books@cc.

Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe
by Piero Camporesi (1989)

An account on how many people in early modern Europe lived in a state of almost permanent hallucination, drugged by their hunger or by bread adulterated with hallucinogenic herbs.

From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy
by Stanisław Lem (1977)

Caught up in local endless hallucinations amidst local revolution during the Eighth Futurological Congress and critically wounded, Ijon Tichy is frozen to await a future cure.

Fables for the Cybernetic Age by
Stanisław Lem (1975).

A collection of fairy-tale-ish science fiction stories focusing on the adventures of Trurl and Klapaucius, two best friends and rival intelligent robot “constructors”.

by Witold Gombrowicz (1937)

A madcap comic parody about a 30-year-old dragged back to secondary school, where everyone believes him as another poseur juvenile, “inclined to pose in order to appear grown up”.

by Primo Levi

Narrative is contained within another narrative in this novel, as Faussone, an exuberant rigger, tells his stories of working to a chemist-writer narrator (no doubt Levi’s alter ego):his constructions, an adventurous monkey, a machine that caught stardust, a name gone wrong, overcoming the fear of water, from India, Russia to Alaska.