June, 1979 by Alex Colville (1920-2013)
La Monomane de l’envie (Monomania: Portrait of an Excessively Jealous Woman), c. 1819–22 by Theodore Géricault (1791-1824)
Wounded Man in a Bed-Sitting Room, 1951 by Robin Ironside (1912-1965)
Mike Watt and Adam Harvey adapted the “Shem the Penman” episode of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake for the Waywords and Meansigns project. Raymond Pettibon provided an illustration.
Aberrant is the début novel by Czech author Marek Šindelka. It’s new in English translation by Nathan Fields from Twisted Spoon Press, and features artwork by Petr Nikl. It’s pretty far out stuff. First pages:
The remarkable debut novel from Marek Šindelka, already the recipient of his country’s major literary awards for poetry (Jiří Orten Prize) and prose (Magnesia Litera), Aberrant is a multifaceted work that mixes and mashes together a variety of genres and styles to create a heady concoction of crime story, horror story (inspired by the Japanese tradition of kaidan), ecological revenge fantasy, and Siberian shamanism. Nothing is what it seems. What appears to be human is actually a shell occupied by an alien spirit, or demon, and what appears to be an unassuming plant is an aggressive parasite that harbors a poisonous substance within, or manifests itself as an assassin, a phantom with no real substance who pursues his victims across Europe and through a post-apocalyptic Prague ravaged by floods. The blind see, and the seeing are blind. Plants behave like animals, and animals are symbionts with plants. Through these devices, Šindelka weaves a tale of three childhood friends, the errant paths their lives take, and the world of rare plant smuggling — and the consequences of taking the wrong plant — to show the rickety foundation of illusions on which our relationship to the environment, and to one another, rests. It is a world of aberrations, anomalies, and mistake
The Finding of Medusa, 1888-1892 by Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898)
Medusa, 1900 by Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929)
The Blood of Medusa, 1898 by Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921)
Quería ser Pájaro (I Wanted to Be a Bird), 1960 by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)
“Dead Dick” by Art Spiegelman, 1989. From The Best Comics of the Decade: 1980-1990, Vol. 1, Fantagraphics Books, 1990. Originally published in RAW vol. 2, #1, 1989.
L’esiliato (The Exiled), 1928 by Arturo Nathan (1891-1944)
Swampangel, 1940 by Max Ernst (1891-1976)
Angel of the Annunciation (detail), c. 1500 by by Giovanni Bellini and workshop (c. 1430-1516)
Still Life with a Figure 1940 by Balthus (1908–2001)
Eve Tempted by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1829–1908)
The Achievements of Capitalism:
- The curtain wall
- Artificial rain
- Rockefeller Center
- Canals
- Mystification
From “The Rise of Capitalism” by Donald Barthelme, which you can read in full here. (Or in Sixty Stories, a perfect book).
Biblioklept 