2025: The Premier Grand Unified WAYR thread

Happy New Year, y'all. Welcome to the first What Are You Reading thread of the Reform Era.

Due to a slacking off in the pace at which ILB's WAYR threads have been piling up posts, combined with some mild grumbling from our Southern Hemispherical friends about our quarterly threads constantly referencing the wrong season for them, I thought maybe we should ditch the old quarterly/seasonal format for a sleeker, modern streamlined thread. After the first six months we can decide if we want or need one or two WAYR threads per annum.

I'm about to start in on Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey of Homer. It's waiting for me at the public library (currently closed for New Year's Day). Meanwhile I'll browse around in David Hinton's translations of the poems of Wang Wei.

Here's a link to last year's final WAYR thread: Caught, Back, Party Going: What Are You Reading In The Fall of 2024?

I'm reading Hard to Be a God by the Strugatsky brothers, given to me by a friend years ago.

I think I left it sitting around because I mistakenly thought that Refn movie (Only God Forgives) was an adaptation? Even though I already loved Roadside Picnic. Idk, very silly of me. But I'm Strugatsky-pilled after reading The Doomed City and I'm glad to have it on hand (any other Strugatsky recs?).

I'm reading about the moles.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/917AlrBb9aL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

ALTERNATE COVER

https://archive.org/services/img/isbn_0600204340_no1/full/pct:200/0/default.jpg

alternate alternate U.S. cover

https://images.pangobooks.com/images/a260111c-a71b-4229-8be5-e881e035cb9a?width=800&quality=85&crop=1%3A1

"the savage kingdom of moles"? goodness me!

"I think I left it sitting around because I mistakenly thought that Refn movie (Only God Forgives) was an adaptation?"

The 2013 movie version of Hard to Be a God is nuts! watch it after you read it. There is also an earlier one with Werner Herzog in it but i've never seen that one.

I just recently finished “Say Nothing” by Patrick Radden Keefe, so am continuing this particular rabbithole with an overview history: a re-read of “The Troubles” by Tim Pat Coogan. I somehow lost my original copy & mr veg gave me a new one for xmas
He writes quite beautifully but it is a bit slow going as my holiday-brain struggles to keep hold of all the info

oh and am also reading “Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent” by Judi Dench w Brendan O’Hea

series of long-ranging interviews w Judi on the various Shakespeare characters she’s played over her career; at times line-by-line /scene-by-scene insights into her perspectives on the characters & the text, it’s pretty fascinating!. a friend gave it to me for xmas, i hadn’t even heard about it, loving it so far.

Great moles.

Yes, good moleage indeed.

In prep for teaching Faustus next term, I'm reading Anthony Burgess's A Dead Man in Deptford. Being Burgess, it's full of language games, and he's hot on Latin filth*. Marlowe's time in the 'service' of Walsingham is really well put together, particularly the sections in Paris; it's great on the scuzz and grime of London (the brutal death of Babington is vivid and disgusting); I love the conversations over pubs with Raleigh and co, the dramatisation of Catholic and atheist guilt like a cloak over everything. It's probably a bit 'do you see' about Marlowe's sexuality but some of the sex is great all the same. There are also some 'chubby hmm' moments where he's working out his 'might line' drunkenly walking the streets and when he first tries 'the nymph' tobacco with Raleigh. I'm enjoying myself immensely.

*Irrumabo - Latin for fuck (I think). It appears in a poem by Catullus and in the phrase Irrumabo Omnia Et Facti Pirata, which translates to "Fuck everything and become a pirate”, which is 100% my new motto.

I think yearly threads are a good idea, fwiw. Happy new year you lot.

Happy new year! We made it. We can continue to read more.

Fleur Jaeggy - Proleterka

89 pages of very tightly written prose.

I found the mole book on my parent’s bookshelf over Christmas. On the inside cover there’s library stamp from my middle school library. I guess I borrowed it around 1990 and forgot about it. Or quite possibly I just stole it. Maybe I’ll actually read it this time.

I’m reading the new Richard Osman, it’s the start of a new series, the usual undemanding fun. I always try to give myself something easy at the start of the year, when it’s miserable and I feel like I’ve forgotten how to read.

Why not just What Are You Reading in 2025? And then if you eventually want to add a second, can guess the rest.

