Wakefield press cambridge (174 risultati)

Cambridge: Wakefield Press:, 2025. First printing, Paperback, Fine, 52 pp. Cover artwork by: Fedele Azeri An as new copy. First printing, Paperback, Fine. Fedele Azeri (illustratore).

softcover. Condizione: Fine copy. 1st. 12mo, 79 pp. Alechinsky, Pierre (illustratore).

softcover. Condizione: Fine copy. 1st. 8vo, 108 pp.

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. 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, Mallards 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 Lorigine de la tendresse, Evidences and Ladoption. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. A frenzied German Expressionist tale of orgy as salvation in Weimar BerlinOriginally published in German in 1919, Potsdamer Platz was Curt Corrinths first novel to employ an expressionistic, frenetic prose and presented his excessive vision of free love. Inspired by the sex theories of Freuds controversial disciple Otto Gross, Corrinth preached the sexual orgy as a means to salvation and universal copulation as a new world religion.The books 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 Corrinths 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 books 1920 deluxe edition.Curt Corrinth (18941960) 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. "Originally published as Potsdamer Platz oder Die Neachte des neuen Messias: Ekstatische Visionen (Munich, Georg Meuller Verlag, 1919)." Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Klee, Paul (illustratore). …

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Twelve grotesque tales from the philosopher and literary absurdist MynonaMynonas other 1921 collection of grotesques is no less provocative and just as indefinable in natureeven close to a century after its original publication. These twelve off-kilter parabolic tales include items such as The Chamber Pot as Lifesaver, The Art of Self-Embalming, The Maiden as Toothpowder, Your Panties Are Beautiful! and The Amorous Corpse. E.T.A. Hoffmann meets Immanuel Kant through the unlikeliest of looking glasses as Mynona spins out quasi-mystical meetings between cosmic entities and drawing-room romantics: a starry-eyed Buster Keaton skirting along the philosophical and literary borders of topics such as cuckoldry, necrophilia, schizophrenia, the end of history and the love lives of objects. With its companion volume of grotesques, The Unruly Bridal Bed, these twelve tales poke more holes in the material world and further demonstrate Mynonas predilection for the philosophical pratfall. "Originally published as Mein Papa und die Jungfrau von Orlaeans: Nebst anderen Grotesken (Meunchen: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1921)."--Title page verso. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. With Psychology of the Rich Aunt, German author Erich Muehsam made his ironic bid for authorial immortality by announcing his discovery that immortality in fact existsspecifically in the person of the Rich Aunt. Through 25 case studies, arranged alphabetically (from Aunt Amalia to Aunt Zerlinde), Muehsam argues his case: the Rich Aunt is able to live forever provided she has a nephew waiting for her demise and for his inheritance. The corollary revealed in these tales, of course, is that a Rich Aunts eternal rest is directly tied to her nephews deprivation of said inheritance. The pathways to an immortals demise can thus be the result of anything from the vagrancies of sexual proclivities or the stock market to the unforeseen expenses of literary ambitions. The Rich Aunt emerges as the enduring fly in the ointment of Church, Family and State, the undoing of fate personified and the transformation of morality into mortality under the aegis of Capital.Originally published in German in 1905, Psychology of the Rich Aunt is a caustically tongue-in-cheek portrayal of greed under capitalism in the bourgeois epoch.Erich Muehsam (18781934) was a German-Jewish anarchist writer, poet, playwright, cabaret songwriter and a fierce satirist of the Nazi party. He played a key role in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, championed the rights of women and homosexuals, advocated for free love and vegetarianism, and opposed capitalism and war. He was brutally murdered in the Oranienburg concentration camp. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. A collection of previously unpublished erotic manuscripts from the author of The Songs of BilitisA bestselling author in his time, Pierre Louys (18701925) was a friend of, and influence on, Andre Gide, Paul Valery, Oscar Wilde and Stephane Mallarme among others. He achieved instant notoriety with Aphrodite and The Songs of Bilitis, but it was only after his death that Louys' 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 Louys 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 outrageousan erotic classic in which humor takes precedence over arousal. By means of shockingly filthy adviceostensibly offered for use in educational establishmentscouched in a hilariously parodic admonitory tone, Louys 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, Louys 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Mr. Gica is the worlds 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. Gicas 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 