Writers No One Reads

Highlighting forgotten, neglected, abandoned, forsaken, unrecognized, unacknowledged, overshadowed, out-of-fashion, under-translated writers. Has no one read your books? You are in good company.

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These writers are famous in some part of the internet or the world. Some may be famous in your own family or in your own mind. ("In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people..." Momus)

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No one reads Ghérasim Luca (1913-1994), a member of the Romanian Surrealist Group who was declared by Gilles Deleuze as “the greatest French poet.” Luca left Bucharest for Paris in 1954, where he later killed himself by jumping into the Seine.

A writer of hermetic, delirious, and erotic prose, Luca was also the creator of the game of “Objectively Offered Objects,” a variation of Salvador Dalí’s symbolically functioning objects, in which a found object was transformed into one imbued with deep psychic meaning by a member of the game. (For a comprehensive essay on OOO, see Sean Sturm’s blog.)

An excerpt from Luca’s Passive Vampire will give you an idea of the writer who believed that “everything must be reinvented”:

I close my eyes, as active as a vampire, I open them within myself, as passive as a vampire, and between the blood that arrives, the blood that leaves, and the blood already inside me there occurs an exchange of images like an engagement of daggers. Now I could eat a piano, shoot a table, inhale a staircase. All the extremities of my body have orifices out of which come the skeletons of the piano, the table, the staircase, and for the very first time these ordinary—and therefore non-existent—objects can exist. I climb this staircase not to get to the first floor but to get closer to myself. I lean on the banisters not to avoid vertigo but to prolong it.

For more:

Read the entirety of Luca and Trost’s manifesto, Dialectics of the Dialectic
Twisted Spoon published Luca’s legendary and obscure Passive Vampire (trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski) from which the photograph above is taken. Read a review at Bookforum.
Black Widow Press published his Inventor of Love, translated by Julian and Laura Semilian.
Ubuweb has audio of Luca reading some of his poems