Wakefield press us (238 resultados)

Paperback. Condición: New. Mynona's self-styled "grotesques" inhabit an uncertain ground between fairy tale, fetishism and philosophy, satirizing everything from nationalism to philanthropyFirst published in German in 1916, Black-White-Red collects six bizarre tales by the "laughing philosopher" Salomo Friedlaender, who wrote his literary work under the pseudonym Mynona (the reversed German word for "anonymous"). In this collection, we encounter a tongue-in-cheek showdown between Goethe and Newton, whose theories of color clash in the form of a nationalistic flag; another story presents the inventor of the tactilestylus setting out to capture the residual sound waves of Goethe speaking in his study through a mechanical recreation of his vocal apparatus, with its amplification set to infinite. In "The Magic Egg," one of Mynona's most emblematic and curious tales, a man encounters an enormous bisecting mechanical egg in the middle of the desert that houses a mummy and a possible pathway to utopia on Earth.Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender (1871-1946), was a perfectly functioning split personality: a serious philosopher by day (author of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Intellectual Biography and Kant for Kids) and a literary absurdist by night, who composed black humored tales he called "grotesques." He inhabited the margins of German Expressionism and Dada, and his friends and fans included Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus. …

Paperback. Condición: New. A miniature Borgesian portrait in misanthropyIn a sequence of anecdotes imbued with haughty melancholy and nihilistic irony, Alain-Paul Mallard assembles a puzzle of an Austrian writer who despises both the world he lives in and the work he himself has produced, whose fragmented life crosses paths with fictional and nonfictional protagonists from Hans Magnus Enzensberger to Paul Celan, and whose concise first-person reflections describe a complicated and sympathetic monster.A masterpiece of the miniature in the tradition of Robert Walser and Fleur Jaeggy, and a tribute to the legacy of Thomas Bernhard, Mallard's "imaginary life" offers a celebration of sterility and silence in its appropriately distilled essence.Writer and filmmaker Alain-Paul Mallard was born in 1970 and raised in Mexico City. He studied Hispanic literature in his native city, and then studied European intellectual history in Toronto. Tempted by silence, he is the author of a short, highly concentrated body of work. His films include L'origine de la tendresse, Évidences and L'adoption.…

Paperback. Condición: New. A shocking and transgressive work from one of the key figures of postwar Japanese fictionYumiko Kurahashi's 1963 novella Scorpions takes the form of a transcript of a one-sided interview with L following the arrest and institutionalization of her twin brother K. The two have played a role in a series of horrifying deaths culminating in the murder of their mother. Through a first-person narrative that varies in tone from scientifically clinical to darkly humorous, mingling together references to the Bible and Greek mythology, odd bits of dialogue and obtuse descriptions, we learn of K and L's shocking crimes as well as the professional and personal entanglement of L and an older man they call the Red Pig, their mother's former lover. Scorpions remains, after more than half a century, a shockingly transgressive text. It bears allegiance to the most radical French fiction of its time, particularly the work of Jean Genet, an author Kurahashi admired, whose own novels explored the sanctification of criminal behavior.Yumiko Kurahashi (1935-2005) was an influential Japanese writer of experimental fiction. She was nominated early in her career for the Akutagawa prize and later won the Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature for her anti-utopian work Journey to Amanon.…

Paperback. Condición: New. A collection of previously unpublished erotic manuscripts from the author of The Songs of BilitisA bestselling author in his time, Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925) was a friend of, and influence on, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde and Stephane Mallarmé among others. He achieved instant notoriety with Aphrodite and The Songs of Bilitis, but it was only after his death that Louÿs' true legacy was to be discovered: nearly 900 pounds of erotic manuscripts were found in his home, all of them immediately scattered among collectors and many subsequently lost. Since then, it has become clear that Louÿs is the greatest French writer of erotica there ever was. The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners was the first of his erotic manuscripts to see publication, and it also remains his most outrageous-an erotic classic in which humor takes precedence over arousal. By means of shockingly filthy advice-ostensibly offered "for use in educational establishments"-couched in a hilariously parodic admonitory tone, Louÿs turns late-nineteenth-century manners roundly on their head, with ass prominently skyward. Whether offering rules for etiquette in church, school or home, or outlining a girl's duties toward family, neighbor or God, Louÿs manages to mock every institution and leave no taboo unsullied. The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners has only grown more scandalous and subversive since its first appearance in 1926.…

