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.
Untitled, undated sketches of readers by George Jones (1786–1869)
Salomé, 1916 by Paul Iribe (1883–1935)
Off to the Pub, 1911 by Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942)
Peasants Arguing with Mutants, 1992 by Gely Korzhev (1925-2012)
Goblin Market, by Primrose Harley (1908-1978)
“Goblin Market”
by
Christina Rossetti
Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpeck’d cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;—
All ripe together
In summer weather,—
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy:
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
Come buy, come buy.”
Odalisque Feeding a Faun, 1920s by Dorothy Webster Hawksley (1884-1970)
Biblioklept 