Fakir, c. 1875 by Vasily Vereshchagin (1842-1904)
Give My Body Back, 2021 by Skyler Chen (b. 1982)
Geppetto Washing Pinocchio, 1996 by Paul Rego (b. 1935)
The Wolf, 1999 by He Duoling (b. 1948)
Leda by Dorothy Webster Hawksley (1884-1970)
The Tear, 2016 by Michaël Borremans (b. 1963)
Take Your Choice, 1885 by John Frederick Peto (1854-1907)
Donald Barthelme, 1965 by Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989)
The Ear-Ring, 1911 by Ambrose McEvoy (1878-1927)
Study for Ennui, 1914 by Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942)
Myth of a Thousand Eyes, c. 1950 by Leonora Carrington (1917-2011)
Deadline Island, 2019 by Samplerman (Yvan Guillo)
Barges 1919, by David Bomberg (1890-1957)
Jean-Patrick Manchette’s The N’Gustro Affair is forthcoming from NYRB in a translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith. NYRB’s blurb:
Mean, arrogant, naive, sadistic on occasion, the young Henri Butron records his life story on tape just before death catches up with him: a death passed off as a suicide by his killers, French secret service agents who need to hush up their role—and Butron’s—in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of a prominent opposition leader from a third-world African nation in the throes of a postcolonial civil war.
The N’Gustro Affair is a thinly veiled retelling of the 1965 abduction and killing of Mehdi Ben Barka, a radical opponent of King Hassan II of Morocco. But this is merely the backdrop to Jean-Patrick Manchette’s first-person portrait (with shades of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me) of a man who lacks the insight to see himself for what he is: a wannabe nihilist too weak to be even a full-bore fascist.
Biblioklept 