My name is José, I am Catholic and I was not a plainclothes policeman very long. In Argentina I wrote poetry and prayed to the Virgin every day for my mother who was a cancerous balloon grounded in the chicken shack behind the house and for my two sisters who tap-tapped their way past my window every hour drowned in lipstick and sperm.

At 29 years of age, completely satisfied with the gentle Fall outside, with vast stretches of contentment ahead of me in an unbroken melloyello greenery, I took my head in my hands and I considered 

Once celebrated on the level of Poe and Twain, Lafcadio Hearn has been forgotten, with two remarkable exceptions: in Louisiana and in Japan.

Max Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Irreality, newly reissued, is not a memoir, a novel, or a poem, though it has been called all those names, and compared rightly with the works of Proust and Kafka. Blecher belongs in that company for the density …