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I may be forced to rethink my earlier comments. I have just returned from the Bookfest, back bowed & shoulder broken under the weight of $19 worth of books, almost thirty titles, sold by cover size.

A strange miscellany. Some to continue the replication of the library of my youth, Sartre, Koestler, Malraux; plays by Genet, Beckett, Brecht & O’Neill; a couple of more modern novels, Allende, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy; a couple of those reasonably inclusive Penguin anthologies of poetry, one of poems from the Thirties & the other U.S. – American Verse – that ranges from Anne Bradstreet to Diane Wakowski; Pynchon & Janet Frame; the collected Wilfred Owen, & Sylvia Plath (yes, Emily, one must have a knowledge of the history of the game); a missing Brautigan & a missing LeGuin; The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon.

&, in what might turn out to be a parallel history of this place in which I'm living, the Diaries of Franz Kafka.