Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews (Lives & letters) - Softcover

Serbian Danilo Kis, like Orwell before him, is preoccupied with the dehumanizing of man in a mechanized, totalitarian world. His fiction - including "The Encyclopedia of the Dead" and "A Tomb for Boris Davidovich" - established him as one of the original writers of postwar Europe. His antecedents include Borges and Bruno Schultz, the cosmopolitian and the small-town Polish Jew; his history exposed and extended his forms and styles. In this collection of non-fiction, Kis displays his questioning approach to the political, intellectual and spiritual dimensions of our world. He explores issues of nationalism as collective paranoia, of censorship, of literature's struggle against banality, and of the peril of speaking of a Central European identity. He also writes on Nabokov the nostalgic magician and on the obsessive monotony of de Sade.