Anyway, I'm currently going back and forth between The Brothers Mann and Babel 17, young Delany's driving ambition proving compatible w the competitive sibs'.

Just finished the first volume of Your Face Tomorrow. Won't be getting the second. The long discursive sections that make up almost all of the book might have been hypnotic if my attention had been captured, but it wasn't. There is something compelling about it, but it's hard to say what. Maddening.

Why not just What Are You Reading in 2025?

Why not the current title?

The Penguin Book Of Korean Short Stories - Focuses on the modern Koreas, def nothing pre 20th century has appeared yet, but surprisingly there are some Northern writers!

South Korean writer Yi Munyol's "The Old Hatter" takes the cake in terms of a traditional mentality that feels alien to a Western reader in 2025. Check this lament:

Our old morality went the way of the old learning. The pious man who cooked his son to feed his old father; the filial daughter-in-law who cut off her finger to bring her mother-in-law back to life by feeding her drops of blood; the faithful wife who took her own life after her husband's death - we have totally forgotten these virtuous people, whose memory once shone brighter than any monument of gold. The world now belongs to those sons whose filial piety amounts to not striking their aged fathers, daughters in law who can earn praise by not throwing out their old fathers-in-law, and wives whose loyalty simply meant not having children by other men.

Society is in the gutter!!!

Very different indeed is Pak Taewon's A Day In The Life Of Kubo The Novelist, a stream of consciousness piece about a sad young man walking through the nightlife of Seoul. It's fascinating both as an example of how Beaudelaire, Woolf and Joyce (who gets a namedrop) were being digested outside of Europe, but also as a glimpse of Korea under Japanese occupation, a period which coincided with the beginnings of Westernization, writers in thrall to modernism, women hitting the bars in the style of flappers, etc.

Taewon ended up joining the North when the civil war came and stayed in N Korea until his death in the 80's; he had his right to write revoked for a few years but apparently regained it. NO IDEA what his later writings are like. He did leave a daughter in the South though, who in torn had a son...who turned out to be Bong Joon-Ho, you may have heard of him.

Thanks Daniel! I really want to check out Korean lit. Local library is closed for repairs, though relocation seems more and more likely (and then Local Library War can ramp back up, maybe with more xenophobia, considering return of Mr. T.)

Why not just What Are You Reading in 2025?

Why not the current title?

Pierre Senges - Rabelais's Doughnuts

A very short collection of stories and essays. Going for a bit of Borges here -- favourites are an essay on libraries, both actual and fictional, and a monologue by a counterfeiter -- its pretty good

i finished a book in 2025 which afaict means im ahead of 2024 already- i was gifted all the presidents men

anyway it tripped along more than i had expected and didnt get too bogged down in all the names, i enjoyed it

Currently reading Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, which I bought in December. Giving it one chapter a night. It's good, but he clearly hates the Weathermen and has a red-hot hate-boner for Bernardine Dohrn.

Also downloaded a couple of ebooks that I'm either dipping in and out of (the Ellison) or going to get to soon:

Julia Armfield, Private Rites (apparently a modern gloss on King Lear focusing on three daughters after Daddy's death)
Alex Van Halen, Brothers (autobiography)
Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of... (grabbed this just for his writings on jazz)

not far along, but

FALL OF CIVILIZATIONS, paul cooper: awkwardly written and handwavey, doubt i'll continue

BLISS & BLUNDER, victoria gosling: retelling of camelot with arthur as a tech billionaire, gwen as his influencer wife, etc. which may not sound all that promising but it's brilliant so far

Currently reading Raymond Smullyan - The Tao Is Silent. Prefer his style in smaller doses, honestly, although I'll finish this.

If I were you I'd skip it and just read the best bit online: Is God a Taoist?.

Currently reading "The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics" by Henri Bergson. The last book published in his lifetime, it's a collection of essays and lectures written over a twenty year period, but it holds together pretty well, since Bergson is at his most readable, and a couple of the essays were written specifically to tie the collection together.

Started rereading Moby Dick because Backlisted did their Christmas episode on it. I had vaguely remembered it as a good story with quite a lot of asides about whaling; I'm now finding that it's maybe 85% essays on whaling and 15% story, mostly concentrated in the first and last chapters. There are moments where Ishmael goes, "Now I really must tell you about X," and X is, like, the wooden fork that the harpoon rests in when it's in the boat, and tbh I really think the book would have survived without a chapter on it. Still good, though.

it's the way he does it, though, reveling in his knowledge, like some mad monk ov Dark Ages (not a sociable guy ashore, and sea life is getting pretty dark too, he even disappears for a while)

I stopped really keeping track of what I was reading around August of last year— I was reading but not in any organized fashion, feeling a little harried and disorganized in my thoughts and patterns.