Paperback. Condición: New. In the last days of the Venetian Republic, the successive wives of Count Alvise Lanzi suffer mysterious, agonizing deaths. Murder Most Serene offers a cruel portrait of a beautiful but corrupt city-state and its equally extravagant and corrupt inhabitants. Redolent of darkness, death, poison and transgression, it is also an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek Venetian romp. Rich in historical detail and bursting with bejeweled putrescence, Gabrielle Wittkop's chilling memento mori eschews the murder mystery in which it is garbed for a scintillating depiction of physical, moral, societal and institutional corruption, in which the author plays the role of puppeteer--"present, masked as convention dictates, while in a Venice on the brink of downfall, women gorged with venom burst like wineskins."Self-styled heir to the Marquis de Sade, Gabrielle Wittkop (1920-2002) was a French author who wrote a remarkable series of novels and travelogues, all laced with sardonic humor and dark sexuality, with recurrent themes of death, disease and decrepitude. After meeting Justus Wittkop, a German deserter, in Paris under the Occupation, she hid him from the Nazis and then married him after the war, in what she described as an "intellectual alliance," given he was homosexual. He would commit suicide in 1986, with her approval, after being diagnosed with Parkinson's. Her first novel, The Necrophiliac, appeared in 1972, but a number of her books have only been made available since her own suicide in 2002, after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Jean de La Ville de Mirmont left behind one undisputed classic, self-published a few months before he would meet his fate on the front lines of World War I: an understated, almost humorous tale of urban solitude and alienation that outlines the mediocrity of bureaucratic existence.Jean Dézert is an office worker employed by the ministry, who rounds out his regimented life with snippets of Eastern philosophy, strolls through the city and consumerist efforts at injecting content into his life by structuring his Sundays through a rigorous use of advertising flyers that take him from saunas to vegetarian restaurants to lectures on sexual hygiene.In his mortal boredom, his modernist engagement with the banality of the everyday and his almost heroic resignation to mediocrity, Jean Dézert emerges as something of a French counterpart to Herman Melville's own rebel bureaucrat, Bartleby the Scrivener-save that when it comes to being an existential rebel, Jean Dézert goes even further in his will to prefer not to. "Jean Dézert is like a brother to me," wrote Michel Houellebecq, "because of his ability to escape despair by means of emptiness."Jean de La Ville de Mirmont (1886-1914) was killed by a shell explosion on the World War I battlefront. He left behind a collection of poetry that would be published posthumously, a collection of short stories and the novella for which he is remembered, The Sundays of Jean Dézert.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Mynona's self-styled "grotesques" inhabit an uncertain ground between fairy tale, fetishism and philosophy, satirizing everything from nationalism to philanthropyFirst published in German in 1916, Black-White-Red collects six bizarre tales by the "laughing philosopher" Salomo Friedlaender, who wrote his literary work under the pseudonym Mynona (the reversed German word for "anonymous"). In this collection, we encounter a tongue-in-cheek showdown between Goethe and Newton, whose theories of color clash in the form of a nationalistic flag; another story presents the inventor of the tactilestylus setting out to capture the residual sound waves of Goethe speaking in his study through a mechanical recreation of his vocal apparatus, with its amplification set to infinite. In "The Magic Egg," one of Mynona's most emblematic and curious tales, a man encounters an enormous bisecting mechanical egg in the middle of the desert that houses a mummy and a possible pathway to utopia on Earth.Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender (1871-1946), was a perfectly functioning split personality: a serious philosopher by day (author of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Intellectual Biography and Kant for Kids) and a literary absurdist by night, who composed black humored tales he called "grotesques." He inhabited the margins of German Expressionism and Dada, and his friends and fans included Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus. …

Paperback. Condición: New. A miniature Borgesian portrait in misanthropyIn a sequence of anecdotes imbued with haughty melancholy and nihilistic irony, Alain-Paul Mallard assembles a puzzle of an Austrian writer who despises both the world he lives in and the work he himself has produced, whose fragmented life crosses paths with fictional and nonfictional protagonists from Hans Magnus Enzensberger to Paul Celan, and whose concise first-person reflections describe a complicated and sympathetic monster.A masterpiece of the miniature in the tradition of Robert Walser and Fleur Jaeggy, and a tribute to the legacy of Thomas Bernhard, Mallard's "imaginary life" offers a celebration of sterility and silence in its appropriately distilled essence.Writer and filmmaker Alain-Paul Mallard was born in 1970 and raised in Mexico City. He studied Hispanic literature in his native city, and then studied European intellectual history in Toronto. Tempted by silence, he is the author of a short, highly concentrated body of work. His films include L'origine de la tendresse, Évidences and L'adoption.…

