Booklore

I am extremely pleased to announce the upcoming publication of Booklore, in which appears a piece I've written on Alain Robbe-Grillet's Topology of a Phantom City (the book from which this weblog has inherited its name).

The anthology is edited by Jonas Ploeger and Alcebiades Diniz Miguel, and features illustrations by Erika Seguín Colás. Other contributors include Carl Abrahamsson, Avalon Brantley, Brian Catling, Andrew Condous, Brendan Connell, Quentin S. Crisp, Richard Gavin, Martin Hayes, Colin Insole, Timothy J. Jarvis, Andrew Liles, Chris Mikul, Daniel Mills, Reggie Oliver, Thomas Phillips, Ray B. Russell, Michael Siefener, Charles Schneider, Thomas Stromsholt, Supervert, Mark Valentine, Paul Wallfisch, DP Watt, Ron Weighell and Jonathan Wood.

Booklore is scheduled to begin shipping in the 2nd week of May, and may be ordered directly from the Zagava Press website.

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.” (Franz Kafka in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak, 27. January 1905)