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Paul Scheerbart The Perpetual Motion Machine The Story of an Invention

Wakefield Press 2011 ISBN 9780984115549 Acqn 19647
Pb 12x18cm 112pp 27 b+w ills 9.95
In the last days of 1907, the German novelist and exponent of glass architecture Paul Scheerbart
embarked upon an attempt to invent a perpetual motion machine. For the next two and a half
years he would document his ongoing efforts (and failures) from his laundry-room-cumlaboratory, hiring plumbers and mechanics to construct his models while spinning out a series of
imagined futures that his invention-in-the-making was going to enable. The Perpetual Motion
Machine: The Story of an Invention, originally published in German in 1910, is an indefinable
blend of diary, diagrams and digression that falls somewhere between memoir and reverie.
Shifting ambiguously from irony to enthusiasm and back, Scheerbart's unique amalgamation of
visionary humour and optimistic failure ultimately proves to be a more literary invention than
scientific: a perpetual motion of a fevered imagination, Scheerbart's visions of rising globalisation,
ecological devastation, militaristic weapons of mass destruction and the possible end of literature
soon lead him to dread success more than failure. The Perpetual Motion Machine is an ode to the
fertility of misery and a battle cry of the imagination against praxis.
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The Young Girl's Handbook Of Good Manners

Pb 12x18cm 62pp 9.95
A bestselling author in his time, Pierre Lous (18701925) was a friend of, and influence on,
Andr Gide, Paul Valry, Oscar Wilde and Stephane Mallarm among others. He achieved
instant notoriety with Aphrodite and The Songs of Bilitis, but it was only after his death that
Lous' 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 Lous 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 humour
takes precedence over arousal. By means of shockingly filthy adviceostensibly offered for
use in educational establishmentscouched in a hilariously parodic admonitory tone, Lous
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, neighbour or God, Lous 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.
Georges Perec An Attempt At Exhausting A Place In Paris

Pb 11x18cm 58pp 9.95
One 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 caf 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 centre 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.
Honore de Balzac Treatise On Elegant Living

Pb 12x18cm 88pp 1b+w ills 9.95
Honor de Balzac's 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living was a keystone text on dandyism,
preceding Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's Anatomy of Dandyism (1845) and Charles Baudelaire's
The Dandy (in The Painter of Modern Life, 1863), and marking an important shift from the
early dandyism of the British Regency to the intellectual and artistic dandyism of nineteenthcentury France. The Treatise is the first true philosophical expression of dandyism, and is full
of well-crafted aphorisms: Elegant living is, in the broad acceptance of the term, the art of
animating repose, runs one classic definition of dandyism, and One must have studied at
least as far as rhetoric to lead an elegant life asserts the importance of verbal pirouette and
dexterous quipping to the dandy. Further embellished with anecdotes and historical and
personal illustrations, Balzac's Treatise even features a fictitious encounter with the original
dandy himself, Beau Brummell. Never before translated into English, this witty tract makes for
an illuminating cornerstone to Balzac's Human Comedy (which was originally to have
included a never-completed four-part philosophical Pathology of Social Life). Above all, it
represents a decisive moment in the history of dandyism, and an entertaining exposition on
the profundities of what lies deepest within all of us: our appearance.
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Charles Fourier The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy

Pb 11x18cm 136pp 9.95
Admired by Marx and Engels, the Surrealists, the Situationists, Walter Benjamin and Roland
Barthes, the great utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837) has been many things to many
people: a proto-feminist, a Surrealist ancestor, a cantankerous cosmologist, a social critic and
humorist and to this day one of France's truest visionary thinkers. He was also, as this volume
demonstrates, a maniacal taxonomist. In this zoological guidebook to cuckoldry and commerce,
Fourier offers a caustic critique of the bankruptcy of marriage and the prostitution of the economy,
and the hypocrisies of a civilization that over-regulates sexual congress while allowing the
financial sector to screw over the public. In these attacks on the morality of monogamy and the
perils of laissez-faire capitalism, Fourier's Hierarchies resonate uncannily with our contemporary
world.
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Rene Daumal - Pataphysical Essays

Pb 12x18cm 136pp 9.95
Pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions, of laws governing exceptions and of the laws
describing the universe supplementary to this one. Alfred Jarrys posthumous novel, Exploits and
Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, first appeared in 1911, and over the next 100 years, his
pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from Marcel Duchamp and
Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. In 1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers
would found the College of Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic Ren Daumal
was the first to elaborate upon Jarrys unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better
known for his unfinished novel Mount Analogue and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist
movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse of often overlooked Daumal:
Daumal the pataphysician. Pataphysical Essays collects Daumals overtly pataphysical writings
from 1929 to 1941, from his landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay,
The Pataphysics of Ghosts. Daumals Treatise on Patagrams offers the reader everything from
a recipe for the disintegration of a photographer to instructions on how to drill a fount of
knowledge in a public urinal. This volume also includes Daumals column for the Nouvelle Revue
Franaise, Pataphysics This Month. Reading like a deranged encyclopedia, Pataphysics This
Month describes a new mythology for the field of science, and amply demonstrates that the
twentieth century had been a distinctly pataphysical era.
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Jean-Pierre Martinet - The High Life