Paperback. Condición: New. A frenzied German Expressionist tale of orgy as salvation in Weimar BerlinOriginally published in German in 1919, Potsdamer Platz was Curt Corrinth's first novel to employ an expressionistic, frenetic prose and presented his excessive vision of free love. Inspired by the sex theories of Freud's controversial disciple Otto Gross, Corrinth preached the sexual orgy as a means to salvation and universal copulation as a new world religion.The book's provincial protagonist, Hans Termaden, arrives in Berlin, where he quickly evolves from city rube to sexual messiah as he converts prostitutes and virgins into sensual warriors and frees men of sexual inhibitions. As word of his exploits spreads, people flock to his headquarters in Potsdamer Platz, turning all buildings into brothels. Police and army attempt to bring order but themselves defect to take part in the spreading copulation as Corrinth's prose itself begins to fragment and melt on the page.Decried in its time, Postdamer Platz can be read today as a portal into the cultural excesses of Weimar Berlin. This first English translation includes the original illustrations done by Paul Klee for the book's 1920 deluxe edition.Curt Corrinth (1894-1960) studied law until serving in the military in World War I, which resulted in his embracing an antiwar and anti-bourgeois stance through his poetry and then through a series of novels, three of which would be banned by the Nazis in 1933. In 1955, he moved to the GDR in East Berlin, where he died five years later. Klee, Paul (ilustrador).…

Paperback. Condición: New. A visionary treatise on perception from the extraordinary polymath Charles Cros-poet, friend to Rimbaud and Verlaine, and inventor of color photography and the phonographEstablishing the author's standing as the inventeur maudit of his time, Principles of Cerebral Mechanics was first presented to the Academy of Sciences in 1872, but was not published until 1879, and then only in fragmentary form. Setting out to understand the mechanics of perception-the organs of which at the time were too small and inaccessible to be studied directly-Cros instead attempted to reverse-engineer the sensory organs. Whereas his previous inventions in the realms of audio recording and color photography had focused on technology for the senses, with this ambitious essay Cros turned to conceptualizing the technology of the senses themselves: rather than the transmission of color to the retina, here he instead attempted to conceive of how color was transmitted from the retina to the brain. By approaching the human brain as a "mechanism of registration," Cros' essay can be set alongside the groundbreaking work of such revolutionary figures who transformed modern vision as Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge.Charles Cros (1842-88) was as much Renaissance man as he was poète maudit. A bohemian poet who drank with Verlaine and provided housing to Rimbaud, he also developed the comic monologue as a theatrical genre, and invented both the phonograph (which he named the "paléophone") and color photography (though he failed to patent either before Thomas Edison or Louis Ducos du Hauron), among other such inventions as a nonmetallic battery and a musical stenographer.…

Paperback. Condición: New. The hallucinatory English-language debut of an overlooked German Expressionist poetBess Brenck Kalischer's only work of prose was first published in German in 1922. Narrated by a woman being held in a sanitarium after a mental breakdown, The Mill is less a novel than a rhythmic, hallucinatory and fractured sequence of prose poems. On its publication, the German author Mynona described it as "more a mill, a cosmos flower, a lyricism and romantic spell than it is a 'novel.'" Shifting from pedestrian concerns to cosmic visions, from the setting of a basement mushroom farm to scenes on Sirius, Kalischer's narrator weaves together literary satire, anguished dream states and shifting subjectivities. As much Maldoror as Munchausen, The Mill describes an unstable journey to psychic restoration that is as radically experimental today as when it was first published a century ago.Bess Brenck Kalischer (1878-1933) was born Betty Levy in Rostock. Although she began publishing her first poems in 1905, she began to make a name for herself as part of the second generation of German Expressionists in Dresden, cofounding the Expesstionistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dresden (Expressionist Working Group of Dresden) alongside such members as Conrad Felixmüller. Later relocating to Berlin, she was a friend of Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona, who used her as a model in several stories and novels. She died of a "nervous disease" in 1933, her grave left without a headstone until 2014.…

