Kafka was the rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

"If it hadn´t been for books, we would have been completely at the mercy of sex". The speaker of these lines is Anatole Broyard, a dapper, earnest, and fledging avant-gardist who would go on to become a leading book critic for The New York Times. We see Broyard setting up his used bookstore on Cornelia Street -indulging in a dream that was for him as romantic as "living off the land or sailing around the world"- while exercizing his libido with a protégée of Anaïs Nin and taking courses at the New School, where he deliberates on "the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis".