jadis composee par l'abstracteur de quinte essence
Beuveurs tresillustres, & vous Verolés tresprecieux (car
à vous, non à autres sont dédiés mes escriptz)
alcofribas/thing/books
- [woman of the dunes] - kobo abe
- a bug collector trapped in a villiage overwhelmed by sand
- le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu - honoré de balzac
- an introduction to modern art. mr. frenhofer paints
la belle noiseuse. you can see rivette's movie with michel piccoli and
emmanuelle béart, but it's a short story anyways, so you might as
well track it down.
- decameron - giovanni boccaccio
- ten of the young idle rich escape plague-ridden florence to
pass a highly structured retreat touring their parents country villas during
the plague. each must tell ten stories along the way. most stories are funny.
husbands made cuckolds by clever monks or students. nuns make sure they get
some too.
- the three-penny novel - bertold brecht
- modern update of gay's three-penny opera
- wuthering heights - emily brontë
- you know
- master i margarita [the master and margarita] - mikhail bulgakov
- satan pays a visit to moscow. lots about jesus and
pontius pilate.
- [path to the nest of spiders] - italo calvino
- growing up in italy during world war ii
- difficult loves (short stories) - italo calvino
- all good short stories from post-war italy
- histoire de ma vie [story of my life] - giacomo casanova de seignault
- 12 volumes, but you should at least read the first two to
get a detailed description of life in eighteenth-century italy, with quarantines
at the border of every city-state, aristocratic students rioting against
attempts by newly-founded police forces to control their behavior. later
volumes discuss court life in paris, and some of the best parts relate to a
prison sentence in the doge's palace handed down by a secret council, and
casanova's escape attempts.
- voyage au bout de la nuit [journey to the end of the night] - louis-ferdinand, céline
- bleak life story with parts about world war one, new york,
detroit.
- canterbury tales - geoffrey chaucer
- stories told on a pilgrimage to canterbury. some are long
and tedious, others are short and mighty funny. i have the modern library
edition, and some excerpts in norton anthologies. if i can find a better
edition, i'll let you know. i thought it was worth working with the original
language, but you may have other ideas.
- english and scottish popular ballads - f.j. childs
- all your favorite songs about death and betrayal - sir
patrick spens, edward, the three ravens, lord randall. finally available again as of
january 2001 thanks to loomis house press.
- the secret agent - joseph conrad
- a less than heroic anarchist plots to bomb the clock at
greenwich station.
- bleak house - charles dickens
- creepy long book with lots of suffering poor and annoying
philanthropic people
- moskva petrushki [moscow to petrushki] - benedict erofeyev
- inspirational drunken monologue
- capital punishment and criminal prosecution of animals - e.p. evans
- summary of european legal cases brought against animals,
most involving damage to crops, many in religious courts, seeking a sentence
of excommunication.
- madame bovary - gustave flaubert
- notre dame des fleurs [our lady of the flowers] - jean genet
- life histories of a queen and the thieves and murderers
who share her loft
- querelle - jean genet
- written with a love for men and their
potential for cruelty and condescention
- [dead souls] - nikolai gogol
- a man creates his own path to bourgeois respectability
- the iliad - homer
- detailed descriptions of battle wounds and arguments
- the odyssey - homer
- sailing in flat-bottomed boats and all the ladies you meet.
- kiss kiss, bang bang (1968) - pauline kael
- [the trial] - franz kafka
- the horrors of bourgeois bureaucracy
- [the castle] - franz kafka
- more amazing tales of bureaucracy out of control
- [a hero for our time] - lermontov
- something about a man, in the military, right?
- [death in venice] - thomas mann
- a writer's obsession with a young beauty. i don't know
why i thought this would be boring. i got stuck in the first chapter a few
times, but once i made it past, i was really engrossed.
- mann ohne eigenschaften [the man without qualities] - robert musil
- a man with things to think about, but nothing much to do,
takes a ridiculous position as organizer of a centennial celebration for the
decaying austria-hungarian empire. a man in the bushes.
- [the young törless] - robert musil
- a more accessible (and shorter) novel about growing up in
the elite schools of germany, or is it austria-hugary?
- ragazzi di vita - pier paolo pasolini
- young men in friuli (around trieste) in the communist party,
in yugoslavia, in trouble
- una vita violenta - pier paolo pasolini
- growing up a refugee on the streets of rome, with some
hustling, some theft, whatever.
- à la recherche du temps perdu [in search of lost time] - marcel proust
- a sick boy grows old in as many book as you can bear,
with sentances almost as long
- gargantua - françois rabelais
- renaissance attack on the old traditions, with a utopian ending
- pantagruel - françois rabelais
- a giant, a friar, and a fool explore the new humanist
thought of the renaissance
- shame - salman rushdie
- have to go back and read this one
- the daring young man on the flying trapeze (~1935) william saroyan
- la nausee - jean-paul sartre
- i recently tried to read this in french, so i can't remember
it at all, except for the bar, the sign made of rats, the evening promenade,
the waves at the breakwater, a dark alley, writing in a library, the chantry
across the street.
- frankenstein, or, the modern prometheus - mary wollstonecraft shelley
- the monster reads milton
- [as a man grows older] - italo svevo [ettore schmidt]
- depressing story of a man realizing his age. read it every
few years to scare yourself.
- fathers and sons - ivan turgenev
- new ideas making their way from the schools into the country
manors of russia
- conversations in sicily (2000) elio vittorini tr. alane salierno
- from conversazione in sicilia (1945)
- new directions
- uomini e no [men and not men] - elio vittorini
- communist resistance in italy in world war ii
- mrs. dalloway - virginia woolf
- clarissa's throwing a party later. richard is off
at lady bruton's. septimus reveals the real problem with dogs. peter's
just arrived from india.
- orlando (1918) virginia woolf
short stories of...
- bertold brecht
- anton chekov
- nicolai gogol
- franz kafka
- alexander pushkin
- cesare pavese
- library of congress catalog