A beautiful mirage of a lost golden age set in Japan a thousand years ago, which like Coleridge’s vision of Kublai Khan’s pleasure palace is not what it seems, Didier Decoin’s The Office of Gardens and Ponds is a compelling interrogation of the boundaries between self and other, the material and spiritual worlds, sexuality … Continue reading The Office of Gardens and Ponds, Didier Decoin France
A reimagination of the life of St Paul and the origins of his Absurdist invention of Christ and Christianity, a fiction destined to consume the Roman Empire and replace it with an empire of faith more terrible still, and born of sexual terror, resistance and revolution against state tyranny and imperialist colonialism, and the inchoate … Continue reading Damascus, Christos Tsiolkas Australia
A savage reimagination of Dante, Hamlet, the myths of Orpheus and Ariadne’s Labyrinth, which references Greek tragedy, Freudian terror, and classic Hollywood noir, Catherine Cho’s Inferno is a Surrealist masterpiece and a fearless journal of her descent into madness as a journey of transformation which echoes the genius of Sylvia Plath and the wildness … Continue reading Inferno, Catherine Cho Asian American Literature- Korean
Antkind by Charlie Kaufman American A satire of America filled with language play referential to James Joyce and the Oulipo group which includes Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino, Proustian and subsuming everything like a Leviathan, Surrealism which recalls that of William S. Burroughs, and a trickster’s irrepressible humor which recalls Kafka and Borges, the … Continue reading Antkind by Charlie Kaufman American
A novel of illumination in a world of contingency, ambiguity, and the relativity of truth, wherein the tracks of the Unseen vanish through Rashomon Gate and beckon us onwards, organized according to the mathematical principle of mutability but also referential with its thousand and one chapters to the humanizing and transformational stories of the Arabian … Continue reading Apeirogon, Colum McCann Britain
A visionary and brilliant panopticon of Lovecraftian- Beckett Absurdism and black metal diatribes, existential dread, and a transgression which recalls that of Kathy Acker, Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God is a compendium of the luminous blasphemies of a mad angel. A conceptual Surrealist film about Edvard Munch traveling through time to join a … Continue reading Girls Against God, Jenny Hval Scandanavian Lit-Norway
A picaresque fable of myth and history set in the sectarian conflict of the Thirty Year’s War, a carnival of horrors and delights which transgresses our topologies of the known into the Surreal, Daniel Kehlman’s Tyll centers its narrative on a Trickster figure and agent of Chaos who like the Jester of King Lear is … Continue reading Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann Germany
A labyrinthine house which is a gateway to infinite worlds, in a story filled with Surreal images and fiendishly clever puzzles and; Jorge Borges, Italo Calvino, Kafka and Haruki Murakami here collide in a fantastic novel of magnificent strangeness. A Jungian journey to wholeness which references Dante and Cervantes, Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi reimagines the … Continue reading Piranesi, Susanna Clarke Britain
An interrogation of hate crime, vigilante justice, and the use of social force based on an infamous murder case, Michael Nath’s The Treatment is a Dante-esque descent into the London criminal underworld filled with bizarre and magnificent misfits, which reimagines and combines elements of Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov. In many ways it compares … Continue reading The Treatment, Michael Nath Britain
In glorious Joycean stream of consciousness Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season leads us on an Orphic journey of supernal darkness, monstrosity, perversions, and the banality of evil in this magnificent dark mirror of modern Mexico. With a murder mystery of fiendish cleverness as its narrative frame, densely layered with surprises, puzzles, and visionary revelations, a … Continue reading Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 