Eye of the Heart: Short Stories from Latin America, ed. by Barbara Howes, 1973. Avon-Bard (1974). No cover artist or designer credited. 576 pages.

A promising mixtape, via many translators. Clarice Lispector might not have been a big enough name for English-reading audiences in the 1970s to make the front or back cover, but editor Barbara Howes included two of her stories.

Here is a piece (the shortest) from the collection:

“Why Reeds Are Hollow”

by

Gabriela Mistral

Translated by William Jay Smith

For don Max. Salas Marchant

I

Even in the peaceful world of plants, a social revolution once took place. It is told that in this case the leaders were those vain reeds. A master of rebellion, the wind, disseminated propaganda, and in no time at all there was talk of nothing else in the vegetal centers. Virgin forests fraternized with silly gardens, in a common struggle for equality.

Equality of what? Of their thickness of trunk, the excellence of their fruit, their right to pure water?

No, simply equality of height. The ideal was that all should raise their heads uniformly. The corn had no thought of making itself strong like the oak, but only of stirring its hairy tassels at the same elevation. The rose did not strive to be useful like the rubber plant, but just wanted to reach that high crown, and make of it a pillow on which to lull its flowers to sleep.

Vanity, vanity! Delusions of grandeur, even if they went against Nature, caricatured their aims. In vain, some modest flowers—the shy violet and flat-nosed lily—spoke of divine law and the evils of pride. Their voices seemed dotty.

An old poet, bearded like the River God, condemned the project in the name of beauty, and had some wise things to say about uniformity, hateful to him in every respect.

II

How did it all turn out? People tell of strange influences at work. Earth spirits blew upon the plants with their monstrous vitality, and so it was that an ugly miracle took place.

One night, the world of lawn and shrub grew dozens of feet, as if obeying some imperious appeal from the stars.

Next day, the country people were dismayed—when they came out of their huts—to find clover high as a cathedral and wheat fields wild with gold!

It was maddening. Animals roared with fright, lost in the darkness of their pastures. Birds chirped in desperation, their nests having risen to unheard-of heights. Nor could they fly down in search of seed: gone was the sunbathed soil, the grass’s humble tapestry.

Shepherds lingered by their flocks beside dark pastures; their sheep refused to enter anything so dense, afraid they might be swallowed up completely.

Meanwhile, victorious, the reeds laughed aloud, whipping their riotous leaves against the blue tops of the eucalyptus.

III

Thus a month is said to have passed. Then the decline set in.

And it came about in this fashion: violets, which delight in shade, dried up when their purple heads were exposed to full sunlight.

“It doesn’t matter,” the reeds hastened to say. “They’re a mere nothing.”

(But in the country of the spirits, they were mourned.)

Lilies, stretching their height to fifty feet, broke in two. Like the heads of queens, white marble heads lay lopped off all around.

The reeds argued as before. (But the Graces ran wild through the wood, lamenting.)

Lemon trees at that height lost all their blossoms to the violent winds. Adios, harvest!

“It doesn’t matter,” the reeds stated yet again. “Their fruit was so bitter.”

The clover dried out, its stems twisting like threads in a fire.

Corn tassels drooped, but no longer from gentle lassitude. In all their extravagant length they fell upon the earth, heavy as rails.

Potatoes, to strengthen their stems, put forth feeble tubers; these were little bigger than apple seeds.

Now the reeds laughed no more; at last they grew serious.

Blossoms of shrub or grass were no longer being fertilized: the insects could not reach them without overheating their little wings.

Furthermore, it was said that man had neither bread nor fruit nor forage for his animals; hunger and sorrow were abroad in the land.

In such a state of things, only the tall trees remained sound, trunks rising strongly as ever: they had not yielded to temptation.

The reeds were the last to fall, signaling the total disaster of their tree-level theory; roots rotted from excessive humidity, and even the network of foliage could not keep them from drying out.

It was then clear that, compared with their former solid bulk, they’d become hollow. They reached hungry leagues upward, but, their insides being empty, they were laughable, like marionettes or dolls.

In the face of such evidence, no one could defend their philosophy; no more was said about it for thousands of years.

Nature—generous always—repaired the damage in six months, seeing to it that all wild plants would again spring up in the usual way.

The poet, bearded like the River God, appeared after a long absence and, rejoicing, sang of the new era.