In any case— this year I have resolved to take more organize joy in my reading and listening.

So far, I have finished ‘Skip Tracing,’ a book by Philly poet Ken Bluford. It’s his first major collection though he is nearly 75– it seems he was active in poetry in the 70s and 80s and then sort of dropped out for whatever reason and is finally having a little renaissance. Excellent book, the Tom Weatherly comparisons are apt but there is a classical air to some of Bluford’s poems that is really striking.

Also finished ‘The Climbing Zine: Book One,’ a collection of writing from the first twelve issues of a climbing-based zine out of Colorado. The best pieces are up there with some of the best adventure writing I have ever come across, and the worst pieces were among the most indulgent and insipid I have ever read. Only some athletes are good writers!!

Now just about to finish Emmanuel Hocquard’s ‘Conditions of Light,’ translated by Jean-Jacques Poucel. Uncanny, elegiac, formally restrained sequence of poems, with each iteration consisting of five poems of five lines each. Quite lovely, here is a nice sample from this morning:

It is noon touches the back
In the darkness photos await
The dough rises on the type
shop stool
The very idea of relation

Read Alex Van Halen's autobiography, Brothers, in a day. It's pretty good. He quotes from other relevant figures' VH books (David Lee Roth's, producer Ted Templeman's, former manager Noel Monk's) and tells you what he agrees with and what he disagrees with, and he's affectionately scornful of Roth, calling him a dilettante and a dummy but an immensely talented live performer/attention magnet on multiple occasions. Worth a read if you're a Van Halen fan; it will make you hear the records differently.

I'm about a third into Emily Wilson's Odyssey translation. It reads swiftly and clearly, but isn't prosaic at all. To achieve that she clearly trimmed and paraphrased rather than trying to save every detail and repetitive epithet in the text. Some people would consider that editing Homer like that is the height of presumption. Not me. I commend her for doing an excellent job, while losing nothing of real importance and producing a first rate modern translation.

For some unfathomable reason I also read the 90 pages of Introduction and Translator's Note, which delved far too deeply into the immense pile of marginalia that has accumulated around Homeric texts. What's worse is that I'd already rummaged around fairly thoroughly in that junk drawer back in college, so there was nothing new for me to learn.

Ia Genberg - The Details. A woman's life via her remembrances of 4 people. Liked it a lot.

Mariana Enriquez - A Sunny Place for Shady People. Short story collection, mostly set in Argentina, mostly horror or macabre/unnerving/supernatural in tone. I enjoyed it but I feel like I was missing a lot of stuff that someone more intelligent would get out of it.

Jean Paul - Maria Wutz

Maria Wutz?

Wutz it to you

Maria Wutz:

https://sublunaryeditions.com/products/maria-wutz-jean-paul

I really liked it but was reading it on a plane journey with two very nervous people sat beside me.

on a chapbook spree, though I did try to break it up with a book of poems which I decided was MFA-core slop after the first fifteen pages.

Augusto Monterosso - The Rest is Silence

Novel released in the late 70s, now available in a translation from NYRB.

Its about the 'life' of a literary critic in a small fictional town, by the name of Eduardo Torres. It starts with a few testimonies by others (unreliable, with digression as king), then we move to his 'criticism' (its ofc terrible, this is like the first novel I've read that really lampoons Sunday supplement crit properly), then we have aphorisms (most bad, but some might be good, this section is totally playing with your expectations of this kind of writing), and then an analysis of one of Torres' poem by a 'colleague' (or a rival, or Torres under a pseudonym), with a final two page commentary on the whole thing just before publication.

If you are into criticism its funny. If you are not you can read these as short stories -- which is what Monterosso spent most of his career publishing in Mexico (where he lived in exile from Guatemala). Whatever way you read it there isn't a lot like it.

Its possible this is the only way he could structure something approaching a novel.

