man said.

“You understand?” Howard said. “For Kafka’s grave. Just as I told the lady at the ticket window, I’m sure the other parts of this ticket for the Old Synagogue and the Jewish Museum are all very interesting—maybe I’ll take advantage of it some other time—but what I really came to see—”

“Yes, come, come. I work here too. I will show you.”

Howard followed him up a stone path past hundreds of gravestones on both sides, sometimes four or five or he didn’t know how many of them pressed up or leaning against one another. The man stopped, Howard did and looked around for Kafka’s grave, though he knew one of these couldn’t be it. “You see,” the man said, “the governor at the time—it was the fourteenth century and by now there were twelve thousand people buried here. He said no when the Jewish elders of Prague asked to expand the cemetery. So what did the Jews do? They built down and up, not outwards, not away. They kept inside the original lines of the cemetery permitted them. Twelve times they built down and up till they had twelve of what do you call them in English, plateaus? Places?” and he moved his hand up in levels.

“Levels?”

“Yes, that would be right. Twelve of them and then the ground stopped and they also couldn’t go any higher up without being the city’s highest cemetery hill, so they couldn’t make any levels anymore.”

“So that accounts for these gravestones being, well, the way they are. All on top of one another, pressed togetherlike. Below ground there’s actually twelve coffins or their equivalents, one on top of—”

“Yes, yes, that’s so.” He walked on about fifty feet, stopped. “Another governor wouldn’t let the Jews in this country take the names of son-of anymore. Son of Isaac, Son of Abraham. They had to take, perhaps out of punishment, but history is not clear on this, the names of animals or things from the earth and so on.” He pointed to the stone relief of a lion at the top of one gravestone. “Lion, you see.” To a bunch of grapes on another stone: “Wine, this one. And others, if we took the time to look, all around, but of that historical era.”

“So that’s why the name Kafka is that of a bird if I’m not mistaken. Jackdaw, I understand it means in Czech. The Kafka family, years back, must have taken it or were given it, right? Which?”

“Yes, Kafka. Kafka.” Howard didn’t think by the man’s expression he understood. “Come, please.” They moved on another hundred feet or so, stopped. “See these two hands on the monument? That is the stone of one who could give blessings—a Cohen. No animal there, but his sign. Next to it,” pointing to another gravestone, “is a jaw.”

“A jaw?” The stone relief of this one was of a pitcher. “Jar, do you mean?”

“Yes. Jaw, jaw. That is a Levi, one who brings the holy water to wash the hands of a Cohen. That they are side by side is only a coincidence. On the next monument you see more berries but of a different kind than wine. Fertility.”

“Does that mean a woman’s buried here? Or maybe a farmer?”

“Yes. Come, come.” They went past many stones and sarcophagi. All of them seemed to be hundreds of years old and were crumbling in places. Most of the names and dates on them couldn’t be read. The newer section of the cemetery, where Kafka had to be buried, had to be in an area one couldn’t see from here. He remembered the photograph of the gravestone of Kafka and his parents. Kafka’s name on top—he was the first to go—his father’s and mother’s below his. It was in a recent biography of him he’d read, or at least read the last half of, not really being interested in the genealogical and formative parts of an artist’s life, before he left for Europe. The stone was upright, though the photo could have been taken many years ago, and close to several upright stones but not touching them. The names and dates on it, and also the lines in Hebrew under Kafka’s name, could be read clearly. It looked no different from any gravestone in an ordinary relatively old crowded Jewish cemetery. The one a couple of miles past the Queens side of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge where some of his own family were buried.

The man walked, Howard followed him. “Here is the monument of Mordecai Maisel. It is much larger than the others because he was a very rich important man. More money than even the king, he had. The king would borrow from him when he needed it for public matters. Later, after he paid it back, he would say to him ‘Mordecai, what can I give you in return for this great favor?’ Mordecai would always say ‘Give not to me but to my people,’ and that did help to make life better in Prague for the Jews of that time. He was a good wealthy man, Mordecai Maisel. Come, come.”

They stopped at another sarcophagus. Hundreds of little stones had been placed on the ledges and little folded-up pieces of paper pushed into the crevices of it. “Here is Rabbi Low. As you see, people still put notes inside his monument asking for special favors from him.”

“Why, he was a mystic?”

“You don’t know of the famous Rabbi Löw?”

“No. I mean, his name does sound familiar, but I’m afraid my interest is mostly literature. Kafka. I’ve seen several of his residences in this neighborhood. Where he worked for so many years near the railroad station, and also that very little house on Golden Lane, I think it’s translated as, across the river near the castle. A couple of places where Rilke lived too.”

“So, literature, what else am I talking of here? The Golem. A world famous play. Well? Rabbi Low. Of the sixteenth century. He started it. He’s known all over.”