“So be it, dear people. Beautiful is the violet for its minuteness, and the lemon tree for its gentle shape. Beautiful are all things as God made them: the noble oak and the brittle barley.”

The earth bore fruit once again; flocks fattened, the people were nourished.

But the reeds—those rebel chieftains—bore for all time the mark of their disgrace: they were hollow, hollow . . .

From “The Kanibul Ball” by Lale Westvind. Published in Kramers Ergot #9, 2016, Fantagraphics Books.

I’m a big fan of Drew Lerman’s work, and I’m always excited when he puts together a new collection. His latest is Conversations with Don DeLillo and Other Conversations, collecting his recent strips. I would describe these strips as functioning in the mode of pseudoautiobiographical postmodern literary interrogation, only that makes them sound pretentious, which they aren’t. They are very funny and very niche, and I often feel like I am Lerman’s ideal reader. This is my niche.

Each one-page strip features (a version of) Lerman encountering (and often trailing) a writer (DeLillo, obv., but also Joy Williams, Jonathan Franzen, Gordon Lish, William T. Vollmann…); the conversations are often very one-sided and allow Lerman to interrogate his subject on the kind of minutiae that often overtakes our ability to see the forest for the trees, so to speak, when it comes to art. In one of my favorite bits, for example, Lerman critiques the implementation of (“middle school book report-ass”) Courier New Unjustified as the font for DeLillo’s novel The Silence. I could go on but I should save it for a proper review.

Conversations with Don DeLillo also features a great negative blurb by a certain grouchy “Myron Circle”:

And maybe this is corny of me, but I love that Lerman used Chris Ware stamps to mail me Conversations with Don DeLillo. (Chris Ware shows up in Conversations, btw — he tries to give Lerman a bunch of his books and tell Lerman how much he loves Snake Creek

More thoughts to come.

RIP Marjane Satrapi, 19-2026

I was saddened to learn today of the death of the artist Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi was only 56.

Satrapi is probably most recognized for her first published work, Persepolis, a graphic novel she completed in 2003. Persepolis was one of the first books I wrote about on Biblioklept, way back in 2007, when this blog was not half a year old. Here is the entire post:

“It was funny to see how Marx and God looked like each other.”

Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis makes a nice introduction to the graphic novel autobiography for anyone who hasn’t read one before. Marjane’s memoir weaves the political turmoil of the Islamic Revolution with the everyday stuff of childhood experience. As the the repressive Islamic regime revokes liberal freedoms, Marjane’s folks (secular intellectuals, of course) smuggle Iron Maiden posters back from Turkey; young Marjane sneaks cigarettes and rock music to a backdrop of political assassinations and war with Iraq.

Persepolis succeeds by engaging the reader in a personal experience of revolution and cultural alienation. It works as a history lesson and as a coming of age story. Readers who try something different (maybe suspend some prejudices?) will be rewarded with an enriched perspective on a political/cultural upheaval still affecting global politics today.

I wrote that twenty years ago, and there are any number of things I could pick at, I think my defensive tone is the most interesting to me. I think that general audiences have come to understand that comics, just like any other medium, can express the highest ideals of art. Persepolis, now a staple on many school reading lists, contributed to that cultural shift.

I looked around for my copy, but then realized that my daughter took Persepolis with her when she left for college last year. I remember reading the book to her when she was little; later she read it herself. We repeated the process with our son. And then we watched Satrapi’s 2007 film adaptation together a few times.

We also watched her film adaptation of her graphic novel Chicken with Plums. The film is good, but the book is better. My 2009 review of the paperback edition again highlighted an anxiety that mainstream audiences held prejudices against the comics medium:

Casual readers to comics often make the error of supposing that the medium is merely words with accompanying pictures. Satrapi’s deft work here might do wonders in correcting this ignorance. There isn’t a wasted panel in Chicken with Plums, and Satrapi commands intense emotion from her thick, black lines. There’s a seamless quality to Chicken with Plums; the text and the pictures, indivisible, add up to more than the sum of their parts. Satrapi knows when to hold back and let her simple black and white images tell the story. There is a certain economy of storytelling that great comic writers can achieve in ways entirely possible in prose, and here Satrapi has surpassed her earlier work in Persepolis, which, while great, often relied heavily on textual exposition. In Chicken with Plums, Satrapi’s evocations of troubled family life, unfulfilled love, the perils of Iranian immigration to California, and Sufi mysticism all blend into a poignant, often-funny, and occasionally devastating portrait that exemplifies the best of the comics medium.

While comparisons to her Persepolis series will undoubtedly hang over all of Satrapi’s work, Chicken with Plums is a wonderful successor, and in some senses, a more achieved work. Although it doesn’t convey the first-person immediacy of Persepolis, nor that memoir’s dramatic scope, the story of Nasser Ali is intimately detailed and achieves something rare in an age of overstuffed books: it leaves its readers hungry for more.

The plot of Chicken with Plums is devastatingly simple. Nasser Ali, a renowned Iranian musician (and Satrapi’s great uncle), elects to die after his wife destroys his beloved instrument. He quits eating and refuses to leave his bedroom. The story is very much an extrapolation of hazy events revealed in dreams and flashbacks, with a tint of magical realism.

I was a bit taken aback, given the plot of Chicken with Plums, while reading the following detail from Satrapi’s obituary in Le Monde today. The French newspaper reported that those close to the artist declared that, “Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life.” How very sad. I hope she has found some peace.

Nine million, n-­i-­n-­e million. Ah, the world got what it deserved. The lessons had been written on the board in big letters thousands of years ago and repeated several times every century since.

Question: How many men can I kill if I dig out the Suez Canal?

Question: How many men can I kill if I build myself a Great Pyramid?

Question: How many men, women and children can we kill if we retake the Holy Land from the heathens? (We’ll call it a Crusade.)

Question: How many men, women and children can we kill if we establish a slave trade between Africa and the New World?

Question: How many men can we kill to make the world safe for democracy?

Question: How many men can we kill to make the world safe for communism?

Answer: Hundreds, thousands, millions, billions.

And then, we’ll start all over again.

From John A. Williams’ 1967 novel The Man Who Cried I Am.

I have always loved the month of May. Spring semester is usually over and done by the last week of April and I seem to breathe a little easier. I love May Day and there’s always been a neat little run of interesting dates in the first week, including my wedding anniversary. (My silly ass has taken to including Thomas Pynchon’s birthday as the capstone to the first week of Merry May). I get that May the Fourth is stupid, but it seemed fun when my kids were little, and I get that Cinco de Mayo, even with its roots in the Chicano movement, is probably now just a marketing tool for amateurs to do it up, a la St. Paddy’s Day and NYE. But it’s fun to have a little treat. My best friend died on 5 May 2025 though and I was dreading the date, although the anxiety over it was worse than the actual day. But then I dreamed about him for a few weeks straight. The month seemed incredibly long but at least the terrible drought in Florida broke with heavy heavy rains.

The wife and I make a point to sneak in an anniversary trip in early May. We spent a few nights in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami and saw Belle & Sebastian perform their 1996 album If You’re Feeling Sinister in full. I felt incredibly old but it was magical. I’ve never been a big fan of Miami, but we had some good meals and enjoyed talking to a few of the artists at the Bakehouse Art Complex. This is the closest I actually got to a bookstore in Miami. Bookleggers is not actually a bookstore, it’s a free library, and it wasn’t open, although there was a loaded library cart full of titles out for offer. I love the idea and if I lived down there I’d pop in to donate at least once a month.

But on to books!

I’ve wormed into William H. Gass’s massive novel The Tunnel again. This is like my fourth or fifth serious attempt. I love Gass’s essays and shorter fiction, but I find that I stall out. My tactic this time has been to read one section a day, or at least to try to. I’m somewhere around page 160 now, and I think I’ve finally gotten into the “story,” or whatever, but it’s all pretty damn windy, and Gass’s penchant for alliteration, which I enjoy in short doses, is, like, too much (there’s a moment where the narrator remarks his wife’s calling him out on all the alliteration; I didn’t dogear it though).

I’ve also stalled a bit on Guillermo Stitch’s The Coast of Everything; I was attempting the same approach as that I’ve taken to The Tunnel — a section a day — but I keep getting distracted by shorter morsels, like Gabriel García Márquez’s In Evil Hour and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (both in translation by Gregory Rabassa, of course). Chronicle was even better than I’d remembered; In Evil Hour was rough, mean, and short.

