The latest addition to my website is Rodney Graham‘s The System of Landor’s Cottage. Rodney Graham is a Canadian artist who has experimented with manipulating found texts. He has taken existing works, such as Dr. No or Freud’s work on dreams, and added to them. In this case, he has written an entire novel from Edgar Allan Poe’s last story, Landor’s Cottage, expanding it both in terms of the text and in terms of his physical addition to Mr. Landor’s cottage. It is an Arabian Nights, story-within-a-story-within-a story phantasmagoria, full of wonderful machines, strange phenomena, Oriental mysteries, love found and love failed, wicked deeds, secret clues and ciphers, plots within plots and much more. It is a wonderful read. Sadly, it has only been published in a limited edition by a Belgian publisher so it is not readily available but well worth the effort to get hold of it.
This is fascinating, just amazing. I can hardly believe that writers are doing such interesting things with those odd Poe non-stories. But I had read Bolaño, and now here is another example.
Thanks for writing about this book.