In this book, the animation of commodity objects magically ties together erotic frolics and political horrors: from a DC07 vacuum cleaner to a detention center for refugees, from little irons, socks and sweaters to the particulars of post-Soviet power and Vladimir Putin.

An artist book juxtaposing text and image, history and its revision, The Blind Merchant is composed of three elements: the complete text of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; a “parasitical” text written by Roee Rosen that runs alongside the play, adopting the perspective of the principal antagonist Shylock; and 145 drawings that present an alternative approach to the drama’s staging and casting of characters.

Erudite, baroque, a dazzling writer and painter but maniacal and all-encompassing in his approach, Roee Rosen keeps erasing the fine line that separates fiction and truth, imagination and reality, just as Sade and Lautréamont have done before him. But this division doesn’t exist anymore. What makes his summa erotica erotic is that, for him as for Georges Bataille, pornography is philosophy.

Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories is a bilingual edition of short writings by Roee Rosen. At the heart of this collection are three provocative texts extracted from important artworks by Rosen, offered here as genre-defying literature at the intersection between reality and fiction, speculative narrative and historical-political critique, humor and eroticism.