Pb 11x18cm 48pp 9.00
Adolphe Marlauds rule of conduct is simple: live as little as possible so as to suffer as little as
possible. For Marlaud, this involves carrying out a meagre existence on rue Froidevaux in Paris,
tending to his fathers grave in the cemetery across the street, and earning the outlines of a living
through a part-time job at the funerary shop on the corner. It does not, however, take into account
the intentions of the obese concierge of his building, who has set her widowed sights on his
diminutive frame, and whose aggressive overtures are to trigger a burlesque and obscene
tragedy. Originally published in 1979, The High Life introduces cult French author Jean-Pierre
Martinet into English. It is a novella that perfectly outlines Martinets dark vision: the terrors of
loneliness, the grotesque buffoonery of sexual relations, the essential humiliation of the human
condition and the ongoing trauma of twentieth-century history.
Jean-Pierre Martinet (19441993) wrote only a handful of novels, including what is largely
regarded as his masterpiece, the psychosexual study of horror and madness, Jrme. Largely
ignored during his lifetime, his star has only recently begun to shine in France, and he is now
regarded as an overlooked French successor to Dostoyevsky. Reading like an unsettling love
child of Louis-Ferdinand Cline and Jim Thompson, Martinets work explores the grimly
humorous possibilities of unlimited pessimism.
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Benjamin Peret - The Leg of Lamb. Its Life and Works

Pb 15x23cm 232pp 4ills 13.95
A foundational classic of Surrealist literature, The Leg of Lamb brings together the arch-Surrealist
Benjamin Pret's short prose: a smorgasbord of automatic writing and fantastical narratives
employing everything from the cinematic antics of Buster Keaton and slapstick animation to the
storytelling devices of detective novels, alchemical operations and mythology. The Leg of Lamb
consists of 24 delirious narratives, including the novella-length works "And the Breasts Were
Dying" and "There Was a Little Bakeress." Pret's adult fairy tales bear equal allegiance to Lewis
Carroll and the Marquis de Sade, and present one of the clearest examples of Surrealist humor,
in which the boundaries between character and object blur, and where a coat rack, artichoke or a
pile of manure is just as likely as Napolon, El Cid or Pope Pius VII to take on the role of hero
and adventurer. Pret himself edited this collection toward the end of his life. Originally published
in French in 1957, almost all of the stories in this collection had been written in the 1920s, half of
them even preceding Andr Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism. The Leg of Lamb offers not only a
highpoint of Surrealist automatic writing, but a key chapter in the genesis of the Surrealist
movement.
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The Book Of Monelle

Pb 12x18cm 120pp 2ills 9.95
When Marcel Schwob published The Book of Monelle in French in 1894, it immediately became
the unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement, admired by such contemporaries as
Stphane Mallarm, Alfred Jarry and Andr Gide. A carefully woven assemblage of legends,
aphorisms, fairy tales and nihilistic philosophy, it remains a deeply enigmatic and haunting work
more than a century later, a gathering of literary and personal ruins written in a style that evokes
both the Brothers Grimm and Friedrich Nietzsche. The Book of Monelle was the result of
Schwobs intense emotional suffering over the loss of his love, a girl of the streets named
Louise, whom he had befriended in 1891 and who succumbed to tuberculosis two years later.
Transforming her into the innocent prophet of destruction, Monelle, Schwob tells the stories of her
various sisters: girls succumbing to disillusionment, caught between the misleading world of
childlike fantasy and the bitter world of reality. This new translation reintroduces a true fin-desicle masterpiece into English.
A secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to
Roberto Bolao, Marcel Schwob (18671905) was as versed in the street slang of medieval
thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman (whom he translated into French). Paul Valry
and Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and he was the uncle of Surrealist
photographer Claude Cahun.
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Paul Scheerbart - Lesabendio. An Asteroid Novel

