Classical Illusions
SKU:
2756
$14.95
$14.95
"It is time for Jascha Kessler to be celebrated for what he preeminently is — a masterly parable-maker, seemingly in the veiln of the prescient Europeans, but with a difference: the voice is American, the revelations are of this continent and culture. And the territory he works is his absolute own, unlike that of any other American writing today." — Cynthia Ozick
Classical Illusions presents twenty-eight stories by a master storyteller about whom the New York Times Book Review has remarked, "he writes with an odd and often compelling blend of humorous compassion and bitter ironic satire." In this collection Jascha Kessler hones these qualities to ever greater precision, arbitrating between existential identity and circumstances of oppression, and demolishing social convention, blind faith, and contemporary folly. Each story bears a title alluding to myths that describe our collective sense of self. These cautionary tales and dream-like parables journey through the American psyche.
Clothbound, sewn, jacketed, 170 pages, 5.5 x 8.5", 1985, 0-914232-75-6
For the expanded paperback edition. go here.
Classical Illusions presents twenty-eight stories by a master storyteller about whom the New York Times Book Review has remarked, "he writes with an odd and often compelling blend of humorous compassion and bitter ironic satire." In this collection Jascha Kessler hones these qualities to ever greater precision, arbitrating between existential identity and circumstances of oppression, and demolishing social convention, blind faith, and contemporary folly. Each story bears a title alluding to myths that describe our collective sense of self. These cautionary tales and dream-like parables journey through the American psyche.
Clothbound, sewn, jacketed, 170 pages, 5.5 x 8.5", 1985, 0-914232-75-6
For the expanded paperback edition. go here.
"These urbane stories roam the world, against backgrounds sharp as Durer and foregrounds modern as Francis Bacon. The illusions are allusions to past belief, but they serve to mythologize our everyday. Kessler lends anima to concrete universal landscapes, and quickens the sempiternal personae, the divinities behind the masks, the cosmos old as Greece and new as Hollywood." — Anthony Kerrigan