Joy to Come

What do Flaubert’s letters, Whitman’s poems, and Lampedusa’s The Leopard have in common? At first glance, not much, but in Joy to Come, they are revealed to have in common the complex mind of literary critic Jim Levy.

As with Jorge Luis Borges, the boundary between fact and fiction is elusive. Although meticulously researched, Spinoza’s eleven months in Brazil and Rolling Stone’s interview of Arthur Rimbaud never happened. Todros Abulafia is a real 13th-century Jewish poet, but Poet B is not.

These thirteen essays, unique in their approach to literature, also explore Chamfort’s aphorisms, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, an obscure T’ang era cult, Malcolm Lowry and his masterpiece Under the Volcano, and the resurrection of the enlightened ruler of medieval Spain, Abd al Rahman III.