books@cc.

by Elfriede Jelinek (1981)

The strict and rigid Erika Kohut taught piano at the prestigious Vienna Conservatory during the day and trawls the porn districts by night.

by Robert O. Paxton (2004)

A rather disappointing newcomer in this notorious field but nevertheless helpful for its up-to-date bibliography and sources.

by Georges Perec (1969)

Born out of self-imposed formalist grid of lipogram, a parody thriller loaded with plots and subplots, pursuits, vengeance and trails, engrossing and well-written despite the missing ‘e’ letter throughout the whole novel.

by Georges Perec (1978)

A quilt of stories of inhabitants of a Parisian apartment block, frozen in time. The layered stories are interwoven with hundreds of lives, minutiae of details, literary and historical allusions, written with self-imposed constraints.

How the secrests of the brain were uncovered in seventeenth-century England
by Carl Zimmer (2004)

An account of how people “first” became aware of the secrets of human brain in the seventeenth century, with particular focus on major players, i.e. Thomas Willis and his contemporaries such as Wren, Descartes, Harvey, Boyle, and Hooke.

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.