Paperback. Condición: New. A collection of previously unpublished erotic manuscripts from the author of The Songs of BilitisA bestselling author in his time, Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925) was a friend of, and influence on, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde and Stephane Mallarmé among others. He achieved instant notoriety with Aphrodite and The Songs of Bilitis, but it was only after his death that Louÿs' true legacy was to be discovered: nearly 900 pounds of erotic manuscripts were found in his home, all of them immediately scattered among collectors and many subsequently lost. Since then, it has become clear that Louÿs is the greatest French writer of erotica there ever was. The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners was the first of his erotic manuscripts to see publication, and it also remains his most outrageous-an erotic classic in which humor takes precedence over arousal. By means of shockingly filthy advice-ostensibly offered "for use in educational establishments"-couched in a hilariously parodic admonitory tone, Louÿs turns late-nineteenth-century manners roundly on their head, with ass prominently skyward. Whether offering rules for etiquette in church, school or home, or outlining a girl's duties toward family, neighbor or God, Louÿs manages to mock every institution and leave no taboo unsullied. The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners has only grown more scandalous and subversive since its first appearance in 1926.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Baron Munchausen returns with visions of mobile architecture and journeys to sausage moons, in this previously untranslated novel from Paul ScheerbartIt is 1905 and a raging stupidity is holding sway over Europe. As an 18-year-old Clarissa and her family take refuge on the icy shores of Lake Wannsee, the legendary Baron Munchausen makes an unexpected appearance at their door. Returning to German society after a century of absence at the ripe age of 180, the Baron is cajoled into presenting his impressions of the World Fair in Melbourne, Australia, to a select gathering of Berlin celebrities. Over the course of a week, the sprightly Baron arrives nightly by sleighmobile to combat the dreary days with a series of fantastical visions and theories: he discusses mobile architecture, the role of technology in the arts and the need for art to ignore nature in its quest to discover new planetary organs and senses; the new household miracles of vacuum tubes for cleaning and potato-peeling machines; the repressive function of sexuality; and the need for progressive taxation. His tales of Melbourne eventually take his audience from a restaurant in the ocean depths to the dwellings of mineral giants in mountain caverns, before culminating in a spiritual voyage to outer space among sausage moons and sun-skins.Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion. Dubbed the "wise clown" by his contemporaries, he opposed the naturalism of his day with fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that would influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.…

Paperback. Condición: New. "Take it with you to any cafe in any city, and Perec will be both your drinking partner and your tour guide, drawing your attention to each little detail coming and going." -Ian Klaus, CityLabOne overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday--"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one café window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Two novellas from the inventor of perpetual motion and godfather of German science fiction. Rakkóx the Billionaire (1901), a "Protean Novel," tells the tale of a multibillionaire who abandons his militaristic aspirations (and such Quixotic fantasies dreamed up by his Department of Invention as the utilization of herring in submarine warfare) in favor of a plan to convert a cliff into a work of architectural art. The Great Race (1900), a "Development Novel in Eight Different Stories," describes an intergalactic competition among worm spirits who wish to separate from their stars and achieve true autonomy in a ferocious race of winged sleds, cannon-airships, sky-high wheel-shaped vehicles and 100-mile-tall stilt machines, whose winners will be transformed into gods. Veering from humorous, aggressive slapstick to ethereal visions of cosmic philosophy, Scheerbart's fiction offers something of a cartoon space odyssey, and resembles that of no other writer, either of his time or our own.Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, newspaper critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion. Dubbed the "wise clown" by his contemporaries, he opposed the naturalism of his day with fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that were to influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction. Vallotton, Félix (ilustrador).…

