The grotesque is central to much of Spanish novelist Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s work. After witnessing horrifying political violence in Latin America and his native Spain in the early years of the 20th century, Valle-Inclán developed the style he called esperpento, which sought to bring out “the comic side of the tragedy of life.” In works of esperpento, reality is contorted until actors come to physically resemble the unwholesomeness of their actions. Evil isn’t so banal when seen though Valle-Inclán’s eyes. Valle-Inclán set the standard for his invented genre with Tyrant Banderas, a novel about an absolute dictator who blows his

Frenchman Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), a diminutive queer alcoholic raised on Rabelais and steeped in Symbolism, could be called the John the Baptist of modernism. While most of modernism’s inspirational figures are better known than Jarry, he influenced nearly all of them to varying degrees: Filippo Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Henri Rousseau, Antonin Artaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Erik Satie, André Gide, Eugène Ionesco, Boris Vian, Raymond Queneau, Jean Genet, Jacques Prévert, and especially Marcel Duchamp were all disciples. And if their explicit affiliation was less clear, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Jorge Luis Borges,

American history is the history of fitful enthusiasms. “On canal boats” in the nineteenth century, Gilbert Seldes records mysteriously in the history of American fanaticism that he published in 1928, which has been reissued by NYRB Classics, “bed-linen was promiscuous.” There were fads in fashion: “Men … wore the enormous cravats which had been introduced by George the Third to hide the swelling on his neck.” Fads in food: “Carrots were scarcely used and the tomato was known as the ‘love apple’ and considered poisonous”; and a little later, “[b]roccoli had been introduced and the tomato accepted.” Fads in propriety:

Near the end of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood recalls how her mother, mortified by Esther’s recent stay at an asylum, recommended they simply carry on as if nothing—the fits, the hallucinations, the suicide attempt—had ever happened. “Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of snow, should numb and cover them,” Esther thinks. “But they were part of me. They were my landscape.”

Teresa Sharp is fifty-three years old and has lived in a modest single-family house on Millsdale Street, in a suburb of Cincinnati, for nearly thirty-three years. A lifelong Democrat, she has voted in every Presidential election since she turned eighteen. So she was agitated when an official summons from the Hamilton County Board of Elections arrived in the mail last month. Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, is one of the most populous regions of the most fiercely contested state in the 2012 election. No Republican candidate has ever won the Presidency without carrying Ohio, and recent polls show Barack Obama

J. J. Sullivan finds most of Nicholson Baker’s new essay collection agreeable and praises many of the essays, admiring Baker’s ability to “snatch little impressions in the chopsticks of his prose.” But what to make of Baker’s argument about pacifism and World War II?

If you studied the liberal arts in an American college anytime after 1980, you were likely exposed to what is universally called Theory. Perhaps you still possess some recognizable talismans: that copy of The Foucault Reader, with the master’s bald head and piercing eyes emblematic of pure intellection; A Thousand Plateaus with its Escher-lite line-drawing promising the thrills of disorientation; the stark, sickly-gray spine of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics; a stack of little Semiotext(e) volumes bought over time from the now-defunct video rental place. Maybe they still carry a faint whiff of rebellion or awakening, or (at least) late-adolescent disaffection. Maybe

Britain’s Pearson and Germany’s Bertelsmann plan to merge their publishers Penguin and Random House, aiming to gain the upper hand in their relationship with Amazon and Apple, the leaders in the ebook revolution. Education and media publisher Pearson said on Monday the joint venture – which will bring under one roof fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett, “Fifty Shades of Grey” author EL James and 2012 Nobel prize winner Mo Yan – would be named Penguin Random House.

Fifty-one years ago, Andy Warhol co-opted a panel of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip Nancy. Ever since, the strip’s squat, spike-haired protagonist has beguiled artists, theorists, pranksters, essayists, and cartoonists as a patron saint of dorky innocence. But despite decades of meta-Nancy secondary texts, this month marks the initial installment of the first-ever comprehensive reprinting of Bushmiller’s peak period (1943–59), with Nancy Is Happy (Fantagraphics, $25).