"Booze, brawls, sex and schizophrenia—such is the artist’s life in Paris, according to this raucous satire.When Patsy Burke, a world-famous Irish sculptor living in France, wakes up in his hotel with his body torn and bloody and no recollection of how it got that way, he’s not particularly surprised. A raging alcoholic given to beating up pimps in Paris dives, he’s used to blackouts and drunk tanks. Unfortunately, his latest bender has left a dead man in its wake, and Patsy’s attempt to…

Based on what I just read in Sunday's New York Times Book Review about recent Dickens' biographies, I am thinking about the incredible amount of truth contained in Dickens' unveiling of himself to Dostoyevsky when they met : http://ning.it/rC2Dc7

“He told me,” Dostoyevsky recalled in a letter written years later, “that all the good, simple people in his novels . . . are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather,…