The Hospital: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem and Sicily

A tour de force: an utterly singular modern Moroccan classic "When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive..." So begins Ahmed Bouanani's arresting, hallucinatory 1989 novel The Hospital, appearing for the first time in English translation. Based on Bouanani's own experiences as a tuberculosis patient, the hospital begins to feel increasingly like a prison or a strange nightmare: the living resemble the dead; bureaucratic angels of death descend to direct traffic, claiming the lives of a motley cast of inmates one by one; childhood memories and fantasies of resurrection flash in and out of the narrator's consciousness as the hospital transforms before his eyes into an eerie, metaphorical space. Somewhere along the way, the hospital's iron gate disappears. Like Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl, the works of Franz Kafka—or perhaps like Mann's The Magic Mountain thrown into a meat-grinder—The Hospital is a nosedive into the realms of the imagination, in which a journey to nowhere in particular leads to the most shocking places. When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive So begins Ahmed Bouananis arresting, hallucinatory 1989 novel The Hospital , appearing for the first time in English translation. Based on Bouananis own experiences as a tuberculosis patient, the hospital begins to feel increasingly like a prison or a strange nightmare: the living resemble the dead; bureaucratic angels of death descend to direct traffic, claiming the lives of a motley cast of inmates one by one; childhood memories and fantasies of resurrection flash in and out of the narrators consciousness as the hospital transforms before his eyes into an eerie, metaphorical space. Somewhere along the way, the hospitals iron gate disappears. Like Sadegh Hedayats The Blind Owl , the works of Franz Kafkaor perhaps like Manns The Magic Mountain thrown into a meat-grinder The Hospital is a nosedive into the realms of the imagination, in which a journey to nowhere in particular leads to the most shocking places. A poem cycle about hospital life and illness by revered, twentieth-century Italian avant-gardist. Hospital Series, a bruisingly intimate colloquy with an elusive lover, is Italian poet Amelia Rosselli’s virtuoso, subversive, neo-Petrarchan sequence of poems. Rosselli wrote much of the series in the mid 1960s after being hospitalized for a mental illness she suffered from for most of her life, and whose pain shapes her language and difficult vision. These explosive poems, a furious cacophonic crescendo of semantic and syntactic accumulations deeply admired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, place Rosselli among the greatest writers of her generation. Hospital Series, a bruisingly intimate colloquy with an elusive lover, is Italian poet Amelia Rosselli's virtuoso, subversive, neo-Petrarchan sequence of poems. Rosselli wrote much of the series in the mid 1960s after being hospitalized for a mental illness she suffered from for most of her life, and whose pain shapes her language and difficult vision. These explosive poems, a furious cacophonic crescendo of semantic and syntactic accumulations deeply admired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, place Rosselli among the greatest writers of her generation. --Provided by publisher Ahmed Bouanani ; Translated By Lara Vergnaud ; With An Introduction By Anna Della Subin. Translated From The French.