Paperback. Condición: New. A mordantly satiric and cruel account of bourgeois greedOriginally published in book form in French in 1887, Joris-Karl Huysmans' A Dilemma remains a particularly nasty little tale, a mordantly satiric and cruel account of bourgeois greed and manipulation that holds up as clear a mirror to today's neoliberalist times as it did to the French fin-de-siècle. Written smack in-between Huysmans' most famous works-his 1881 Against Nature, which came to define the Decadent movement, and his 1891 exploration of Satanism, Down There-A Dilemma presents some of Huysmans' most memorable characters, including Madame Champagne, the self-appointed Parisian protector of women in need, and the carnal would-be sophisticate notary Le Ponsart, who wages a war of words with the bereft pregnant mistress of his deceased grandson with devastating consequences. In its unflinching portrayal of how authoritarian language can be used and abused as a weapon, this novella stands as Huysmans' indictment of the underlying crime of the novel itself: a language apparatus employed to maintain the appetites of the ruling class.Earning a wage through a career in the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of different literary movements: from the grey and grimy Naturalism of books like Marthe and Downstream to the cornerstones of the Decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, the dream-ridden Surrealist favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Mr. Gica is the world's greatest barber. He holds the world record for sculptural hairstyling and has won three Olympic golds in neck massage. But his specialty is the shave. Mr. Gica's shop has six mirrors on the walls, six sinks, six barber chairs and no employees. Always crowded, its chairs always occupied, the barbershop forms an off-kilter microcosm: a world of melancholic kitsch that includes opera singers, football players, gladiators, the secret police, four lost hippies and other ludic figures-including our superhuman protagonist's ever-lurking antagonist in perpetual disguise, Dorel Vasilescu.Trying on a variety of voices and modes like so many work coats, Curl scissor-snips love poems, mock-critical commentaries with footnotes, dreams, diary entries, streams of words without punctuation, cultural references and a number of rebellious hairs off a number of necks to sculpt a patchwork portrait of universal loneliness.This is the first translation of T.O. Bobe into English.T.O. Bobe (born 1969) is a Romanian poet, novelist and screenwriter living in Bucharest. Two of his books have been finalists for prestigious Romanian ASPRO prizes. …

Paperback. Condición: New. A how-to manual for the armchair adventurerPierre Mac Orlan's 1920 Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer was at once a paean to the adventure story, a tongue-in-cheek guidebook to the genre's real-life practitioners and a grim if unspoken coda to the disasters of World War I. "It must be established as a law that adventure in itself does not exist," Mac Orlan stipulates. "Adventure is in the mind of the one who pursues it, and no sooner is he able to touch it with his finger than it vanishes, to reappear much farther off in another form, at the limits of the imagination." This handbook outlines two classes of adventurer: the active adventurer (sailors, soldiers, criminals) and the passive adventurer (sedentary parasites who draw sustenance from the exploits of the former). Roaming from battlefields to pirate ships to port-town taverns, and offering advice on reading, traveling and eroticism, Mac Orlan's Handbook is ultimately a how-to manual for the imagination, and a formulation of the stark choice all would-be adventurers must face: to live or write.Generally known as the author of Le Quai des brumes (the basis for Marcel Carné's film of the same name), Pierre Mac Orlan (1882-1970) was a prolific writer of absurdist tales, adventure novels, flagellation erotica and essays, as well as the composer of a trove of songs made famous by the likes of Juliette Gréco. A member of both the Académie Goncourt and the Collège de 'Pataphysique, Mac Orlan was admired by everyone from Raymond Queneau and Boris Vian to André Malraux and Guy Debord.…

Paperback. Condición: New. In the last days of the Venetian Republic, the successive wives of Count Alvise Lanzi suffer mysterious, agonizing deaths. Murder Most Serene offers a cruel portrait of a beautiful but corrupt city-state and its equally extravagant and corrupt inhabitants. Redolent of darkness, death, poison and transgression, it is also an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek Venetian romp. Rich in historical detail and bursting with bejeweled putrescence, Gabrielle Wittkop's chilling memento mori eschews the murder mystery in which it is garbed for a scintillating depiction of physical, moral, societal and institutional corruption, in which the author plays the role of puppeteer--"present, masked as convention dictates, while in a Venice on the brink of downfall, women gorged with venom burst like wineskins."Self-styled heir to the Marquis de Sade, Gabrielle Wittkop (1920-2002) was a French author who wrote a remarkable series of novels and travelogues, all laced with sardonic humor and dark sexuality, with recurrent themes of death, disease and decrepitude. After meeting Justus Wittkop, a German deserter, in Paris under the Occupation, she hid him from the Nazis and then married him after the war, in what she described as an "intellectual alliance," given he was homosexual. He would commit suicide in 1986, with her approval, after being diagnosed with Parkinson's. Her first novel, The Necrophiliac, appeared in 1972, but a number of her books have only been made available since her own suicide in 2002, after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Jean de La Ville de Mirmont left behind one undisputed classic, self-published a few months before he would meet his fate on the front lines of World War I: an understated, almost humorous tale of urban solitude and alienation that outlines the mediocrity of bureaucratic existence.Jean Dézert is an office worker employed by the ministry, who rounds out his regimented life with snippets of Eastern philosophy, strolls through the city and consumerist efforts at injecting content into his life by structuring his Sundays through a rigorous use of advertising flyers that take him from saunas to vegetarian restaurants to lectures on sexual hygiene.In his mortal boredom, his modernist engagement with the banality of the everyday and his almost heroic resignation to mediocrity, Jean Dézert emerges as something of a French counterpart to Herman Melville's own rebel bureaucrat, Bartleby the Scrivener-save that when it comes to being an existential rebel, Jean Dézert goes even further in his will to prefer not to. "Jean Dézert is like a brother to me," wrote Michel Houellebecq, "because of his ability to escape despair by means of emptiness."Jean de La Ville de Mirmont (1886-1914) was killed by a shell explosion on the World War I battlefront. He left behind a collection of poetry that would be published posthumously, a collection of short stories and the novella for which he is remembered, The Sundays of Jean Dézert.…