Pb 15x23cm 232pp 16ills 11.95
First published in German in 1913 and widely considered to be Paul Scheerbarts masterpiece,
Lesabndio is an intergalactic utopian novel that describes life on the planetoid Pallas, where
rubbery suction-footed life forms with telescopic eyes smoke bubble-weed in mushroom
meadows under violet skies and green stars. Amid the conveyor-belt highways and lighthouses
weaving together the mountains and valleys, a visionary named Lesabndio hatches a plan to
build a 44-mile-high tower and employ architecture to connect the two halves of their double star.
A cosmic ecological fable, Scheerbarts novel was admired by such architects as Bruno Taut and
Walter Gropius, and such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (whose wedding
present to Benjamin was a copy of Lesabndio). Benjamin had intended to devote the concluding
section of his lost manuscript The True Politician with a discussion of the positive political
possibilities embedded in Scheerbarts Asteroid Novel. As translator Christina Svendsen writes
in her introduction, Lesabndio helps us imagine an ecological politics more daring than the
conservative politics of preservation, even as it reminds us that we are part of a larger galactic set
of interrelationships. This volume includes Alfred Kubins illustrations from the original German
edition.
Paul Scheerbart (18631915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, newspaper critic, draftsman,
visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion, who wrote
fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that were to influence Expressionist authors and the
German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.
ART
A Handbook For The Perfect Adventurer Pierre Mac Orlan

Pb 12x18cm 104pp 9.95
Pierre Mac Orlans 1920 Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer was at once a paean to the
adventure story, a tongue-in-cheek guidebook to the genres 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
Orlans 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 Carns film of the
same name), Pierre Mac Orlan (18821970) 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 Grco. A member of both the Acadmie Goncourt and the Collge de
Pataphysique, Mac Orlan was admired by everyone from Raymond Queneau and Boris Vian to
Andr Malraux and Guy Debord.
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Jean Ferry - The Conductor And Other Tales

Pb 12x18cm 144pp 22ills 10.50
First published in French in 1950 in a limited edition of 100 copies, then republished in 1953 (and
enthusiastically praised by Andr Breton), The Conductor and Other Tales is Jean Ferrys only
published book of fiction. It is a collection of short prose narratives that offer a blend of
pataphysical humour and surreal nightmare: secret societies so secret that one cannot know if
one is a member or not, music-hall acts that walk a tightrope from humour to horror, childhood
memories of a man never born, and correspondence from countries that are more states of mind
than geographical locales. Lying somewhere between Kafkas parables and the prose poems of
Henri Michaux, Ferrys tales read like pages from the journal of a stranger in a familiar land.
Though extracts have appeared regularly in Surrealist anthologies over the decades, The
Conductor has never been fully translated into English until now. This edition includes four stories
not included in the original French edition and is illustrated throughout with collages by Claude
Ballar.
Jean Ferry (19061974) made his living as a screenwriter for such filmmakers as Luis Buuel
and Louis Malle, cowriting such classics as Henri-Georges Clouzots Le Quai des orfvres and
script-doctoring Marcel Carns Les Enfants du paradis. He was the first serious scholar and
exegete of the work of Raymond Roussel (on whom he published three books) and a member of
the Collge de Pataphysique.
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Flametti, Or The Dandyism Of The Poor

Pb 15x23cm 200pp 10ills 13
In 1916, Hugo Ball (18861927) cofounded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and penned the "Dada
Manifesto," launching what would become the Zurich Dada movement. That same year he
completed his semi-autobiographical novel, Flametti, or The Dandyism of the Poor, which would
be published two years later. Drawing from his pre-Dada period of struggle and poverty in the
vaudeville circuit, Ball immerses us in the rise and fall of Max Flametti and his vaudeville
company. Fishing in the local river to feed his company, dabbling in drugs, strolling through the
vegetable market on the Gemsebrcke in Zurich, ducking into a side street to avoid running into
the police, Flametti marches through the pages of Balls novel passionately pursuing a career that
culminates in the presentation of the theatrical extravaganza The Indians at the Krokodil in Zrich
(a locale that still exists today as a Spanish restaurant). Overcoming odds and alternately
averting, succumbing to and embracing financial ruin, Flametti ultimately emerges as a tragic
figure--a Willy Loman of vaudeville. Flametti portrays a frenetic Zurich that had been the backdrop
to the Dada movement, and is comparable to other such literary cities and eras as Christopher
Isherwoods Berlin. Afterword by Bernhard Echte. Translated by Catherine Schelbert. Illustrations
by Tal R.
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Pierre Louys Pybrac

Pb 12x18cm 180pp 10ills 10.50
By turns amusing and offensive, Pierre Lous 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 Lous 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 sixteenthcentury chancellor poet Guy Du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac, whose moralizing quatrains were
common literary fare for young French readers until the nineteenth century. Lous 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. Introduction and translation by Geoffrey Longnecker. Illustrations by Toyen.
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The Physiology Of The Employee Balzac

