This Week’s Reading, 3.3.12
A new weekly round-up of curiosities and grotesqueries that fried our synapses. Starring, this week:
- Romanian artist Raul Oprea interviewed by Horror Sleaze Trash. Only three brief questions, but Oprea’s art says everything that is necessary. More of his work here.
- Gaskella reflects on ‘super-noirist’ Jim Thompson’s most famous work (reminder: Thompson’s work is getting eBooked).
- Tim Parks at the NYR blog on establishing a modern canon: “Whatever in the future masquerades as a canon for our own time will largely be the result of good marketing, self-promotion, and of course pure chance.”
- Artist Erik Thor Sandberg: “With my work, I always try to dissect and expose a piece of human nature. I approach each composition as a kind of conversation between me and the audience. This dialog is always an attempt to question and define a scrap of my identity or that of the audience.” (this via Paul).
- The second issue of The Coffin Factory creeps quietly out – new fiction by Aimee Bender, Justin Taylor, Adam Wilson, and Jacques Strauss.
- 19th Century Medical Mummies at Morbid Anatomy.
- Dalkey’s Martin Riker on international literature.
- Sweet cover showdown at AbeBooks.
- Issue Seventeen of >kill author now out, dedicated to Italo Calvino.
- Finally, a hat-tip to two presses we have fallen in love with – one for the future, one now in small press heaven. Future: Milanese press Terracava (again, via Mr. K), homespun zines of the psychedelic and the demented. Heaven: Kilmog Press, a just-closed-down Kiwi press from the gusty streets of Dunedin – gorgeous books with incredible production values.
- Yukio Mishima, interviewed in English:
