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Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Eastern Europe

                    

                      History

     Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends, Lonnie R. Johnson

     Heart of Europe: Poland, Davies

     Poland: The First Thousand Years, Patrice M Dabrowski

     The Spirit of Hungary, Sisa

     The Will To Survive: A History Of Hungary, Bryan Cartledge

     The Habsburgs: To Rule the World, Martyn Rady

     Romania, Lucian Boia

     Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City, Peter Demetz

     The Black Sea: A History, Charles King

     Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes, Through Darkness and Light, Caroline Eden

     Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea, Claudio Magris

     Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956, Anne Applebaum

     Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder

     Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Moshe Arens

     Auschwitz, Laurence Rees

    Treblinka, Jean-François Steiner, Simone de Beauvoir (Preface), Terrence Des Pres (Introduction)

     Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World, Jan Karski, Madeleine K. Albright (Foreword), Zbigniew Brzeziński (Afterword),

     Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Victor Sebestyen

     A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989, Padraic Kenney

    The Balkan Wars, André Gerolymatos

     Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood, Barbara Demick

     Sarajevo: A War Journal, Zlatko Dizdarević

     Imagination and Meaning: worlds of Mircea Eliade, Girador & Ricketts eds

     Alphonse Mucha, Sarah Mucha

     Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times, Alan Walker

     Artist Body: Performances 1969-1998, Walk Through Walls: A Memoir, Marina Abramović

                                Philosophy

    Theory, Culture, and Politics editors György Lukács, Judith T. Marcus, Zoltán Tarr, The Theory of the Novel, Soul and Form editors John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis, The Historical Novel, Goethe And His Age, Essays on Thomas Mann, Solzhenitsyn, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (John Rees and Slavoj Zizek Contributors), György Lukács

     In Defense of Lost Causes, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Living in the End Times, The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, How to Read Lacan, Enjoy Your Symptom!, Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Parallax View, Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj(with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova), God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (with Boris Gunjević), The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?(with John Milbank), The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism, Žižek’s Jokes: Did You Hear the One about Hegel and Negation?, Slavoj Žižek

                                      Literature

     Approximate Man and Other Writings, Chanson Dada: Selected Poems, Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, Tristan Tzara

     Tata Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara

by Marius Hentea

     The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess, The Poetry Lesson, Andrei Codrescu

     The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Festival of Insignificance, The Curtain, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera

     New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, A Year of the Hunter, The Witness of Poetry, The Land of Ulro, Czeslaw Milosz

The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, Aleksander Fiut

     Collected Stories, In My Father’s Court, Isaac Bashevis Singer

     Night Trilogy ( Night, Dawn, Day), Twilight, A Mad Desire to Dance, The Trial of God: as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod, Sages and Dreamers, Souls on Fire, Filled with Fire and Light: Portraits and Legends from the Bible, Talmud, and Hasidic World, Somewhere A Master, A Beggar in Jerusalem, All Rivers Run to the Sea, And the Sea is Never Full, Elie Wiesel

     Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, Paul Celan, John Felstiner trans.

     The Trial, The Complete Stories, Kafka

The Nightmare of Reason: Kafka, Pawel

     Love and Garbage, Judge on Trial, Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, Ivan Klíma

     Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Vítězslav Nezval

     The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski

     Dictionary of the Khazars, Landscape Painted With Tea, Pavik

     Closely Watched Trains, I Served the King of England, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, Too Loud A Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal

     The Beelzebub Sonata, The Madman and the Nun, Stanislaw Witkiewicz

     Ferdydurke, Kosmos, Kronos, Trans-Atlantyk, Withold Gombrowitz

     The Elephants, Mrozek

     The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schultz

     Green Face, The Golem, Walpurgisnacht, Gustav Meyrink

     By Night Under the Stone Bridge, The Swedish Cavalier, Leo Perutz

     The Cyclist Conspiracy, In Search of the Grail, Mongolian Travel Guide, Chinese Letter, Svetislav Basara

     The Art of the Impossible, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížďala, The Garden Party and other Plays, The Beggar’s Opera, Leaving,  To the Castle and Back : Reflections on My Strange Life as a Fairy-Tale Hero, Living in Truth: 22 Essays Published on the Occasion of the Award of the Erasmus Prize,  Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel, Eda Kriseova

     Mere Chances, Veronika Simoniti

     Agnomia, On Writing, Róbert Gál

     Blinding, The Left Wing, The Right Wing, Levantul, Europe Has the Shape of My Brain, Mircea Cartarescu

      Glorious Nemesis, The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, Ladislav Klíma

     The Door, Magda Szabó

     Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, László Krasznahorkai

     Spaceman of Bohemia, Jaroslav Kalfar

     Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Flights, Olga Tokarczuk

     The Five Wonders of the Danube, Seven Touches of Music: A Mosaic Novel, The Image Interpreter, Impossible Stories 1 & 2, The Papyrus Trilogy ( The Last Book, The Grand Manuscript, and The Compendium of the Dead), Zoran Živković

     Celestial Harmonies, The Book of Hrabal, Helping Verbs of the Heart, Not Art,  The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube), Péter Esterházy

     Doppelgänger, Dasa Drndic

     Cyclops, Ranko Marinković

     The Passport, The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, The Appointment, The Hunger Angel, Herta Müller

     The Bridge on the Drina, Bosnian Chronicle, Ivo Andrić

     The Tiger’s Wife, Téa Obreht

     The Palace of Dreams, Chronicle in Stone, The General of the Dead Army, Elegy for Kosovo: Stories, The Siege, The Traitor’s Niche, Agamemnon’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories, The Three-Arched Bridge, The File on H., The Successor, Essays on World Literature: Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Ismail Kadare

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jayofdollhousepark

I am a former counselor, teacher, and debate coach who loves to read and write, and a student of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, and languages who loves to travel. Help me celebrate the lives and works of our great authors as a common human heritage. I can also be reached at jayofdollhousepark@gmail.com. Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium: My initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs and writing an appreciation. I've now come full circle and completed the calendar year. These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some new discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. I also include reading lists by national literature, a Modern American Literature group of lists, and Best Books of the Year lists and reviews. There will occasionally be my own poetry as well; you are warned. I hope that you may also find books which will help you through life and bring depth and joy to your days. As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody. Thank you so much for your company on this journey. Regarding my daily political journal on Torch of Freedom, a voice of progressive democracy and the antifascist Resistance: I stand for liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a free society of equals. My America is a torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world. I stand for the absolute structural and systemic equality of all human beings, and for the Rights of Man everywhere on earth. I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. Herein I write as an agent of Chaos and Transformation whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. For thirty-nine years now I have been engaged in antifascist action, democracy activism, and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and state terror for the liberation of humankind, wherever men hunger to be free. And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet as he formulated it in Paris 1940, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Resist and fear not, O my brothers and sisters, for in resistance we seize our freedom and become Unconquered.

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