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

Haunted by a sense of loss and foreboding, this fourth collection is rich in poems that raise the quiet mutiny against a withering cosmos. A dark magic works here, sustained by poetry that is often complex, ironic, disquieting, impassioned, and sometimes even wildly comic. In these pages we are confronted with the poet in midair, the Walrus Voluptuary, a tree that becomes a woman, a man with the head of a black swan. The poet's resonant voice convokes a cycle of spellbinding images, both concrete and elusive, that are, indeed, flares burning in the counterfeit night.

Catafalques

Poetry

Asylum Arts

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

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.

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

For years, Eric Basso's novella, The Beak Doctor, has sustained a cult reputation among a hard core of avant-garde writers. This collection of short stories begins with a tale of death and hideous resurrection, moves on through a quest for the great horse who rules a subterranean polar kingdom, an atmospheric cycle of short prose pieces, a tragicomic roman noir set in exotic Istanbul (in which the great horse appears in a new guise), and concludes with the harrowing odyssey of a masked man in a fogbound city turned upside down by a plague of sleeping sickness: The Beak Doctor.

The Beak Doctor

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

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Basso, Eric. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Basso, Eric

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Basso, Eric. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The beak doctor: Short fiction

Decompositions: Essays on Art & Literature 1973 - 1989

Catafalques

The Golem Triptych

The Golem Triptych

Bartholomew Fair

The Beak Doctor

Revagations: A Book of Dreams Vol. 1

Decompositions

Enigmas: Short Plays 1979-1982