[SPOILER ALERT: The two works in question, while hardly plot-driven, are discussed in their entirety.] The Littlest Pirate King (Fantagraphics, 2010), David B.’s graphic novel adaptation of Pierre Mac Orlan’s short story “Roi Rose”, opens with a faithful rendering of its first paragraphs: “The first lantern ran along the ship’s deck as if on invisible little […]
In case you missed it over the holidays, Words Without Borders, the online magazine of international literature, ran an issue whose theme was “The Fantastic” for the final month of 2011, featuring work from Slovenia, Japan, Turkey, Malta, India (Urdu), Spain, China, and France. Highlights include a Scottish castle haunted by the Bosnian conflict, a bus with […]
Let me be straight: Billy Fog is a dark book for kids. Scant pages in, the title character, a boy no more than ten, writes in a letter to Santa: Who is death? What is it? Where is it? Do we have to go there? Sometimes in bed, before I go to sleep, I look into the darkness all around me and […]
(Image used by permission of J.K. Potter) Readers will have heard of the Proust Questionnaire, a Belle Époque social entertainment not penned by the great literary rememberer, but made famous by his replies, which are prized for their content, his phrasing, and what they reveal about the era. Something of the budding artist’s character emerges as […]
Michel Bernanos was the fourth of six children born to Georges Bernanos, the famous French Catholic writer of rural damnation. He was the only one to become a writer, though in the vein of the fantastic and often under pen names, so as not to partake unfairly of his father’s fame. At the age of 41, […]