Starting 2025 in suitably apocalyptic style: negrophobia by Darius James and late victorian holocausts by Mike Davis. Might have to go lighter for the next one

A while back, a friend said I should get into writing YA fiction because it can be lucrative and remain interesting, and because my poetic field has been feeling pretty fallow recently, I decided to dive into some newer YA books to see whether I think I could pull it off.

Of course, the first book I chose absorbed me completely for several hours and brought up some painful memories of adolescence. ‘Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe’ by Benjamin Alire Sáenz is a lovely book, narrated by Aristotle, a fifteen year old loner with some family drama, inner rage, a loathing of most other boys. He becomes friends with Dante, who is more of a hippie free spirit with a loving set of academic parents. It’s set in El Paso in 1987. I won’t give away much, but the essential drama of the book is Ari learning to “stop fighting the war he’s fighting” against himself.

It’s hard to read books like this sometimes— they didn’t really exist when I was a teenager. I wish they had, as I probably would have felt a lot less alone. Also tied into this thread is the idea that if my parents and the general environment hadn’t made me so afraid to be myself, my life could have been very different, and much happier. It’s a fool’s errand to obsess about what could have been, but it’s hard not to do so when looking back on how repressed and broken I was for much of
my teenage life.

What I am happy about is that teenagers today have these sorts of books. I am getting the sequel out from the library this afternoon.

I really liked Aristotle and Dante too, but I gave up on the sequel before the 100pg mark. The writing was super banal and just...bad in a way I don't remember the first book being (sample line of prose from the sequel would be something like: "I don't like it when Ari is mad at me. It makes me feel sad").

Queer YA is kinda my thing, so I'm here for any recommendations you need.

crypto— please give me all the recs for queer YA! thanks in advance <3

i am hesitant about reading the sequel because i have heard similar things, but i guess we’ll see.

I'd say start with Bill Konigsberg's Openly Straight--and then if you like it, move on to its (actually good!) sequel, Honestly Ben. Don't want to claim anything as authoritative as these being the *best* queer YA novels, but I did make them a focus of my dissertation, and I include Openly Straight whenever I get to teach my Gay Life & Culture in the 21st Century course (the students usually respond very positively to it). But there's plenty more where that came from, so feel free to reach out whenever you're ready for more.

I'm reading a posthumously published novel by Barbara Pym, An Academic Question. The narrative voice has many touches of her somewhat rueful and self-deflating humor, but I can see why she held onto it; it's a bit underdeveloped.

Currently reading "Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man" by Friedrich Schiller, and also slowly making my way through "Family Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995-2014" by Alice Munro.

xpost thanks crypto, going to get that transferred to my local branch library.

today i *did* go to the library to get the Aristotle and Dante sequel, then read some reviews and thought better of reading it— i loved the first one and would rather not have it tainted, tbh.

Also took out ‘Darius the Great is Not Okay,’ ‘Boy Meets Boy,’ ‘Different for Boys,’ and a few others. Already finished ‘Different for Boys’ because it’s more like a short story, but it had its small moments.

Richard Russo “risk pool.”
I’d like to thank whoever it was (Scott?) who recommended him after I mentioned Richard ford. I adore this book, don’t want it to end.

yeah i love Russo’s books, he’s great

Oh Alfred, Boy Like Me absolutely wrecked me.

to folks who liked arisotle and dante, i’ll make a strong recommendation for john corey whaley’s “highly illogical behavior.”

cute, smart, and uncreepy — which isn’t how i feel about a bunch of the other ya romance i’ve read in the past decade

I’ve heard of that one but haven’t read it. Adding it to the list!

thanks soda, on mine now too

Finished the Villa book.

It was pretty good, to be honest, though in a way that felt a little strange.

So many of the gay YA books have protagonists that have decent relationships with their parents. A few exceptions, sure, but there seems to be a ton of emphasis in the genre on kids being worried about who they are and the parents ending up being fine with it.

The father of the protagonist in the Villa book is undoubtedly the most evil father in any of the YA books I have read— not in a cartoonish way, but in the way that everyone knows and expects out of homophobic dads. I guess it might be weird to say it, because it was painful to read at times, but it was *good* that this book didn’t sugarcoat things. So many kids still get kicked out of their houses when they come out, it’s wild to think about.

Anyway, certainly not the most artful or politically astute of the books I have been reading, but pretty lovely, and nice to FINALLY have some Asian representation in one of these books for once.