figuresincluding our superhuman protagonists 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. A collection of short stories offering a perfect introduction to the work of the great German humorist MynonaOriginally published in 1921, The Unruly Bridal Bed brings together ten indefinable tales that include Tobias and the Prune, Plant Paternity, The Dissolute Nose, Fried Sphinx Meat and The Great Gold-Plated Flea. Under his literary pseudonym Mynona (a palindrome for the German Anonym, or Anonymous), Salomo Friedlaender here displays his unique brand of philosophical slapstick that blends fairytale technology with proto-metafiction and at times unsettling meditations on fornicating plants, aristocratic eugenics, spiritual and physical hermaphroditism, and our excremental sun. With its companion volume of grotesques, My Papa and the Maid of Orleans, this collection offers a perfect introduction to the great German humorists work. "Originally published as Das widerspenstige Brautbett und andere Grotesken (Meunchen: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1921)."--Title page verso. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. The first English translation of the novel awarded the 2000 Grand Prix du Roman de lAcademie FrancaiseA Terrace in Rome describes the tormented life of Geoffroy Meaume, a 17th-century engraver of encrypted shadows and erotic prints. After a passionate affair in his youth concludes with his face being burned by acid thrown by his lovers jealous fiance, Meaume undertakes a lifetime of wandering, his psyche forever engraved by the memory of the woman who spurned him. With a face of boiled leather and a mind haunted by a nightmare of desire, he devotes himself to the black-and-white world of etchings and mezzotints, forsaking the paradise of color to engage in a science of shadows. This fragmented narrative of a man attacked by images is related in 47 short chapters which themselves act as engravings; a tale told by an antiquarian, full of fragmented vision and sexual hell. First published in French in 2000, A Terrace in Rome received the Grand Prix du Roman de lAcademie Francaise that same year, and went on to be translated into 19 languages. This is its first appearance in English.Pascal Quignard (born 1948) has written over 60 books of fiction, essays, and his own particular genre of philosophical reflection that straddles the personal journal, historical narrative and poetic theory. His books in English include Albucius, All the Worlds Mornings, The Sexual Night, Sex and Terror, On Wooden Tablets: Apronenia Avitia, and The Salon in Wurttemberg, as well as the multiple volumes of his ongoing book project The Last Kingdom, which, to date, includes The Roving Shadows, The Silent Crossing and Abysses. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Originally published in Danish in 1910, Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah is a fevered pulp novel that reads like nothing else of its time: an anomaly within the tradition of the Danish novel, and one that makes for a startlingly modern read to this day. Combining elements of the serial film, detective story and gothic horror novel, Kzradock is a surreal foray into psychoanalytic mysticism.Opening in a Parisian insane asylum where Dr. Renard de Montpensier is conducting hypnotic seances with the titular Onion Man, the novel escalates quickly with the introduction of battling detectives, murders and a puma in a hallucinating movie theater before shifting to the chalk cliffs of Brighton. It is there that the narrator must confront a ghost child, a scalped detective, a skeleton, a deaf-mute dog and a manipulative tapeworm in order to properly confront his own sanity and learn the spiritual lesson of the human onion.When Gershom Scholem read the novel in its 1912 German translation on the recommendation of Walter Benjamin, he concluded: This is a great book, and it speaks a formidable language This book lays out the metaphysics of doubt. "Originally published as Menneskelget Kzradock, den vaarfriske Methusalem: af Dr. Renard de Montpensiers Optegnelser, 1910."--Title page verso. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. A manuscript of obscenely erotic poetry from Pierre Louys, written in secret and published after his deathBy turns amusing and offensive, Pierre Louys Pybrac is possibly the filthiest collection of poetry ever published, and offers a taste of what the Marquis de Sade might have produced if he had ever turned his hand to verse. First published posthumously in 1927, Pybrac was, with The Young Girls Handbook of Good Manners, one of the first of Louys secret erotic manuscripts to see clandestine publication. Composed of 313 rhymed alexandrine quatrains, the majority of them starting with the phrase "I do not like to see," Pybrac is in form a mockery of sixteenth-century chancellor poet Guy Du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac, whose moralizing quatrains were common literary fare for young French readers until the nineteenth century. Louys spent his life coming up with his own ever-growing collection of rhymed moral precepts (suitable only for adult readers): a dizzying litany describing everything he "disliked" witnessing, from lesbianism, sodomy, incest and prostitution to perversions extreme enough to give even a modern reader pause. With the rest of his erotic manuscripts, the original collection of over 2,000 quatrains was auctioned off and scattered throughout private collections; but like everything erotic, what remains, collected here, conveys an impression of unending absurdity and near-hypnotic obsession. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Toyen (illustratore).…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. 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 (19352005) 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. 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. A Berlin Novel. Baron Munchausen returns with visions of mobile architecture and journeys to sausage moons, in this previously untranslated novel from Paul Scheerbart Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. "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 cafe 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. Originally published in French as Tentative d'aepuisement d'un lieu parisien. Christian Bourgois aEditeur, 1975. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. For devotees of Dada and Surrealism, this outlandish, unconventional collection of prose poems amplifies a formerly invisible voice of European modernismEmil Szittyas 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, Szittyas "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 authors 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 Hungarianborn Adolf Schenk (18861964). 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 cafe Les Deux Magots before dying of tuberculosis. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Together with other disillusioned illusionists, the titular magician exposes the dark underside of art, intent on unveiling lifes elegant deceptionIn following the tales of these magicians of madness, Diabelli offers unique confessional accounts of linguistic self-destruction. Chief among them is prestidigitator Grazio Diabelli, who refuses an invitation to perform and instead discourses on the history of escapology as he contemplates his own final and permanent disappearing act. Also waiting in the wings is August Stramm, "pianistic abortion" applying for the post of orchestra minion despite being hard of hearing; and Anatol Zentgraf, private scholar and maniacal reader who is the alleged epicenter of an earthquake. Added to this first English edition is Burgers tale "The Laughter Artist," an account of a nameless professional artist of cachinnation whose mothers backstage visit induces a fatal culmination of his art.Hermann Burger (194289) was a Swiss author, critic and professor. He first achieved fame with his novel Schilten, the story of a mad village schoolteacher who teaches his students to prepare for death. At the end of his life, he was working on the autobiographical tetralogy Brenner, one of the high points of 20th-century German prose. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. This fierce fable of childbirth by German Surrealist Unica Zuern was written after she had already given birth to two children and undergone the self-induced abortion of another in Berlin in the 1950s. Beginning in the relatively straightforward, if disturbing, narrative of a young woman in a tower (with a bat in her hair and ravens for company) engaged in a psychic war with the parasitic son in her belly, The Trumpets of Jericho dissolves into a beautiful nightmare of hypnotic obsession and mythical language, stitched together with anagrams and private ruminations. Arguably Zuern's most extreme experiment in prose, and never before translated into English, this novella dramatizes the frontiers of the bodyits defensive walls as well as its cavities and thresholdsanimating a harrowing and painfully, twistedly honest depiction of motherhood as a breakdown in the distinction between self and other, transposed into the language of darkest fairy tales.Unica Zuern (191670) was born in Gruenewald, Germany. Toward the end of World War II, she discovered the realities of the Nazi concentration campsa revelation which was to haunt and unsettle her for the rest of her life. After meeting Hans Bellmer in 1953, she followed him to Paris, where she became acquainted with the Surrealists and developed the body of drawings and writings for which she is best remembered: a series of anagram poems, hallucinatory accounts and literary enactments of the mental breakdowns from which she would suffer until her suicide in 1970. Translation of a novela, Die Trompeten von Jericho, which originally appeared in Gesamtausgabe Bd. 4.2, pages 331-381 (Brinkman & Bose, Berlin, 1998). Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. First edited and published by Marcel Marien in 1968 in a limited edition of 230 copies, half a year after Paul Nouge's death, The Subversion of Images is a miniature classic in both the photobook and surrealist canons. It collects Nouge's notes and photographs from 1929 1930 to form a guidebook to the surrealist image. Nouge here outlines his conception of the object and outlines the surrealist approach to it, while also offering an accompaniment to the visual work of his colleague, Rene Magritte, whose paintings he sometimes titled. How might a tangle of string elicit terror? How might the suppression of an object move one to sentimentality? What is the effect of a pair of gloves on a loaf of sliced bread?Nouge's accompanying photographs explore these notions, and feature a number of his Belgian surrealist colleagues. This translation is presented as a facsimile of the original edition, with an afterword by Xavier Canonne, director of the Musee de la Photographie.A biochemist by trade, Paul Nouge (1895 1967) was a leading light of Belgian Surrealism and its primary theorist, as well as a decisive influence on such Lettrists and Situationists as Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, who would take inspiration from his conception of plagiarism for what would come to be termed detournement. Nouge steered the Brussels surrealist group toward a more rational approach to visual and verbal language that discarded the Parisian surrealists' proclivity for irrationality and occultism. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. A Kafkaesque odyssey across a dreamlike, universal landscapeAn unnamed adolescent drifter wanders through an unnamed country at an unspecified point in time in search of warmth and comfort. He finds it at a farm engaged in festivities but is immediately forced to flee the next morning after coveting the mysterious lady of the estate. Now a fugitive, the vagabond encounters and joins with another, a wry middle-aged man tasked with delivering a message sealed in a tube. The two pursue a dreamlike chain of clues and horror in their mission, encounteringas well as perpetratingcrime and cruelty, until the boys former aimlessness develops into an unexpected destiny. An at times unsettling narrative of initiation, the torments of desire and the death of youth, The Messengers is an oneiric exploration of a realm that embodies the parables of Kafka and the atmosphere of Alain-Fournier. This novella was the winner of the Prix des Nouvelles litteraires when it was first published in French in 1974.Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud (born 1947) is a French novelist and short-story author. He has been the recipient of the Prix Renaudot, Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle, Prix Giono, Prix Valery Larbaud and the Grand Prix de lImaginaire. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. 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 194344, Vercoquin and the Plankton was the first of Vians novels to be published under his own name. Published in 1947, the book came out two months after his succes 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 a clef drawn from Vians 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 (192059) 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

softcover. Condizione: Fine copy. 1st. 8vo, 250 pp., Translated by Christopher Butterfield.

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Sternbergs rule-breaking, genre-defying novel upends the humdrum workday worldA nameless employee stands outside the door to an office, hesitating to enter because he is five minutes late. This banal opening then launches into a frenetic narrative that switches genres, modes and universes with abandon. From an account of his feral childhood with a nymphomaniacal mother, to his early development of a third arm and a second head, the employee unspools his subsequent life as department-store wrapper, ladder-descending bureaucrat, traveling salesman, murder suspect and other occupations. Years return and reverse through a series of inflicted hellscapes as a tension builds between an untrammeled imagination willing to commit any crime and the inescapable rigidity of the mind.First published in French by Les Editions de Minuit in 1958, The Employee was awarded the Grand Prix de lHumour Noir in 1961. This first English-language translation presents an entropic exercise of the imagination that will leave readers bewildered and breathless.Jacques Sternberg (19232006) was a literary maverick, who wrote over 50 books that roamed freely through genre and influence without ever adhering to anything that might threaten constraint. He was briefly a member of the Panic Movement, founded by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. A compilation of 16 rigorous, eccentric essays commissioned by the German founder of psychophysicsThe original 1824 German publication of Stapelia Mixta united a bevy of eccentric proposals, meditations and displays of consciously excessive learning that strove for an unusual clarity of absurdity, which was the hallmark of the pseudonymous author Dr. Mises. Aiming for a broader reading audience, it was titled after a flower, but one of such a stench as to guarantee originality. And such was the originality of these semiserious flights of excess that came under the cover of Dr. Mises, who wrote on everything from landscaping to the spiritual lives of plants and heavenly bodies while also conducting pioneering research in optics and experimental psychology.The 16 essays of this collection include discussions of dancing, drugs, immortality, perception and psychology. These increasingly inventive essays start with a relatively digestible Encomium of the Belly before developing into a complicated, prepataphysical exploration of Spatial Symbolism.Dr. Mises was the pen name of the founder of psychophysics, Gustav Theodor Fechner (180187), an alter ego he adopted for his more speculative and satirical writing.Erik Butler is a researcher at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Fully translated into English for the first time, Nerval's autobiographical anthology encompasses his complete literary career, which influenced such authors as Marcel Proust, Andre Breton and Antonin ArtaudThough Gerard de Nerval had originally intended it to be a small anthology of his early poetry, his 1853 Little Castles of Bohemia ended up as something more. As could be said of all his last works, the book was an effort at stability: worn out and financially impoverished, Nerval gathered his past writing in an attempt at assembling some sort of posterity. The melancholic, wandering castles presented here are gathered from the range of Nerval's literary life, from his autobiographical reminiscences of the bohemian neighborhood of Le Doyenne to the lyrical "odelettes" that established Nerval as a poet early on, the one-act Corilla and the mystical sonnets of madness that concluded his career. This bilingual volume containing the first full English translation (together with the original French verse) includes woodcut illustrations by Alfred Prunaire from a rare 1912 edition.Gerard de Nerval (180855) was a writer, poet and translator who wedded French and German romanticism and transformed his research into mystic thought and his bouts of mental illness into such visionary works as Aurelia, or Dream and Life. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Prunaire, Alfred (illustratore).…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. 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 Brions 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 Academie francaise 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. A canonical gem of the nocturnal fantastic, in the tradition of German Romantics such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and Novalis Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Exquisitely crafted essays on medieval criminal slang, ancient Greek prostitution, laughter, anarchy and more from the endlessly influential Marcel SchwobAll over the world, wrote Jorge Luis Borges, there are devotees of the writer Marcel Schwob who constitute little secret societies. Spicilege, Schwobs last book published under his name, constitutes the handbook to these societiesto Schwobs work, to himself as erudite scholar and author, and to the twilight of the era of French Symbolism. Schwob was, as Paul Leautaud described him, a living library, and the critical biographies gathered in the essays of Spicilege display a few of the volumes in that library: his groundbreaking research on Francois Villon (work that remains a cornerstone to our knowledge of Villon), his passion for Robert Louis Stevenson and his encounters with such less-remembered writers as George Meredith. But it is the carefully developed ideas in these essays and the eccentric yet thorough scholarship that draws them together that are of particular interest today: the understanding of criminal slang in the Middle Ages; the study of prostitution in ancient Greece; the folklore inspired by a Flaubert story; a complex critique of individuality that effectively laid the groundwork for Jarrys pataphysics; as well as ruminations on perversity, laughter, biography, love, terror and pity, and art and anarchy.Marcel Schwob (18671905) was a scholar of startling breadth, an incomparable storyteller and a secret influence on generations of writers, from Apollinaire and Borges to Roberto Bolano and J. Rodolfo Wilcock. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Drawing on British Gothic fiction, German Romanticism and Dickensian humor, Jean Ray's tales mix Catholic mythology with cosmic horrorAfter 600 years, Geoffrey Chaucer and his 14th-century pilgrims overcome space and time to return to the Tabard Inn in Southwark, freshly cleansed of their sins. This time it is a new cast of storytellers picking up where the others had left offa motley crew that includes a Prioress with a taste for executions and a madman who once made the mistake of asking after the Uhu. Also among them is a new listener: Tobias Weep, secretary of the Upper Thames Book Club, who has stumbled onto their impossible gathering, pinned to his chair by the impossible weight of E.T.A. Hoffmann's talking tomcat on his lap. Jean Ray's The Last Canterbury Tales, first published in French in 1944, makes no pretense of finishing Chaucer's masterpiece but instead works toward a denouement of its own that reveals an unexpected act of storytelling underpinning this collection.Jean Ray (18871964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. A pivotal figure in the "Belgian School of the Strange," he authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, along with his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. 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 massesa depiction of a robotic woman preceding by several years Fritz Langs 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 (18811957) was a German author whose antiwar novel Die Pflasterkaesten (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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…