Kirjahaku

Literary essays on Marion Morehouse, Hubert Selby, Henry Miller, and Jack Kerouac; interviews with Albert Hofmann (about LSD), Michael Korda (about T.E. Lawrence and Ulysses S. Grant), Jeffrey Jackson (about the Paris flood of 1910), Robert Roper (about Walt Whitman and Nabokov's Lolita, Justin Kaplan (about Mark Twain and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass), Christopher Sawyer-Lau anno (about E.E. Cummings, James Dempsey (about Scofield Thayer).

Collected Couteau features an anthology the author's early writings and publications. It contains the only complete, unabridged versions of interviews with Ray Bradbury and Last Exit to Brooklyn author Hubert Selby. The 188-page trade-sized paperback also features an unabridged interview with Paul Bowles's biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lau anno, in which the latter discusses Paul Bowles, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Louis-Ferdinand C line, and the Beats. The collection includes an essay on Walt Whitman and numerous book reviews, including essays on Tea in the Harem, by Mehdi Charef; The Demon and The Room, by Hubert Selby; Libra, by Don DeLillo; Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; The Mustache, by Emmanuel Carr re; A Literate Passion: The Letters of Anais Nin and Henry Miller, and a review of Allen Ginsberg's 1990 photography show in Paris. It also contains an in-depth review of Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul, by Claire Dunne; and Jung, My Mother and I. The Analytic Diaries of Catherine Rush Cabot, by Jane Cabot Reid.

In the early years of the twentieth century, a retired legal clerk in Montmartre named Leon Angely collected Picassos, Modiglianis, and Utrillos before any of these artists were well known. And he purchased many of these creations after his failing vision left him almost completely blind. Legend has it that Leon was assisted by a young girl who served as his "eyes," and based on her description of the work he would make his selections. This homage to the 'blind man who was crazy for color' uncovers previously unknown information about this important yet largely forgotten figure who inspired one of Picasso's most powerful engravings, featuring a 'Blind Minotaur' being led by a little girl. The book is illustrated with original artwork by Picasso's model and muse, Sylvette David, who posed for the painter when she was only nineteen years old, in 1954. Now eighty-seven, Sylvette credits Picasso with inspiring her to devote her life to painting. Her work is frequently exhibited in Europe, and in 2021 she was invited to lecture at the Musee Picasso is Paris.