Paperback. Condición: New. The hallucinatory English-language debut of an overlooked German Expressionist poetBess Brenck Kalischer's only work of prose was first published in German in 1922. Narrated by a woman being held in a sanitarium after a mental breakdown, The Mill is less a novel than a rhythmic, hallucinatory and fractured sequence of prose poems. On its publication, the German author Mynona described it as "more a mill, a cosmos flower, a lyricism and romantic spell than it is a 'novel.'" Shifting from pedestrian concerns to cosmic visions, from the setting of a basement mushroom farm to scenes on Sirius, Kalischer's narrator weaves together literary satire, anguished dream states and shifting subjectivities. As much Maldoror as Munchausen, The Mill describes an unstable journey to psychic restoration that is as radically experimental today as when it was first published a century ago.Bess Brenck Kalischer (1878-1933) was born Betty Levy in Rostock. Although she began publishing her first poems in 1905, she began to make a name for herself as part of the second generation of German Expressionists in Dresden, cofounding the Expesstionistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dresden (Expressionist Working Group of Dresden) alongside such members as Conrad Felixmüller. Later relocating to Berlin, she was a friend of Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona, who used her as a model in several stories and novels. She died of a "nervous disease" in 1933, her grave left without a headstone until 2014.…

Paperback. Condición: New. A canonical gem of the nocturnal fantastic, in the tradition of German Romantics such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and NovalisFirst published in France in the dark year of 1942, the story collection Waystations of the Deep Night remains the best-known of Marcel Brion's numerous novels and stories in the vein of the strange and the fantastic. The journeys in this volume carry the reader through the surreal vistas of an underground city that appears aboveground as a bizarre theater of facades and a fire-ravaged landscape where souls turn to ash. A young castrato sings his heart out in a lost baroque garden; a child falls under the fateful spell of an enchanted painting; a traveler in a burned-out landscape encounters the Prince of Death; and dancing cats engage in mortal combat in the cellars of an abandoned port city.A self-declared heir of Achim von Arnim and E.T.A. Hoffmann, Brion was also an admirer of the German Romantic writer Novalis and his sequence of Hymns to the Night, but his own imaginative homages to the night are more troublingly ambiguous, possibly an indirect reflection of the dark times in which they were written.Born in Marseille in 1895, Marcel Brion was a freelance writer and critic. In 1964 he was elected to the Académie française in recognition of both his critical and creative writing, Over the course of a long and productive career he published 20 novels, four volumes of short stories and some 68 nonfiction books covering music, art, literature, history and travel. He died in Paris in 1984.…

