From Adventures in Immediate Irreality, by Max Blecher, out next month from New Directions. Blecher, who wrote frequently about his experiences of depersonalization, was born in Romania in 1909 and died in 1938 of tuberculosis of the spine. Translated from the Romanian by Michael Henry Heim.

In small, insignificant objects (a black feather, a banal little book, an old snapshot of frail, long-forgotten figures with the suffering that comes from serious internal ailments written all over them, a dainty ashtray made of green porcelain in the form of an oak leaf and forever smelling of dead ashes), in the…