The pictured stack is not all May reading, although I did read and review Antoine Volodine’s novel The Monroe Girls (tr. Alyson Waters) in early May.  I read and reviewed Thomas Kendall’s How I Killed the Universal Man in April; I then read Joanna Russ’s And Chaos Died and meant to review it and kept moving it up the stack and then eventually lost track. On Bluesky, I tweeted that I was “baffled by the whole thing. Like if Kathy Acker wrote a sci-fi psionic satire. Very weird, I think I loved it, it might not be a ‘good’ novel.” That’s still basically my memory. I picked up a first edition Grove Press copy of WSB’s The Ticket That Exploded and I now have to reshelve all the Burroughs which means I have to reshelve a whole bookcase. So it can hang there for awhile.

I gave up pretty quickly on Stanley Crawford’s Gascoyne — probably too quickly — but I wanted the weirder flavor of his slim 1972 novel Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine. I ended up reading Crawford’s 2005 novel Petroleum Man over two nights and loving every minute of the experience. I highly recommend the novel, as well as Dan Visel’s 2010 review of the novel at his blog With Hidden Noise. I also recommend the blog With Hidden Noise, which was somehow not on my radar fifteen or some such years ago, but which I have very much enjoyed browsing now, which is to say over the past few days. There’s a rich backlog there. I lament too often that There Aren’t Any Good Websites Anymore, but maybe I don’t look enough; maybe I’m guilty of spending too much of my internet time on social media sites. The first book I mentioned here was by William H. Gass; I’ll take my offramp from this cursed blog by suggesting you read a real blog post, this With Hidden Noise post on Gass’s On Being Blue, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and Thomas Browne.

From “Sexy Guns” by Helge Reumann. Published in Kramers Ergot #9, 2016, Fantagraphics Books.

NYRB will publish reprints of two John Berger books on June 16th of this year (why does that date seem so familiar?), his experimental picaresque 1972 classic G., and 1984’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photo. I’d never heard of the latter, which NYRB describes as maybe

…the most original of John Berger’s books; certainly, it is among the most moving. A meditation on first and last things, it is divided into two parts, one reflecting on humanity’s relation to time, the other on our place in space.

Here is a paragraph from the middle of G.:

You had to find a third value, a third interest that your social ambition, which, unlike pure ambition, must always wear the dress of conformity, and the idealism of your penises could acknowledge as arbiter. And this third value was property. The third interest was an interest in owning. Not a remote merely financial interest, but a passionate one which stirs you physically, which becomes a sense as acute as the sense of touch. Indeed you have seen to it that your children are taught to touch nothing that is not theirs, not a flower nor an animal nor the hand of a stranger. To touch is to claim as property. To fuck is to possess. And you take possession either by paying rent or by buying outright.

Flower in a Stream, c. 1989 by David Cloud Berman (1967-2019). Originally published in Caliban #8, 1990.

“Box Head” by Jayr Pulga, published in RAW #5, 1983, Raw Books & Graphics.

Timoclea Kills the Captain of Alexander the Great, 1659 by Elisabetta Sirani (1638–1665)

This October, McSweeney’s will publish an anthology of Stephen Dixon’s short stories. Titled Goodbye to Goodbye (after Dixon’s 1985 short story), this anthology inaugurates a forthcoming wave of Dixonia over the next three years, including editions of I and End of I in paperback, a new edition of Frog next year and a reprint of Interstate the year after that, and, most exciting, a previously-unpublished novel called Half Stories, Full Novel, and Out of Time, a collection of previously-unpublished short stories.

The collection includes “Said,” one of Dixon’s more “experimental” pieces; you can read it here.

Jacket copy:

When Stephen Dixon passed away in 2019, American literature lost, in Jonathan Lethem’s words, “a great secret master.” In a career that spanned six decades, Dixon published over seven hundred short stories and had two novels shortlisted for the National Book Award. Arguably, his innovative work represents the earliest appearance of what we now call autofiction, and many of this generation’s writers count him among their greatest influences.

Goodbye to Goodbye is the first major collection of Dixon’s stories since 1994. The current anthology includes work that spans Dixon’s remarkable career, from his very first published story to previously unpublished works written at the end of his life. The stories have been chosen to reflect the development of Dixon’s ever-evolving style, from earlier, more traditional stories; to pioneering experiments with dialogue, point of view, and sentence structure; to what became his trademark: obsessively self-revising texts that reflect experience as if through a funhouse mirror, paradoxically both truly felt and narratively twisted. As J. Robert Lennon writes in his introduction, Dixon’s work “doesn’t efface its artificiality; it doesn’t want its reader, or its author, to disappear.”

