From a Dead Beat to an Old Greaser

[Charles Albert]

I have a Chicago review press edition of Roadside Picnic, which includes an
Afterword by Boris Strugatsky.

It details the efforts of the brothers to get the story past Soviet era
censors....It simply MUST be read.

love,

cfa

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 4:56 PM Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:

> Love the Strugatskys and Lem (has anyone seen the wonderful film adaptation
> of his The Futurological Congress - The Congress (2013)?). This
> Toddler-Hunting story sounds like it's exactly what I'm avoiding. Ugh!
>
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 4:45 PM John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 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
> > >
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>