BOOK BARN

#297: L’IMAGINATION AU POUVOIR! It all began in Nanterre, a western suburb where the University of Paris had set up a new campus in response to overcrowding. Contemporary descriptions make it sound like a bit of a hole—it’s now part of La Defense, the city’s gigantesque business district—and in 1963 there had been a ruckus when police shot and killed Nahel Merzouk, a French student of Algerian descent, in circumstances which recall nothing so much as the recent ICE killin

#296: O MY AMERICA! In 1929, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca left his native Granada to go to New York City, to study English at Columbia University. Lorca is by any standards one of the great Spanish poets; the poems that came of that visit, gathered in The Poet in New York, represent his furthest step into surrealism. The original methods of surrealism—what André Breton called “the omnipotence of dreams” over reason and logic, and the power of unconscious thought

#295: DREADING THE BOOJUM. Queen Victoria, the story goes, read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and was so delighted with it she let it be known she would love to have a copy of his next book, only to be surprised and confused by receiving a copy of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, a mathematical work Carroll had published under his own name, Charles Dodgson. The story, alas, is apocryphal—Dodgson himself scuttled it—but it does point up the almost schizoid dichotom