From a Dead Beat to an Old Greaser

[John Bailey]

Strugatsky Brothers hell yeah! Last year I raced through Hard to be a God
in the grip of a flu fever and it was one of the better reading experiences
of the year.
Also this year I read Taeko Kono's Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories
(trans. Lucy North) and it was comparable to discovering Pynchon for the
first time. I now judge all other writing in relation to that book.
The title story focuses on a woman, a fading opera singer, who hates little
girls but buys expensive outfits for little boys so she can watch them
dress and undress. She also has sexual fantasies about beating them until
their intestines fall out. It's profoundly unsettling, but like all of her
protagonists the character is both alien and deeply comprehensible. The
rest of the stories similarly mash raw and sometimes shocking psychosexual
drama with domestic normalcy. I can't recommend them enough.

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 6:37 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Stanislaw Lem.
>
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 1:06 PM Thomas Eckhardt <
> thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de>
> wrote:
>
> > Especially "dreary politcal rectitude"...
> >
> > I recently discovered the Strugatskys whose wonderful later works read
> > like Kafka on LSD.
> >
> > Andrei Bely's "Petersburg" is a masterpiece (Nabokov agrees).
> >
> > Am 12.12.2019 um 16:51 schrieb Laura Kelber:
> > > I agree with all of this, Rich. There are minefields of gratuitous
> > violence
> > > and cruelty (it sells!) and dreary political rectitude (the critics
> > behoove
> > > themselves to praise it) that scare me away from a lot of current
> > > literature.
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>