Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff PATRON-ONLY REVIEW / Ad-Free

Hey Cliff, if you're in the market for more material relating to this time/this topic, Mel Gordon's Horizontal Collaboration is super well-researched and copiously illustrated. It's a wild ride about the cultures of prostitution, sex, and death in Paris throughout the ages, with a focus on the 1890s–1940s.

Got this when you alluded to your review of it, always down for a depressing bleak tale!!

Read this book the year it was published. It launched my lifelong fascination with world-galavanting, somewhat-intellectual eccentrics. I think this fascination of mine actually was "a thing" in the late 70s and early 80s: a fascination with early 20th C men (typically) who balanced their lack of genuine talent with excess in every other sphere. I remember my mother acquired a slew (?) of books on the topic. (And she was a rather uptight, prudish person.) Michelle Green's "The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier" covers a whole nest of 20th C decadents in North Africa. Also worth reading about are Edward James. He was the creator of Las Pozas gardens in Mexico, outside Queretaro; his memoir "Swans Reflecting Elephants: My Early Years" is great if you can find it. Another is Augustus Hare, amply described in Malcolm Barnes' "Victorian Gentleman." I'll stop now.

Cliff, you gotta read this Tobias Wolff short story: https://wordsunlimited.typepad.com/files/bullet.pdf