Paperback. Condición: New. 1st. Maimed beggars, female automatons, cultural prosthetics: four tales of opulence, poverty and grotesque empathy from the Weimar RepublicFirst published in 1924, Fantastic Orgy is most notable for its title story, an account of a drinking rout organized for maimed beggars in honor of a sideshow attraction, a mechanical woman doomed to early death through disintegration from entertaining the masses-a depiction of a robotic woman preceding by several years Fritz Lang's less sympathetic presentation in Metropolis. All four stories, however, explore the emotional and material needs of a crippled society, the economic trap of poverty and the hypocritical righteousness of charity. Like an etching by Georg Grosz or Otto Dix translated into literary form, Alexander Frey presents the troubling, at times fantastical notion of a prosthetic humanity for damaged times.Alexander M. Frey (1881-1957) was a German author whose antiwar novel Die Pflasterkästen (The Cross Bearers) is considered by some critics to be superior to All Quiet on the Western Front. Frey refused to join the National Socialist Party, despite having served as a medic in the trenches of World War I alongside dispatcher Adolf Hitler, and fled Germany during World War II.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Life in the Folds, originally published in French in 1949, is the Belgian-born author and artist Henri Michaux's (1899-1984) most direct exploration of the many forms of suffering, a laboratory of fantastical, destructive energies in which the poet presents his methods for dealing with the world around him. The first two sections offer such items as the Slapping Gun and the Man Sling (in the section "Freedom of Action") to the scenarios that call for defensive measures such as the "Constellation of Jabs" and the visceral "Blow of Fatigue" (in the section "Apparitions"). Also included is one of Michaux's more complex fantastical-anthropological travelogues, "Portrait of the Meidosems," an account of the ways and manners of a population of vague ectoplasmic figures, anguished filaments of sorts that struggle to exist but are never allowed to sit still. This volume charts a turning point in Michaux's life and in the world, where his earlier depictions of visualized psychology and suffering found representation in a traumatized Europe. Imbued by the war years, the Occupation and the horror of the concentration camps, Life in the Folds bears the scars of Michaux's own personal catastrophe--the loss of his wife, who had died of "atrocious burns" the previous year--and concludes with the autobiographical text, "Old Age of Pollagoras," a wearied testament uttered before a haunted "plain of death.".…

Paperback. Condición: New. A previously untranslated gem of Surrealist prose poetry from the acclaimed French novelistIn 1941, Julien Gracq, newly released from a German prisoner-of-war camp, wrote a series of prose poems that would come to represent the only properly Surrealist writings in his oeuvre. Surrealism provided Gracq with a means of counteracting his disturbing wartime experiences; his newfound freedom inspired a new freedom of personal expression, and he gave the collection an appropriate title, Great Liberty: "In the occult dictionary of Surrealism, the true name of poetry is liberation." Gracq the poet rather than the novelist is at work here: Surrealist fireworks lace through bewitching modernist romance, fantasy, black humor and deadpan absurdism. A later, postwar section entitled "The Habitable Earth" presents Gracq as visionary traveler exploring Andes and Flanders and returning to the narrative impulse of his better-known fiction.Julien Gracq (1910-2007), born Louis Poirier, is known for such dreamlike novels as The Castle of Argol, A Dark Stranger, The Opposing Shore and Balcony in the Forest. He was close to the Surrealist movement, and André Breton in particular, to whom he devoted a critical study.…

Paperback. Condición: New. A disorienting, de Chirico-esque detective tale of curio shops and eerie antiquities, penned in France's postwar traumaA traveling businessman decides to tarry in an unnamed city, dons a new name and profession on a whim, and rents a room in a hotel on an island at the city's edge. As he wanders through the streets of unvisited storefronts and offices, he encounters a strange constellation of characters: a sinister night watchman; his spiritual half-brother, the "professor"; and a mute beauty who quickly obsesses him. They in turn lead the narrator into labyrinths of crowded curio shops and secondhand furnishers where the secrets of the island lie buried behind armoires and delirium. As the narrator pieces together the drama at the heart of the abandoned quarter, he discovers missing elements to his own biography and the role he is to play as witness to tragedy.Marcel Béalu's novella, written in the 1940s but not published until 1954, peels away an oneiric banality to reveal doubled lives and secret stories. The Impersonal Adventure utilizes a dreamlike logic to translate postwar trauma, urban devastation and anxiety into a tale that unfolds in the empty streets and bric-a-brac shops of a de Chirico painting.Marcel Béalu (1908-93) was a French poet and novelist who drew inspiration from German Romanticism and French Surrealism, but avoided schools of thought and autobiography. His work was distinct for its dreamlike qualities and has established him as a master of the French fantastique. He made his living as a hat maker (when he first met the poet Max Jacob, who took him under his wing), an antiques dealer, and then as a bookseller.…

