Sypnosis

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.

My Thoughts

Brilliant book. It wasn't what I was expecting at all. The ending especially haunted me.

Sypnosis

The time is the eve of the World War II. The place is Alexandria, an Egyptian city that once housed the world's greatest library and whose inhabitants are dedicated to knowledge. But for the obsessed characters in this mesmerizing novel, their pursuits lead only to bedrooms in which each seeks to know—and possess—the other. Since its publication in 1957, Justine has inspired an almost religious devotion among readers and critics alike.

My Thoughts

One of the most beautifully written books ever, with a very intriguing love interest. Durrell has a way with describing landscapes, and a deeply philosophical nature.

Sypnosis

Following the twin trails of desire and depravity to a shocking, sadistic paradise - a garden in China where torture is practiced as an art form - a dissolute Frenchman discovers the true depths of degradation beyond his prior bourgeois imaginings. Entranced by a resolute Englishwoman whose capacity for debauchery knows no bounds, he capitulates to her every whim amid an ecstatic yet tormenting incursion of visions, scents, caresses, pleasures, horrors, and fantastic atrocities.

My Thoughts

Absolutely beautifully written, the dialogue is eloquent and the scenery is disturbing, an absolute classic.

Sypnosis

Gilbert Adair's novel is set in Paris in the spring of 1968. The city is beginning to emerge from hibernation and an obscure spirit of social and political renewal is in the air. Yet Théo, his twin sister Isabelle and Matthew, an American student they have befriended, think only of immersing themselves in another, addictive form of hibernation: moviegoing at the Cinémathèque Française. Night after night, they take their place beside their fellow cinephiles in the very front row of the stalls and feast insatiably off the images that flicker across the vast white screen.

Denied their nightly 'fix' when the French government suddenly orders the Cinémathèque's closure, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew gradually withdraw into a hermetically sealed world of their own creation, an airless universe of obsessive private games, ordeals, humiliations and sexual jousting which finds them shedding their clothes and their inhibitions with equal abandon. A vertiginous free fall interrupted only, and tragically, when the real world outside their shuttered apartment succeeds at last in encroaching on their delirium.

The study of a triangular relationship whose perverse eroticism contrives nevertheless to conserve its own bruised purity, brilliant in its narrative invention and startling in ints imagery, The Dreamers (now a film by Bernardo Bertolucci) belongs to the romantic French tradition of Les Enfants Terribles and Le Grand Meaulnes and resembles no other work in recent British fiction.

My Thoughts

Extraordinary, revolutionary, and inherently taboo.

Sypnosis

Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Dolores Haze, his landlady's gum-snapping, silky skinned twelve-year-old daughter. Reluctantly agreeing to marry Mrs Haze just to be close to Lolita, Humbert suffers greatly in the pursuit of romance; but when Lo herself starts looking for attention elsewhere, he will carry her off on a desperate cross-country misadventure, all in the name of Love. Hilarious, flamboyant, heart-breaking and full of ingenious word play, Lolita is an immaculate, unforgettable masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust.

My Thoughts

I read this book when I was rather young. It was easy to romanticize, unfortunately. But now looking back on it, I truly appreciate it for how beautifully written it is despite the disturbing content it contains. I still believe to this day that Vladimir Nabokov is one of the most eloquent writers, even if his work is pretty unhinged.

Sypnosis

The shocking thing about the girls was how nearly normal they seemed when their mother let them out for the one and only date of their lives. Twenty years on, their enigmatic personalities are embalmed in the memories of the boys who worshipped them and who now recall their shared adolescence: the brassiere draped over a crucifix belonging to the promiscuous Lux; the sisters' breathtaking appearance on the night of the dance; and the sultry, sleepy street across which they watched a family disintegrate and fragile lives disappear.

My Thoughts

Just captivating. A staple of my girlhood years.

Sypnosis

Taken from the original, uncensored journals of Anaïs Nin, Henry and June spans a single year in Nin's life when she discovers love and torment in one insatiable couple. From late 1931 to the end of 1932, Nin falls in love with Henry Miller's writing and his wife June's striking beauty. When June leaves Paris for New York, Henry and Anaïs begin a fiery affair that liberates her sexually and morally, but also undermines her marriage and eventually leads her into psychoanalysis. As she grapples with her own conscience, a single question dominates her thoughts: What will happen when June returns to Paris? An intimate account of one woman's sexual awakening, Henry and June exposes the pain and pleasure felt by a single person trapped between two loves.

My Thoughts

Anais Nin is my favorite writer of all time. Her writing is beautiful, revelatory, and naturally taboo. Those are the type of qualities I adore. Henry and June is a true, non-traditional, polyamorous love story that dates back to the 1930s.

Sypnosis

Jack Kerouac immortalized her in his novel Big Sur. A student of Zen, she hung out with Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg and was a speaker at San Francisco’s Human Be-In. But Lenore Kandel was no muse or hanger-on; she was a brilliant lyric poet, often unabashedly erotic, and that’s where her legacy lies.

Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel contains 80 examples of her art, from the “holy erotica” of her early years to later, more contemplative works. Many of the poems have never been published, others only in rare ephemeral publications. Some are explicit, celebrating carnal love as part of the divine. Others are humorous and cover more quotidian subjects. A recurring theme is the “divine animal” duality. The collection includes poems written from the early fifties up until Kandel’s death.

The paradox of Lenore Kandel is that despite her prodigious talent, she was one of the least read and critically appreciated of modern poets. Kandel found her voice at a time when the Beat era was giving way to the countercultural age, and though she straddled both eras, it meant that she also fell through the cracks in terms of recognition. Now for the first time the full range of her work appears in one volume.

My Thoughts

Lenore Kandel is my favorite poet of all time. She combines sultry, gorgeous language, with an inherently explicit nature. She is my all time favorite beat poet, and I love them all.

Sypnosis

"The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman is the most comprehensive selection of his verse to date, a volume that contains a lot of previously uncollected work. … this book makes a case for him as a perceptive and eccentric American original, a man who seems to have fallen out of the sky like a meteor."— The New York Times "The body of work is small but voluminous in intensity, spirit and soul, with a lineage that runs from Charles Baudelaire to Charles Mingus. Kaufman—with his commitment to the art, his surreal eye on the urban experience and beyond it, and his jazz timing—brings San Francisco to life."— San Francisco Chronicle "Twentieth-century American poetry cannot be fully comprehended without Bob Kaufman. City Lights and the editors do a grand service to literature by publishing Kaufman's poetry in one collection. … This is a necessary gift for poets and poetry readers."— Booklist "Not many collected works deserve sustained place in the hands of readers and on the shelves of bookstore poetry sections. This is one of them."— Publishers Weekly “He was an original voice. No one else talked like him. No one else wrote poetry like him.”— Lawrence Ferlinghetti Bob Kaufman (1925–1986) was one of the most important—and most original—poets of the twentieth century. He is among the inaugurators of what today is characterized as the Afro-Surreal, uniting the surrealist practice of automatic writing with the jazz concept of spontaneous composition. He seldom wrote his poems down and often discarded those he did, leaving them to be rescued by others. He was also a legendary figure of the Beat Generation, known as much for hopping on tables to declaim his poetry as for maintaining a monastic silence for months or even years at a time. Kaufman produced just three broadsides and three books in his lifetime.

My Thoughts

My second favorite beat poet of all time, Bob Kaufman. He is on par with Allen Ginsberg in his brilliance, but cultivates his own philosophical nuances, wrapped in clever wordplay.

Sypnosis

Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the superb work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

My Thoughts

A beautifully written story.