The Lonely VoiceFrank O' Connor
Penguin LostAndrey Kurkov
We all know the story of Kafka and Brod. Kafka, the tragic genius whose prophetic writings foretold the essential paradoxes and madnesses of the 20th-century and, so far, the 21st. Brod, the prolific fool, a man who history remembers not for his own art, but…
Many critics have regarded Lars Iyer‘s novel Spurious as a satire about a dysfunctional relationship between failed intellectuals. And so it is. But… for those of us who have been friends with failed intellectual or who have been failed intellectuals ourselves, then it is not merely…
Linus Urgo, reviewing Lars Iyers‘s Spurious at The KGB Lit Magazine, makes the excellent point that the noveldespite all its intellectual wrangling, vicious insults, paranoid esoterica, and apocalyptic comedy is essentially about… friendship. Urgo writes: Literature has known no better friends than Vladimir and Estragon – or,…
Once again we return with “The A to Z of Spurious,” our micro-encyclopedia of intellectual and not-so-intellectual topics discussed by Lars and W., the two endlessly chattering “heroes” of Lars Iyer’s novel Spurious. (Read all the installments of the series here.) The book is not,…
“Two friends [Lars and W.] drink, walk in the English countryside, and talk (and talk and talk) in Iyer’s playfully cerebral debut,” says Publishers Weekly about Lars Iyer‘s Spurious, which it also describes as “piquant, often hilarious, and gutsy.” But what do they talk and…
Lars Iyer, the author of our new novel Spurious, recently sent us a handy reader’s guide to his book. As way of introduction, he wrote: I hope Spurious can be enjoyed by a reader entirely unfamiliar with the names and ideas mentioned in its pages.…