Paperback. Condición: New. A nonconformist satire of both bureaucracy and nonconformism from the French polymath and author of Foam of the DaysWritten at the age of 23 for his friends in the winter of 1943-44, Vercoquin and the Plankton was the first of Vian's novels to be published under his own name. Published in 1947, the book came out two months after his succès de scandale I Spit on Your Graves and two months before the publication of his beloved classic The Foam of the Days. At once social documentary, scathing satire and jazz manifesto, Vercoquin and the Plankton describes the collision of two worlds under the Vichy regime: that of the youthful dandyism of the ever-partying Zazous and the murderously maniacal bureaucracy of a governmental office for standardization. In this roman à clef drawn from Vian's own contradictory lives as a jazz musician on the Left Bank and an engineer at the French National Organization for Standardization, the reader is introduced to a handful of characters inhabiting a world lying somewhere between Occupied Paris and Looney Tunes.Boris Vian (1920-59) was a French polymath who in his short life managed to inhabit the roles of writer, poet, playwright, musician, singer/songwriter, translator, music critic, actor, inventor and engineer, before dying of a heart attack at the age of 39, after authoring ten novels, several volumes of short stories, plays, operas, articles and nearly 500 songs. Vian is remembered as one of the reigning spirits of the postwar Parisian Latin Quarter, a friend to everyone from Jean-Paul Sartre to Raymond Queneau and Miles Davis, playing trumpet with Claude Abadie and Claude Luter, and an influence on such future kindred spirits as Serge Gainsbourg.…

Paperback. Condición: New. A disorienting, de Chirico-esque detective tale of curio shops and eerie antiquities, penned in France's postwar traumaA traveling businessman decides to tarry in an unnamed city, dons a new name and profession on a whim, and rents a room in a hotel on an island at the city's edge. As he wanders through the streets of unvisited storefronts and offices, he encounters a strange constellation of characters: a sinister night watchman; his spiritual half-brother, the "professor"; and a mute beauty who quickly obsesses him. They in turn lead the narrator into labyrinths of crowded curio shops and secondhand furnishers where the secrets of the island lie buried behind armoires and delirium. As the narrator pieces together the drama at the heart of the abandoned quarter, he discovers missing elements to his own biography and the role he is to play as witness to tragedy.Marcel Béalu's novella, written in the 1940s but not published until 1954, peels away an oneiric banality to reveal doubled lives and secret stories. The Impersonal Adventure utilizes a dreamlike logic to translate postwar trauma, urban devastation and anxiety into a tale that unfolds in the empty streets and bric-a-brac shops of a de Chirico painting.Marcel Béalu (1908-93) was a French poet and novelist who drew inspiration from German Romanticism and French Surrealism, but avoided schools of thought and autobiography. His work was distinct for its dreamlike qualities and has established him as a master of the French fantastique. He made his living as a hat maker (when he first met the poet Max Jacob, who took him under his wing), an antiques dealer, and then as a bookseller.…

Paperback. Condición: New. In defense of the poetic, Pascal Quignard pens an impassioned reply to von Hofmannsthal's despondent Lord ChandosIn 1902, Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos Letter articulated a deep crisis of faith in language. Having "lost completely the ability to think or speak of anything coherently," the titular character abandons literature in favor of silence. In The Answer to Lord Chandos, a text that was meticulously crafted over 41 years, Pascal Quignard passionately challenges this withdrawal and urges us not to forsake the power of poetry. His exhortation meditates on Emily Brontë, Handel, Rembrandt and more to demonstrate how literature rejuvenates our connection to the universe. In an introduction to this first English edition, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy illuminates the core question animating this debate, which has resonated within literature since its inception: can poetry give access to the real? Quignard's resounding answer offers a testament to the immense value of literary expression.Pascal Quignard (born 1948) is the author of A Terrace in Rome and more than 60 fiction and nonfiction titles. He has won both the Prix Goncourt, France's top literary prize, and the Formentor Prize for Letters.…

Paperback. Condición: New. For devotees of Dada and Surrealism, this outlandish, unconventional collection of prose poems amplifies a formerly invisible voice of European modernismEmil Szittya's earliest known work of significance, The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards, was published in German in Budapest in 1916, yet it portrays the hallucinatory Paris in which the author had chosen a temporary dwelling at that time. Prose poems for lack of a better word, Szittya's "hashish films" were almost lost to time but can now be recognized as similar to the work of Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire. They nevertheless reflect the author's lifelong refusal to ally himself to any literary or artistic movement. It is a strange literary work as international and untethered as the author himself had been, a symbolic map of Montparnasse that incorporated the visual world of the painters around him.Emil Szittya was the most established pseudonym of the Hungarian-born Adolf Schenk (1886-1964). A vagabond in both his writing and his practice, his life intersected with notable names throughout Europe in the years of high modernism. Schenk eventually settled in Paris, fighting in the Resistance and working at the café Les Deux Magots before dying of tuberculosis.…