Put down your copies of Wreckers, it's time for a blast from the Blood Organ. Atlas Press has finally released its collection of texts by Gunter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, the seventh in its fantastic "documents of the avant-garde" series.

"A renegotiation of our relationship to objects," that would seem to be the explicit point to Colson Whitehead's first novel, The Intuitionist, but this charming, fast-paced book actually takes the reader somewhere quite different.

While Portugal's literary mogul José Saramago may have recently captured the American scene with is novel, "Blindness," and the subsequent Nobel prize that was awarded to him, another of the country's gems can be found in Antonio Lobo Antunes. Having previously read his, "Act of The Damned," I sat down over the break and opened what many reviewers and readers call his "pinnacle" novel, "An Explanation of The Birds."

A nice dose of the flu these last couple of weeks has kept me from reading much more than comic books, and this hefty collection by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell occupied me for a while.