Carl Laszlo, Auschwitz survivor, art collector and art dealer with Hungarian roots, and German author and translator Udo Breger, born during World War II with close ties to key figures of the Beat Generation, meet in Basel in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One hopes to establish personal contact with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Allen Ginsberg, while the other turns out to be a mediator who, against the backdrop of…
“Two Assassins is a unique collaborative work, part detective story, part literary scholarship, part historical research, and part personal memoir that seeks to unravel a mystery: what the 11th-century Persian master of the Assassins, Hassan Sabbah, really meant for William Burroughs. Oliver Harris sheds light on the many untold backstories and dark textual secrets behind Burroughs’ invocations of Hassan Sabbah…
American photographer, poet and publisher Ira Cohen was born to deaf parents in the Bronx in 1935. After having dropped out of Cornell University, having married and having had two children with his wife Arlene Bond, Cohen sailed to Tangier in 1961, where he stayed for four years. In those years Cohen published his seminal Gnaoua journal with contributions by Jack Smith, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Harold Norse a.o. Cohen returned to the US…
