Gaslight - Joachim Kalka

Staff Pick
The 19th century might have seemed far away in the late-20th century, but now that we’re in the 21st century, how does it feel? When you read books like Joachim Kalka’s Gaslight, the answer is “surprisingly close”, and history feels significantly larger after reading it. It’s a book made from a melange of styles—literary criticism, military history, true crime—but they're all of a piece, because they’re all recognizably facets of the same world. We know how the modern world, as it exists now, can find its way into literature, so it's fun and enlightening to see how canonical artists like Marcel Proust and Emile Zola, Karl Kraus and Alban Berg dealt with their own contemporary bugaboos, from Jack the Ripper to the Dreyfus Affair, from anarchists to submarines.
Gaslight: Lantern Slides from the Nineteenth Century By Joachim Kalka, Isabel Fargo Cole (Translated by) Cover Image
By Joachim Kalka, Isabel Fargo Cole (Translated by)
$17.95
ISBN: 9781681371184
Availability: Special Order—Subject to Availability
Published: New York Review Books - June 6th, 2017