Synopsis
In David Stromberg's newest work, Mister Investigator takes on the end of the world—or rather, digs into this fraught and dangerous time in which we find ourselves, and into what it says about our future. Our historical moment—as Mister Investigator discovers—is actually connected to multiple precedents. To this end, his inquiry is first and foremost a reading: of the thinkers, poets, artists, philosophers, and politicians who have reacted to the unthinkable. In Mister Investigator's case, it is the likes of W. H. Auden, who chose to look at the fateful events of 1939 with full awareness, or the painter Mark Rothko, whose "recipe for art" includes a willing engagement with death, irony, and tension in order to create a new understanding of this moment. Mister Investigator has the courage to study the raw texture of the present moment. He knows no comfort and no consolation, and he invites real effort at cognition. His ability and desire to look closely at events that evoke horror is what makes his inquiry so attractive—and, more to the point, so necessary today.
DAVID STROMBERG is a writer, translator, and literary scholar. He has published fiction in The Woven Tale Press, The Account, and the UK's Ambit, nonfiction in The American Scholar, Literary Matters, and Los Angeles Review of Books, and translations in The New Yorker, Asymptote, and Conjunctions. In 2019, Public Seminar published his series of personal essays about growing up on the ethnic and cultural margins of Los Angeles. He is the author of four cartoon collections, including Baddies (Melville House), and two critical studies, most recently Idiot Love and the Elements of Intimacy (Palgrave Macmillan). He has edited a collection of children's stories translated from Yiddish, In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times (Delacorte), and a collection of essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Old Truths and New Clichés (Princeton University Press).
POLINA BARSKOVA teaches Russian literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly publications include articles on Vladimir Nabokov, the Bakhtin brothers, early Soviet film, and the culture of the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944). She has also authored eight books of poetry and one book of prose in Russian, and published three collections of her poetry in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House Press), and Relocations (Zephyr Press).
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