The Double Life Of Arsene Lupin - The Lupin books are quick, easy reads for when I want to practice my French, and a dashing jewel thief is certainly a more comfortable read in the 21st century than many of the other archetypes of turn of the century popular lit (victorian explorer, supercop, etc.). I haven't been reading them in order, and it's been ages since I picked one up, but it feels like he's a harder man in this...previously I'd only remembered him tricking the police and rich victims, but here he gets several innocents involved and manipulates them in rather cruel ways, even if the book always stops short of making him a real rogue. I was going to speculate that the competition of the Fantômas stories, featuring a totally ruthless criminal, might have forced Leblanc to heighten things a little, but turns out this is from 1910 and Fantômas started in 1911.

Started Édouard Louis’ ‘History of Violence.’ Harrowing.

I read The End of Eddy a while ago and enjoyed it.

Yeah, I don’t know if “enjoyed” would be the word I would use to describe my reaction to ‘The End of Eddy,’ but I thought it was interesting. What I find fascinating is the contrast between the two— Louis’ tight prose in ‘Eddy’ is much less so in ‘History,’ which feels much more sprawling, undifferentiated, jumbled. But then again, it is a book detailing a more acute, specific act of violence rather than a general ambient violence, so these stylistic choices make some amount of sense.

"Enjoyed" isn't the right word, no. Let's say Louis' control over the material.

...impressed me.

yes, that was my reaction too

Picked up Boy Like Me, thanks for the recommendation.

I’m halfway through “Still Pictures” by Janet Malcolm, it’s completely delightful.

I just re-read Eiger Dreams, Jon Krakauer, a collection of a dozen or so short magazine pieces about mountains and climbing. The sport has continued to grow and change, but these pieces have aged very well because they aren't really about technique but about a certain kind of obsession, written by someone who knew it from the inside.

that’s my favorite Krakauer, Aimless.

Have y'all read James Salter's novel about mountain climbing?

Solo Faces? Yes. Great book.

I'll have to look into it & see what's up. I've a hunch the most interesting part of a mountain climbing novel would be the least fictional and most focused on the climbing.

I need to get that. I love Eiger Dreams. Climbers by M. John Harrison is a great, ah, climbing book.

I'm reading *The Mermaid of Black Conch* by Monique Roffey. She's a British-Trinadadian writer and this is a magical realist fable in which a woman is cursed to be a mermaid, and, centuries later, caught by some American tourists. A local guy saves her and gradually nurses her back to health. It's gentle and warm (so far), written in a mix of patois and fragmentary poems.

Aimless, the climbing parts of Solo Faces are quite interesting, but it’s really about the obsession and drive that get a climber to do the things they do. Harrison’s book is much more about dirtbagging, on the other hand— they’re sort of a study in contrasts, with Salter’s being much more in debt to the modernist novel and Harrison the post-modern. at least in my thinking.

I liked Harrison’s book a bit better, tho, if only because it feels closer to my own experiences

Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945 has taken a turn in its final third that's less interesting to me than what came before, so I might give up on it. I got two more John D. MacDonald Travis McGee novels from the library and am going to try one of those tonight.

what did milton mayer write about the germans, during the war, that you found uninteresting?

Alan Moore, The Great When - So far this is repeating the tricks from Jerusalem, multiple protagonists, jumps in time, psychedelic and mystical imagery mixed with British working class/leftist history. At least the black character is less clumsily portrayed this time.

I just can’t with Moore’s prose. I feel like a 12 year old again, trying to decode one of those impossible long pages of captions in Swamp Thing. I need the pictures! I might have to put them beside Neal Stephenson in the “sounds interesting, won’t read” pile

I had a similar experience when I first cracked open Jerusalem during the pandemic, but being a Moore fanboy I took it as a challenge abd focused on understanding each sentence. In a way that kinda retaught me how to read? So much writing these days doesn't demand that kind of attention (cf discussion elsewhere about no one doing description anymore), it felt really good to get back to that kind of concentration. Not that I can pretend I always read like that now.

I really enjoyed You Dreamed of Empires. Partly because it's a fascinating period of history - I didn't know Cortes made alliances with many indigenous groups, or that he was invited into the palace in Tenochtitlan (the floating city at the heart of the Aztec empire), or that Tenochtitlan was a wonder of the world which awed the Spanish. But I also enjoyed the modern, sardonic tone (though he didn't shy away from the brutality and barbarism on both sides), and the occasional flash of postmodernity (e.g. an unexpected brief appearance of the music of T-Rex).

