Moebius: 40 Days in the Desert

French comic book artist and illustrator Jean Giraud (1938-2012), aka Moebius, has had, perhaps, a more profound influence on the Continue reading →

Seoul Stories: Han Kang, Violence and Candlelight

The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of Continue reading →

Calvino’s Cosmicomics: Time and the Hunter (or t zero)

To me, there’s virtually no doubt that Italo Calvino is a literary genius. Each one of his works create either Continue reading →

Creating a Character, 2: Bernard Malamud and J.G. Ballard

The question remains: How does a skilled writer establish a good character in so few pages? And how does it relate to their overall style and composition?

Abjection and the Real

Psychoanalysts Julia Kristeva and her predecessor Jacques Lacan have baffled graduate students for years due to their opaque and relentless Continue reading →

Simulacrum in Literature: Baudrillard and Barthelme

Simulacrum, like many terms surrounding postmodernism, has been defined in a number of ways. Perhaps the simplest definition of the Continue reading →

Time-Tearing with Philip K. Dick

I like Philip K. Dick. His ideas are intriguing and his writing is more than passable by my standards. I Continue reading →

Creating a Character: Carver and Cheever

The short story, the ever neglected cousin of the novel, requires many of the same techniques used in the composition Continue reading →

Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip and Pragmatic Knowledge

Philip K. Dick is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting writers of the 20th century. His prose is Continue reading →

Borges and Murakami: Philosophy in Fiction

Borges and Murakami Philosophy in fiction has had a long and storied history, from the mythology of Ancient Greece to Continue reading →

Storie Naturali: The Weird and Wonderful World of Luigi Serafini

Recently I received a book in the post. The words were written by an author I’d never heard of and it Continue reading →

Two Lessons on Animal and Man, 2: Christianity and Cartesianism

Christianity and Cartesianism In the second lesson of his book Two Lessons on Animal and Man, Gilbert Simondon begins to Continue reading →

Two Lessons on Animal and Man, 1: Antiquity

Simondon Gilbert Simondon (1924 – 1989) was arguably one of the most original and innovative thinkers in contemporary French philosophy. Continue reading →

The Failed Übermensch: A Marxist Reading of Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment highlights the turmoil, and tribulations of the societal exclusion of 19th century Russia’s lower class. Raskolnikov, Continue reading →

Calvino and the Codex Seraphinianus: A Psychedelic Mystery

On a cloudy Friday afternoon, sometime at the end of March, we were sat huddled on the floor of a Continue reading →

Man, the Animal Without Essence, 3: Brains, Hands and Tools

Artifice and art itself – these are the two meanings of the Greek word technē. Technē is, according to French Continue reading →

Borges and the Book of Infinity

If the Library of Babel is a library that is all libraries, then what if there was a book that is all books? What if, in the pages of a book, one could find infinity itself?

Fernando Pessoa and Nietzsche: The Last Man and Happiness

“Zarathustra has changed, Zarathustra has become a child, Zarathustra is an awakened one; what do you now want among the Continue reading →

The Mystery of The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript dates to the early 15th Century and it is believed to have come from northern Italy. It Continue reading →

Kafka, Orwell, Huxley: The Surveillance State in Literature

Even since the days before the Edward Snowden revelations there have been comparisons made between the powers of the NSA Continue reading →

Man, the Animal Without Essence

In the second half of his most famous work, Technics and Time, 1, ‘Prometheus’s Liver’, Bernard Stiegler analyses the Greek myth Continue reading →

Borges and Calvino: Invisible Cities and Dreams

  …Marco’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan’s Continue reading →

No Place to Hide: The Importance of Glenn Greenwald’s Newest Book

‘There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or Continue reading →

When Fiction Lives In Fiction

Fantastic Borges essay on the history of meta-fiction and its role in literature. After a thorough search of Google I couldn’t Continue reading →

The Importance of the Synthetic A Priori in Kant’s First Critique

For Kant, the analytic/synthetic distinction and the a priori/a posteriori distinction are fundamental building blocks in his philosophy. In this Continue reading →

Borges’ Dreamtigers

  A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images Continue reading →

Paranoia in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly

paranoia /ˌparəˈnɔɪə/ noun a mental condition characterized by delusions of persecution, unwarranted jealousy, or exaggerated self-importance, typically worked into an Continue reading →

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions

Another Borges book. Another 5 stars. I mean this man is so brilliant I’m starting to turn into a dithering Continue reading →

The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: The Role of the Slave In Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals

In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche aims to provide a new philosophical standpoint, one based on the concept of value Continue reading →

Proletarianization in E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops

‘cannot you see […] that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really Continue reading →

The Influence of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’

I’ve never been so indecisive about what to rate a book as I have been with Kafka’s The Trial. Upon Continue reading →

Bioy Casares: Time Images in The Invention of Morel

Ok, so I decided to pick this up as I found out Bioy was a friend of Borges (who just Continue reading →