skopia
Patrick Bateman works mergers and acquisitions, agonizes over the typeface on a colleague's business card, and narrates atrocities in the voice he uses for Huey Lewis albums. Reagan's Wall Street becomes horror comedy.
A balloon settles over forty-five blocks of Manhattan and New Yorkers read meanings into it. Barthelme's deadpan collages taught two generations of American writers that a story need not make ordinary sense.
O'Hara wrote these on lunch breaks from the museum, turning an ordinary Manhattan hour into art. "The Day Lady Died" runs through his errands until Billie Holiday's face on a newspaper stops everything.
The dead man narrates his own murder, and so do a coin and a tree, in the Istanbul of 1591 where painting a face as the eye sees it is treated as blasphemy.
Named executor of an ex-lover's estate, Oedipa Maas keeps finding a muted post horn on bathroom walls. Either a secret postal system has run under America for centuries or she is unraveling.
Czech propagandists airbrushed a purged minister out of a state photograph and left his fur hat on the leader's head. From that erasure Kundera builds seven stories about everything power wants forgotten.
Somewhere there is a film so entertaining that anyone who watches it stops eating. Wallace chases it through a tennis academy and a halfway house full of addicts he writes with real love.
You buy a Calvino novel, the copy is faulty, and the hunt for the rest keeps dropping you into the opening chapter of some other book. Ten beginnings, each hard to leave.
Kundera puts a Prague surgeon who cannot stop having affairs, the woman who loves him, and the Soviet tanks of 1968 together, then asks whether a life lived once can weigh anything.
A dead poet's 999 lines arrive wrapped in footnotes by a neighbor certain the poem is about his own lost northern kingdom. The ingenuity is total and the grief underneath is real.
In London in 1944 the army notices that an American officer's sexual conquests keep predicting where German rockets fall. What follows is the filthiest, funniest chase ever run across a ruined continent.
Humbert Humbert explains how he became stepfather to a twelve-year-old girl and drove her across America. Nabokov gives the monster the most beautiful prose in English and dares you to enjoy it.