Brief Lives of Idiots

Available from Nook & Cranny Books when we last checked. Sold from the shop’s own store; the price there is the one that counts.

A parody of the medieval Lives of the Saints , Ermanno Cavazzoni’s Brief Lives of Idiots offers us a perfect month of portraits of idiots drawn from real life, from overly realist writers to fringe-belief obsessives, punctuated every seventh day with a litany of suicides—failed, foolish or fatal to others. This roll call extends the ridiculous to melancholic extremes, introducing us to such exemplary fools as the father and husband unable to recognize his own family, the Marxist convinced that C