Oh I also read The Great Arc, about the 19th century project to create a triangulation survey of India, and calculate the curvature of the earth along the way. An incredible undertaking which took decades, cost hundreds of lives (from disease), uprooted locals and destroyed their homes (yay colonialism), was a celebrated scientific achievement at the time and is now almost completely forgotten. The surveyor general, George Everest (pronounced EVE-rest) is only remembered for one thing (the mountain), calculating the height of which was merely a side effect of the survey which he didn't do and didn't particularly care about.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlett Letter

Talked about this a bit on the 'classic' book thread

Gert Hofmann - The Parable of the Blind

This is fantastic. A 'back story' of the six blind men painted by Brueghel in his "Blind Leading the Blind", told in a Beckett like fashion, from their POV.

I just finished A Long Strange Trip by Dennis McNally, the official history of the Grateful Dead. I loved the first 60%, which only goes through like 1972, but it is a bit thin after that. It weirdly skips over things I would have liked to hear more about (1973 is basically reduced to Watkins Glen, 1974 to the Wall of Sound and cocaine) and emphasizes other things I dngaf about like the trip to Egypt in 1978. The last few years and Garcia's deterioration is pretty grim.

I started reading Billy Budd, Sailor and enjoying it already.

Started Martin Wilson’s ‘What They Always Tell Us,’ a book that is technically YA but reads a lot more like an adult novel about teenagers. Two brothers in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, one of whom recently tried to kill himself. Interesting things happening in their dynamic, and it seems like they both might be gay? Anyway, I am enjoying it, feels very naturalistic and not as antic or contrived as some other YA I have read recently. Maybe also because it’s older and there isn’t as much manic texting and stuff?

This feels a bit like a confession, but I checked out a Richard Stark 'Parker" novel, The outfit, from the library without realizing that I'd read it a couple years ago. As I started reading it seemed vaguely familiar. About 1/3 through I knew for sure that I'd read it before, but I recalled so little about the details that I was still able to enjoy it. I went ahead and finished it. Again. It took me two nights, so it's not like I wasted a lot of time on it.

xp

Don’t know that novel, but yes—-the breathlessness of a lot of social media age YA prose can be exhausting and even a bit alienating for an oldster like me. Another one for me to check out though!

xp this is perfectly fine! you've read a lot of books; not all of them are necessarily memorable

Jean Paul - Logbook of Giannozzo the Balloonist

Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann. Just yer standard contemporary political critique via literary historical fiction. Abounds with startling insights and images.

xpost to crypto: finished it today. a really lovely book about brotherly love and learning how to care for others. the younger brother is gay, but it’s more a part of the story of how the two brothers find each other as brothers again.

(i am an only child— probably makes sense to all of you, lmao— but i love reading books about siblings)

The Music of What Happens disappointed me after the other two Konigsbergs. The characters struck me as pallid imitations of Ben and Rafe. Also, he's not great at three-dimensional girls.

Yeah, agreed about that one, tho I thought the actual themes of the book were important.

I mean, it was the first gay YA book I’ve read that dealt with SA in any kind of meaningful way

I mean, it was the first gay YA book I’ve read that dealt with SA in any kind of meaningful way

oh yeah by far the most harrowing -- when I got to a certain chapter I got a lump in my throat.

Istvan Orkeny - One Minute Stories. (The title is what these are)

How are you finding One Minute Stories? I loved it (as you know)

Oh really love them! They seem to draw on a lot of what I love about specifically Hungarian fiction circa 1920s or so, which is like this pure love for the pleasure -- but also horror -- in the everyday. The footnotes are really useful in adding context of that post-war eastern euro life.

Cool! I think they have something of the Daniil Kharms about them also, which is high praise. I have vol2 here if you ever need more.

May do. I'll revive the FAP thread.

(Have you read this collection btw? You might like it: https://www.europaeditions.com/author/338/geza-csath)

crypto, the description you gave and those online don’t do justice to how absolutely brutal ‘Two Boys Kissing’ is. maybe it’s because I get very emotional when i think about the worst of the plague years and all the men we lost, but i am finding it hard to read this book without becoming overwhelmingly sad.

Gezaesthetics, nice.