Yannis Livadas (1969) is a Greek experimental poet, writer, jazz scholar and translator who lives in Paris, France. His translations from English into Greek include works by Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Harold Norse, Gregory Corso, Frank O’Hara and Ezra Pound. Livadas’s highly individual poetry incorporates an idea of experimentalism that is based on ‘organic antimetathesis’: the scaling…
William Levy (Baltimore, 1939) attended the University of Maryland and Temple University and taught in the literature department at Shippensburg State College, Pennsylvania, during which period he co-founded the Insect Trust Gazette, a poetry magazine which – among others – published William Burroughs. Levy developed into a spearhead of the European underground soon after he had left the US in 1966…
Gustav Sack (1885-1916) grew up in the German village of Schermbeck, close to the Dutch border and the industrial Ruhr district. He attended the grammar school of the nearby town of Wesel and did German Studies and Natural Science at the universities of Greifswald, Münster and Halle before dropping out in 1910. Sack developed an interest in literature during his grammar school days, when he discovered…
‘A Wilderness of Dreams’ is a passage from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Hans Phaall – A Tale’, an early science fiction tale about a balloon flight from Rotterdam to the moon that was published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835. After its first publication ‘Hans Phaall – A Tale’ was revised and reprinted several times and renamed ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall’. A later version, which includes…
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was a short story writer and novelist who is generally regarded as one of the leading representatives of American ‘Dark Romanticism’. Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts and descended from a family of Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of the earliest and largest New England colonies. His ancestor John Hathorne was a harsh and unrepentant…