Literary Criticism. Art Criticism. DECOMPOSITIONS collects Eric Basso's essay on art and literature in one volume. In the pivotal essay "Annihilation," Basso takes a short story by a forgotten Hungarian writer as the springboard to a searing dissection of Rembrandt, alchemy, Stephane Mallarme, Edgar Allan Poe and Rene Daumal, closing with a new interpretation of Kafka's The Castle. Eric Basso "remains one of the most interesting writers in the country, someone whose work does not fit conveniently into categories.but whose poetry, fiction and dramatic writing extend our sense of what terms like modernism and postmodernism mean"-Stephen-Paul Martin.