Gisele Prassinos

Wakefield's edition of her early story collection, The Arthritic Grasshopper, is excellent even by their standards, with cool original art and a great introduction about Prassinos in relation to the sexist surrealist milieu by Bo Ruberg of all people.

the thing that strikes me with her earliest stories, which she started at 14, is how imagistic they are. People reading often comment on how full of non-sequiturs and narratives that don't make sense, but that's because they're not narrative. It's like Prassinos is writing ekphrasis of non-existent Varo pieces and viewed in that light I think her writing isn't all that difficult to parse, which certainly doesn't mean it's not really interesting.

(no subject)

its pretty funny that every time Andre Breton encountered something he liked he'd be like "this is the best thing anyone has written since Maldoror!"

Louis Levy - Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah

A weird little curio for sure. An extremely odd novel from 1910, appreciated by Benjamin and Scholem, that's somewhere between gothic horror, detective farce, and psychoanalytic drama. It's not fully satisfying - I actually think the second section is too short - and the ending twist and resulting philosophy fall a little flat on me and how I think about things. But! It's a quick read and both thought-provoking and fun, I am glad I read it.