Memories of the Future

Somehow Amazon.com totally gets me. I just bought The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck and The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. I still haven't bought Maldoror by Lautreamont just because it's become a sort of illicit longing now. I've wanted it for so long that I would be lost if I didn't want it anymore!

So after I purchased these two books I decided to skim through the recommendation pages to see what I would find. Of course there were Georges Batailles books, that's a given, and there were some books on vernacular photography. But the book that caught my eye is Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. It just sounds cool:

Fantastically imaginative, darkly ironic and marvelously crafted, these seven tales written in the 1920s were unpublished during Krzhizhanovsky's lifetime. Set mostly in Moscow, where the toilsome workdays sap spiritual strength, the stories are about the strange, wondrous and alarming things that can result from a chance encounter. In Quadraturin, the most straightforward story, the resident of a matchbox-size flat is proffered an experimental formula for biggerizing rooms, which, when applied, expands the space and doesn't stop until the room becomes a black wilderness. In Someone Else's Theme, a writer meets a down-on-his-luck seller of philosophical systems, while the protagonist of The Branch Line is directed to a train that spirits him into a disorienting dreamscape. The long title story is the biography of a brilliant, lonely scientist, Max Shterer, whose obsessive pursuit of making time dance in a circle proves prescient and chilling. Turnbull's translation reads wonderfully, capturing the isolation and strangeness of Krzhizhanovsky's startling stories. - Publishers Weekly

Thanks Amazon.com for getting me.