“I’ve certainly heard of the play. It was performed in New York City—in a theater in Central Park—last summer. I didn’t know it was Rabbi Low who started the legend.”

“Yes, he, he. The originator. Others may say other rabbis might have, but it was only Rabbi Low, nobody else. Then he knocked the Golem to pieces when it went crazy on him. Come, come.”

They went on. The man showed him the grave of the only Jewish woman in medieval Prague who had been permitted to marry nobil
ity. “Her husband buried here too?” Howard said. “No, of course not. It was out-of-religion. The permission she got to marry was from our elders. He’s somewhere else.” The stone of one of the mayors of the Jewish ghetto in seventeenth-century Prague. The stone of a well-known iron craftsman whose name the man had to repeat several times before Howard gave up trying to make it out but nodded he had finally understood. Then they came to the entrance again. After the man said Kafka wasn’t buried here and Howard said he wanted to give him something for all this, he finally gives him the fifty note, the man pockets it and Howard asks if he might know where Kafka is buried.

“Oh, in Strašnice cemetery. The Jewish part of it, nothing separate anymore. It isn’t far from here. You take a tube. Fifteen minutes and you are there,” and he skims one hand off the other to show how a train goes straight out to it. “It’s in walking distance from the station. On a nice day unlike today the walk is a simple and pleasant one. And once you have reached it you ask at the gate to see Kafka’s grave and someone there will show you around.”

Plagiarism

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The warlocks are people said to practice witchcraft.

They rule the archipelago through a secret society, characterized by complex organization, the help of magical creatures, and numerous powers and weaknesses.

Their powers originated in a magical duel, with the winner obtaining a book of magic as reward.

According to legend, a foreign navigator challenged the power of a native healer.

The navigator was defeated.

The healer destroyed the navigator’s ship when he tried to flee the island.

Accepting his defeat, the navigator gave the healer the magic book.

According to legend, the secret society of warlocks operated from a cave guarded by a deformed creature.

The creature walks on one foot.

Or on three feet.

(Actually one leg and two hands.)

(Because one of its legs is attached to the back of its neck.)

The creature has blue skin and sharp teeth, cannot talk, and communicates only by guttural, rough and unpleasant sounds.

The warlocks’ secret society kept their magic book in their secret cave.

This cave measured approximately 200 meters long by 3 meters high and contained many rooms lit by torches and jugs of human oil.

The warlocks are said to be able to fly using a cloak made from the skin from a dead virgin’s bosom.

The warlocks are said to be able to turn into certain animals.

The warlocks are said to be able to inflict harm from a distance.

Their knowledge of plants and animals also enables them to brew powerful potions.

They are said to be able to tame the mythical hippocampus and safely board the legendary ghost ship Caleuche.

They are said to be weak to salt.

Flora (Detail) — Circle of Giuseppe Arcimboldo

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Flora (detail), c. 1590-1600, attributed to the circle of Giuseppe Arcimboldo

 

Mass-market Monday | Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Compass Rose

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The Compass Rose, Ursula K. Le Guin. Bantam Books (1983). Cover art by Yvonne Gilbert. 271 pages.

A strong collection, containing one of Le Guin’s classic stories, “Schrödinger’s Cat,” which I wrote about a few years ago. From that riff:

Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1982 short story “Schrödinger’s Cat” is a tale about living in radical uncertainty. The story is perhaps one of the finest examples of postmodern literature I’ve ever read. Playful, funny, surreal, philosophical, and a bit terrifying, the story is initially frustrating and ultimately rewarding.

While I think “Schrödinger’s Cat” has a thesis that will present itself to anyone who reads it more than just once or twice, the genius of the story is in Le Guin’s rhetorical construction of her central idea. She gives us a story about radical uncertainty by creating radical uncertainty in her reader, who will likely find the story’s trajectory baffling on first reading. Le Guin doesn’t so much eschew as utterly disrupt the traditional form of a short story in “Schrödinger’s Cat”: setting, characters, and plot are all presented in a terribly uncertain way.

Untitled (King) — Ho Che Anderson

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Untitled (from King), 1993/2005, by Ho Che Anderson (b. 1969)

Hibernation — Remedios Varo

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Hibernación (Hibernation), 1942 by Remedios Varo (1908-1963)

 

30 frames from David Lynch’s Eraserhead

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From Eraserhead, 1977. Directed by David Lynch with cinematography by Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell. Via Film Grab.

Thank you David Lynch

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RIP David Lynch, 1946-2025

We weirdos lost a spiritual uncle today.