At once deeply personal and comically exuberant, Goodbye to Goodbye showcases both Dixon’s unique perspective on life and his innovative approach to writing.

Untitled (Christian’s Birthday), 2023 by Gerald Lovell (b. 1992)

The pic above doesn’t really show how massive Heaven & Hellhound is. This 800 pager is by the pseudonymous B. Authentick, and purports to be a “tale of metaphysical realism.” You can learn more about the book (and download it for free) at its website. Blurb:

Heaven & Hellhound is a work of dark literary fiction that weaves together the occult, esoteric philosophy and the eternal struggle between light and shadow. Volume One – The Page of Wands – breaches the eternal threshold where ancient mysteries collide with modern consciousness. Drawn from that liminal space, what divides the sacred from the profane dissolves into something unspeakably horrifying. But for the lantern’s light, the dark night of the soul enshrouds.

Written by B. Authentick, inspired by the engravings of Gustave Doré and the ferocious vision of Vincent van Gogh, this tome is more than a book – it is a talisman, a portal and a companion for those who dare to peer through the veil.
A Trans-Atlantic tale set in 1964 in England and California, the tale channels the esoteric traditions of the Western mystery schools through the lens of Metaphysical Realism, a novel literary mode. It affords a means to storytelling in which the occult is not decoration but physics, the muse is not metaphor but visitor, and the body’s toll is commensurate to the malediction which afflicts its soul. Heaven & Hellhound is a work of literary innovation, published as the foundational text of Metaphysical Realism.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain

Adventures & Misadventures of Maqroll, Mutis

Against the Day, Pynchon

The Age of Sinatra, Ohle

Angels, Johnson

Ape & Essence, Huxley

Augustus, Williams

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Johnson

The Autumn of the Patriarch, García Márquez

The Baron in the Trees, Calvino

Berg, Quin

Billy Budd, Melville

Blood & Guts in High School, Acker

Blue Lard, Sorokin

Brave New World, Huxley

Breaking & Entering, Williams

By Night in Chile, Bolaño

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Miller Jr.

Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut

The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal

Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, Johnson

The Confidence-Man, Melville

Correction, Bernhard

Crash, Ballard

Days Between Stations, Erickson

The Dead Father, Barthelme

Dog Soldiers, Stone

The Dog of the South, Portis

Fat City, Gardner

The Female Man, Russ

The Franchiser, Elkin

Garbage, Dixon

Gargoyles, Bernhard

Go Down, Moses, Faulkner

Gormenghast, Peake

Gringos, Portis

Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon

The Girls of Slender Means, Spark

High Rise, Ballard

The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington

Hurricane Season, Melchor

I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Everett

Ice, Kavan

Infinite Jest, Wallace

The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, Carter

Interstate, Dixon

J R, Gaddis

Junky, Burroughs

Lanark, Gray

Lancelot, Percy

The Lathe of Heaven, Le Guin

Light in August, Faulkner

Loitering with Intent, Spark

Lord Jim at Home, Brooke

The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

The Lost Scrapbook, Dara

The Man in the High Castle, Dick

Mason & Dixon, Pynchon

Masters of Atlantis, Portis

Motorman, Ohle

Mumbo Jumbo, Reed

Naked Lunch, Burroughs

Negrophobia, James

Neuromancer, Gibson

Norwood, Portis

The Obscene Bird of Night, Donoso

O Pioneers!, Cather

Oreo, Ross

The Place of Dead Roads, Burroughs

The Plains, Murnane

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain

The Public Burning, Coover

Pudd’nhead Wilson, Twain

Queer, Burroughs

Radiant Terminus, Volodine

The Real Cool Killers, Himes

The Recognitions, Gaddis

Silas Marner, Eliot

The Savage Detectives, Bolaño

The Shadow of the Torturer, Wolfe

Smiley’s People, Le Carré

Snow White, Barthelme

The Sot-Weed Factor, Barth

Speedboat, Adler

The Stranger, Camus

Sula, Morrison

Suttree, McCarthy

There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, Forrest

Three Trapped Tigers, Cabrera Infante

True Grit, Portis

Two Serious Ladies, Bowles

UBIK, Dick

Under the Volcano, Lowry

Underworld, DeLillo

Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Markson

Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, Reed

Zama, di Benedetto

A page from Inner City Romance #3 by Guy Colwell, Last Gasp, 1977. Reprinted by Fantagraphics, 2015.

A Passion Like No Other, 2012 by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977)