With legs as long and felicitous as those, who needs Happy Hours? Even junkies crumpled in derelict alcoves are dying to know if her unbelievably shiny knees will be on the test. Of course her voice itself is the answer to why homicidal ruminations in the hearts of all men who have heard her speak are at an all time low. But did you also … Continue reading Connolly Ryan Poems, Day 3: “She Taught Her Neighborhood To Breathe”
The universe just wants to let you know that if you aren’t engaged Saturday night it would love a chance to change into something less universal and more intimate and then come through your window with breathtaking intentions as amatory as they are ambulatory and hoist you into its silken welkin or creamy empyrean or any other archaic words for firmament you prefer and then … Continue reading Connolly Ryan Poems, Day 2: “And Now A Word From The Universe”
I Have a Weakness or Soft Spot For: Sad ladies in Saturday leotards; drained lakes and the ducks who still drink from them; chocolate éclairs conquered on park benches by lonely young men in thrift-shop dress shirts; grassy inclines vibrant with trillium; city children on country field trips; foliage falling like a gaggle of gymnasts; little orange spiders who don’t care what death is; the … Continue reading Connolly Ryan Poems, Day 1: “I Have a Weakness or Soft Spot For:”
Among the many Italian authors billed as literary powerhouses, there is still, perhaps, no one who can hold a candle to Alberto Moravia. His most epic work, The Woman of Rome, is all the proof one needs of this. Released in 1949, the political undertones that become more prominent as the novel progresses cover the then recent past, a wartime era that tore the nation … Continue reading The Woman of Rome: A Love Letter to the Oldest Profession
Valeria Luiselli is something of the gamine manic pixie dream girl of the literary world–aesthetically at least. When it comes to her prose, though, there is so much more beneath the surface of her marketable look. Her second novel, The Story of My Teeth, published by Coffee House Press (who also put out the English translation of her first novel, Faces in the Crowd, and … Continue reading Collaboration Innovation: Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth
Most readers consider the literary gods of “drug books” to be Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. In truth, Italian author Pitigrilli dances circles around all of them in the 1921 novel Cocaine. Born to a Catholic mother and Jewish father in Turin, Italy as Dino Segre, the author culled most of the inspiration for the material in Cocaine from his time … Continue reading Cocaine: The Most Literary Book About Drugs