Lose isn’t exactly the right word–the work is still there, the tremendous body of works, the films and images that I’ve returned to for so much of my life, films and images my fourteen-year-old son has recently been drawn to himself, wholly independent of me, getting there through his own weird back channels, my son who asked me just the other day if we could watch Eraserhead, and I said, Not yet, although I was the same age as he is now when I watched Eraserhead and let it do something weird to me. Maybe we’ll start with The Elephant Man instead, let it break his heart a little. Keep him away from Fire Walk With Me until he can handle it (you can never really handle it). I saw them all too young. Was way too young when my older cousin showed me Blue Velvet; I think it imprinted on me. Rewatching it (for the fifth? tenth?) time a decade and a half later, I realized I was Kyle M’s Jeffrey Beaumont peering through the closet in horror at the Adult World. Maybe I wasn’t too young. But I’ve loved them all, again and again—Lost Highway, the first one I got to see in a theater, Mulholland Dr. (the best one?), Inland Empire (really the best one). Even Dune, the first one I saw, perplexed as hell. My parents let us watch it again and again on VHS and it always refused to cohere. I think they thought it was like Star Wars, which it both was and very much wasn’t. Even the straight one he made for the normies (especially the one he made for the normies–although I don’t know if they appreciated it). But really, especially, when he Got the Old Gang Back Together for Twin Peaks: The Return—it was such a gift, a gift that seemed to come out of nowhere, unexpected, but I think even then we could recognize what a beautiful gift it was — even if it broke my heart all over again at the end, in the best possible way (“What year is this?” / “Laura!” / HOWL). I think we all knew to say Thank you then; I think we showed our love in return for the artist’s gifts. I’m thankful now, sad, selflishly sad that there won’t be one more gift, one more vision that could never come from another mind. But thankful.

Saint George and the Dragon (Detail) — Martin de Vos

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Detail from Saint George and the Dragon (c. 1590-1602) by Martin de Vos (1531/1532 – 1603)

“What Do I Need to Paint a Picture?” — Ithell Colquhoun

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“What Do I Need to Paint a Picture?”

by

Ithell Colquhoun

From Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (ed. Penelope Rosemont)

Certainly not a canvas or an easel, because I need first a resistant surface (wall or panel) and a steady support (wall or table or bench). I like the surface on which I paint to be as near that of polished ivory as possible; sometimes this surface is so lovely that it seems a pity to paint it at all. Then I need a number, but not a large number, of opaque pigments and a small amount of medium, I am not going to say what is in the medium, but it smells very nice. Then a still smaller number of transparent pigments, and lastly a surfacing-wax which I put on when the paint is dry and which also smells very nice.

I need a line to work to (Blake’s “bounding outline”); that means a full-sized detailed drawing afterwards traced. Then I put on the opaque colors very smooth and finally the glazes, if any, with the transparent colors. These are only the fixed and the cardinal qualities; what of the mutable? What of inspiration? What can one say of it except that it comes and goes, is helped and hindered, is unbiddable and unpredictable?

As to results, I aim for them to be sculptural: drawing and painting are branches of sculpture. For me, drawing is two-dimensional sculpture, painting is two-dimensional colored sculpture. If I do any sculpture, it is colored.

Mine is a very convenient way of painting, because it needs so many consecutive hours of work that it is almost impossible to do anything else.

Dino Buzzati’s The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories (Book acquired, late Dec. 2024)

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I got a review copy of Lawrence Venuti’s selection of Dino Buzzati short stories he’s translated as The Bewitched Bourgeois a few days before we left for a family vacation at the end of last year in Mexico City. I’d meant to take it with me, thinking that the (often very short) short stories would make ideal plane, airport, and I’m-exhausted-but-want-a-quick-brain-snack reading. But I ended up throwing José Donoso’s novel The Obscene Bird of Night into my ancient North Face Recon instead in a weird effort to get its last hundred and fifty pages “finished” before the so-called “next year.” I achieved that goal and am now rereading big chunks of The Obscene Bird of Night. I should have brought the Buzzati. I think it would have been ideal for my needs at the time, based on the handful of tales I’ve read so far.

Here’s NYRB’s blurb:

Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the course of forty years. Many of them are fantastic—reminiscent of Kafka and Poe in their mixture of horror and absurdity, and at the same time anticipating the alternate realities of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in their chilling commentary on the barbarities, catastrophes, and fanaticisms of the twentieth century.

In The Bewitched Bourgeois, Lawrence Venuti has put together an anthology that showcases Buzzati’s short fiction from his earliest stories to the ones he wrote in the last months of his life. Some appear in English for the first time, while others are reappearing in Venuti’s crisp new versions, such as the much-anthologized “Seven Floors,” an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; “Panic at La Scala,” in which the Milanese bourgeoisie, fearing a left-wing revolution, find themselves imprisoned in the opera house; and “Appointment with Einstein,” where the physicist, stopping at a filling station in Princeton, New Jersey, encounters a gas station attendant who turns out to be the Angel of Death.