Fervent reco: Léon-Paul Fargue (anything), particularly High Solitude, in Rainer Hanshe's translation (of Haute Solitude). Lonely, shadowy, hallucinatory; a high-modern's nightly destiny, "a return to the heart," in this life that "dumps you like sand from a wheelbarrow." Back when plump, acerbic, cigarette smoking French poets were kings.

How strange, that Fernando Arrabal's book-length Letter to General Franco --written and mailed to him in 1971--has never until now been translated. A searing plea for compassion and change in Spain. Timely, in view of our current vale of tears. The great playwright's letter is full of details about life under fascism, informative of the weird little mechanism's of fascist control. Available in English from dialogosbooks.com

Right. Well, we seem to be done. Rhodes' end, though a bit unclear where he goes after the spell of rotting in a Marseille prison ( The...

This may be the end of the Rhodes (take a look, the novel The Jailbird's Song , www.dialogosbooks.com , amazon etc). This bulletin, just...

And so we stagger on... with our tear-streaks, our clenched fists... bleeding brains. Those who have fled are dogged by our shadows, by...

Is my hero, Rhodes, really off--with jutting jaw, or merely Beckettian shuffle--to the flames of Hell? What is the end, in the final...

Soon, there was nothing before the last men but a long boulevard beyond which the Void could be read like a poster. The Earth Affair was...

We can't go on. We go on. We'll stagger through the miasma of corruption that lies ahead, then we'll try to vote in the fall. The...

You expect life to contain its own magic. You want to reach into it and pull out, I don't know, a... calendar, or a harmonica. But no, it...

This is bad. Is my guy--your guy, Rhodes--in a foreign jail? Has his exquisite rage with humanity caused some giant misunderstanding?...