Saturday 28 September 2013
Presented by FILAMENT STANZA, EQUUS PRESS & BODDIN8 GALLERY
With readings by and from the works of:
LOUIS ARMAND
THOR GARCIA
GEORGES BATAILLE (translated by Stuart Kendall, read by David Vichnar)
Programme starts at 20h
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LOUIS ARMAND is a Sydney-born writer & visual artist who has lived in Prague since 1994. He has worked as an editor, publisher, art consultant & curator, & as a subtitles technician at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival; currently he lectures in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University & is an editor of VLAK magazine. He has published five novels, Breakfast at Midnight (Equus, 2012), Clair Obscur (Equus, 2011), Menudo (Antigen, 2005), The Garden (Salt, 2001) and most recently Canicule (Equus, 2013). In addition, he is the author of seven collections of poetry–most recently, Letters from Ausland (Vagabond, 2011) & Synopticon (with John Kinsella; Litteraria, 2012)
He will be reading from Canicule (Equus, 2013): “Baudelaire’s mellow ‘living proof of our immortality’ done in the high pulp style.” The dog days of 1983. The bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov, dancing into the sunset. Hess, Ascher and Wolf are orphans chance has brought together in a small Baltic seaside town. Twenty years on, the long hot summer of the Israel-Lebanon War. Hess, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter, finds himself in the Mediterranean, drinking to forget a wasted marriage. Wolf, haunted by his father’s murder, is drawn into the nebulous world of international terrorism. When Ascher, a failed artist, commits suicide, all the stakes are changed. Or are they? With the Cold War, sex and punk rock throbbing in the background, Hess must confront his past, seeking to salvage dignity from defeat. Review by Richard Marshall, in 3AM Magazine: http://is.gd/EBG6lD
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THOR GARCIA was born in Long Beach, California. He has worked as a journalist in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and Prague, Czech Republic. His books include the novel The News Clown (Equus, 2012) and the story collection TUND (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011).
If Thor Garcia’s Only Fools Die of Heartbreak (Equus 2013), his latest short fiction collection, had somehow been published in the 19th Century, it would have given Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn a run for their money as the most controversial and banned book in the nation. Even as recently as the 1960’s, the book would have undoubtedly joined D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover as one of the pornographic tomes that brought about the passing of obscenity laws in many countries. Luckily for readers, Garcia is alive and writing today, and his prose takes full advantage of the everything-goes nature of indie publishing. From a review by Gabino Iglesias: http://is.gd/qghN0n
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DAVID VICHNAR will read from the first English translation of GEORGES BATAILLE’s Louis XXX (STUART KENDALL transl.). This book presents two little known hybrid texts: The Little One and The Tomb of Louis XXX. Written alongside Bataille’s major work, Guilty, and only loosely narrative in any conventional sense, these audaciously experimental pieces of pornographic chamber music commingle prose and poetry, fiction and autobiography, philosophical and theological meditations, abstract artifice and intimate confession, bound together by the mysterious pseudonym at their center. Jean-Jacques Pauvert claimed that The Little One was the most “shattering” text that Bataille ever wrote and André Breton remarked that The Little One “offers the most hungering, most moving aspect of [Bataille’s] thought and attests to the importance that that thought will have in the near future.” from: http://is.gd/k6rYud