The beak doctor: Short fiction

Basso, Eric

Europa Media

Decompositions collects all of Eric Basso's essays on art and literature in one volume. Basso takes us on a tour of bizarre literary landscapes and eccentric machines created by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Alfred Jarry. He explores Paul Valéry's brilliant subversion of philosophy and metaphysics in Monsieur Teste, and reveals the deathless apparition behind Maurice Blanchot's harrowing Death Sentence. The collection also contains illuminating, and diverting, pieces on Finnegans Wake, the French Romantics and Jacobean dramatist Cyril Tourneur, a study of the unexpectedly elusive, and venomous, Céline, and moving biographical portraits of Goya, Gérard de Nerval and Th?odore G?ricault. In the pivotal essay, "Annihilation," Basso takes a short story by a forgotten Hungarian writer as the springboard to a searing dissection of Rembrandt and the punitive anatomy, the alchemists' quest for a mystical Absolute, French poet Stéphane Mallarmé's collision with nothingness, Poe's chilling depiction of hypnotic suspension in articulo mortis, and René Daumal's dangerous experiments with asphyxiation to test the frontiers of life and death. "Annihilation" closes with a new interpretation of Kafka's The Castle. Basso approaches his subjects not as a critic but as an artist reflecting on the works, lives, deeds and frailties of other artists. These are studies that cut to the quick of what it means to create, and be created or destroyed by, a great poem, story, novel or painting.

Decompositions: Essays on Art & Literature 1973 - 1989

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Completed in 1983, this mesmerizing dramatic trilogy is destined to take its place beside The Playboy of the Western World, Waiting for Godot and The Homecoming as a classic of the modern theatre. Always surprising, witty and intelligent, Basso's plays move gracefully through both history and the history of theatre, incorporating at times the slapstick of Ionesco, the brooding heaviness of Ibsen, the passion, language and scope of the great Elizabethan dramatists. A powerfully moving odyssey, a transmutation of language from base metal to gold, a work of grandeur and pity.

The Golem Triptych

Dramas & Plays

Asylum Arts

Set in London during a killing heat wave, Eric Basso's 1982 novel, Bartholomew Fair, unfolds as a terrible cataclysm is about to devastate the city. Begun in the Middle Ages as a religious festival in commemoration of St. Bartholomew the Great, over the centuries Bartholomew Fair passed through several metamorphoses. Now it has gone "underground." Its lone survivor recounts the story of the Fair's final, sordid incarnation, and the bizarre odyssey which brings him face to face with the unspeakable. Rich in texture and atmosphere, this extraordinary novel is also a stylistic tour de force, in which the history of Bartholomew Fair, whose long-dead voices come to life in these pages, haunts the clandestine activities of its modern-day performers and their obsessed patrons. Its strange cast of characters do their best to unravel the fabric of expectations. Basso has created a world that is darkly comic, sinister, moving and, in the end, unforgettably disturbing.

Bartholomew Fair

Eric Basso (Randallstown, MD) is a native of Baltimore whose fiction, poetry, drama and essays have appeared in the Chicago Review, Fiction International, Central Park, Collages & Bricolages, Exquisite Corpse, and elsewhere.

Revagations: A Book of Dreams Vol. 1

Religion & Spirituality

Leaping Dog Press

Decompositions collects all of Basso's essays on art and literature in one volume. Basso approaches his subjects not as a critic but as an artist reflecting on the works, lives, deeds and frailties of other artists. These studies cut to the quick of what it means to create, and be created or destroyed by, a great poem, story, novel or painting.

Decompositions

This volume brings together all the short plays of Eric Basso-Enigmas, plus The Armoire and Adele Pierre. In Nightlight, as two men recount their life stories to a young woman the boundary between truth and falsehood becomes increasingly blurred. The Lecture explores the reputation of a great thinker, with harrowing results to its audience of three. Gentlemen of the Old School reunites three old friends in a sinister comedy of misunderstanding, dark family secrets and revenge. In The Armoire, a dimwitted inspector conducting and investigation into a case involving exhibitionism and ritualized behavior, becomes caught in a dizzying web of conspiracy. The volume concludes with the powerful and disturbing Adele Pierre, in which a medium is confronted with a past that may, or may not, be her own.

Enigmas: Short Plays 1979-1982

The Smoking Mirror

Poetry

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Books by Basso, Eric