Pb 12x18cm 160pp 55ills 9.95
If Honor de Balzac's Treatise on Elegant Living addressed one crucial pillar of modernity--the
"mode" itself, fashion--his Physiology of the Employee examines another equally potent
cornerstone to the modern era: bureaucracy, and all of the cogs and wheels of which it is
composed. Long before Franz Kafka described the nightmarish metaphysics of office
bureaucracy, Balzac had undertaken his own exploration of the dust-laden, stifling environment of
the paper-pusher in all of his roles and guises. "Bureaucracy," as he defined it: "a gigantic power
set in motion by dwarfs." In this guidebook, published for mass consumption in 1841, Balzac's
classic theme of melodramatic ambition plays itself out within the confined, unbreathable space of
the proto-cubicle, filtered through the restricted scale of the pocket handbook. The template for
such later novels such as The Bureaucrats, and one of the first significant texts to grapple with
the growing role of the bureaucrat, this physiology reads like a birding field guide in its
presentation of the various classifications of the office employee, from the Intern to the Clerk (all
ten species, from Dapper to Bootlicker to Drudger) to Office Manager, Department Head, Office
Boy and Pensioner. The job titles may change over the years, and paper-pushing has perhaps
evolved into email-forwarding, but the taxonomy remains the same. In our twenty-first-century
crisis of employment, jobs continue to be themselves a form of currency, and the question
continues to loom: when will it be quitting time?
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The Emperor Of China, The Mute Canary & The Executioner Of Peru
Pb 15x23cm 234pp 1ills 12.50
This volume collects three savage plays from the man Andr Breton designated as one of the
only "true Dadas" (alongside Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia): The Emperor of China (1916),
The Mute Canary (1920) and The Executioner of Peru (1928). The first two have long been
acknowledged as highpoints in the Dada movement's contribution to the theatre, but in their
brutal depictions of violent sexuality and nightmarish tyranny, and their casts of manipulative
bureaucrats, murderous henchmen, insane dictators, lascivious virgins, Ubuesque cuckolds and
nonsense-spewing enigmas, these plays also echo the work of such other dissident surrealists of
the era as Georges Bataille and Andr Masson. These unsettling theatrical works were significant
anticipations of Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty and the Theater of the Absurd of the 1960s.
Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes (1884-1974) was a French writer and artist, and one of the
fiercest adherents of the Paris Dada movement, acting as the group's secretary, and for which he
authored some of its most vitriolic texts. Disenchanted with the Surrealist movement that
followed, Ribemont-Dessaignes allied himself instead with such other Surrealist dissidents as
Ren Daumal and the Grand Jeu. Throughout his long life, Ribemont-Dessaignes authored a
sizable oeuvre of novels, plays, poetry, essays and memoirs, none of which has to date been
translated into English.
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The Creator by Mynona

Pb 12x18cm 160pp 19ills 1col 9.95
Billed by its author--the pseudonymous Mynona (German for anonymous backward)--as the
most profound magical experiment since Nostradamus, The Creator tells the tale of Gumprecht
Weiss, an intellectual who has withdrawn from a life of libertinage to pursue his solitary
philosophical ruminations. At first dreaming and then actually encountering an enticing young
woman named Elvira, Weiss discovers that she has escaped the clutches of her uncle, the Baron,
who has been using her as a guinea pig in his metaphysical experiments. But the Baron catches
up with them and persuades Gumprecht and Elvira to come to his laboratory, to engage in an
experiment to bridge the divide between waking consciousness and dream by entering a mirror
engineered to bend and blend realities. Mynonas philosophical fable was described by the
legendary German publisher Kurt Wolff as a station farther on the imaginative train of thought of
Hoffmann, Villiers, Poe, etc., when it appeared in 1920, with illustrations by Alfred Kubin
(included here). With this first English-language edition, Wakefield Press introduces the work of a
great forgotten German fabulist.
Mentioned in his day in the same breath as Kafka, 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 Children) and a literary absurdist by
night, who composed black humoured tales he called Grostesken. His friends and fans included
Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus.
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A Dilemma - Joris-Karl Huysmans

Originally 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 neo-liberalist times as it did to the French
fin-de-sicle. Written smack in-between Huysmans' most famous workshis 1881 Against
Nature, which came to define the Decadent movement, and his 1891 exploration of Satanism,
Down ThereA 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 (18481907)
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 favourite, Becalmed, and his
Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate.
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Giambattista Marino - The Massacre Of The Innocents

A finely crafted epic and literary monstrosity from the seventeenth-century "poet of the
marvelous": the harrowing account, in four bloody cantos, of King Herod and his campaign to
murder the male infants of his kingdom to prevent the loss of his throne to the prophesied King of
the Jews. The book starts in the pits of Hell, where the Devil stokes the flames of Herod's
paranoid bloodlust in his troubled sleep, and concludes in the heights of Heaven where the
"unarmed champions" march on to eternal glory. In between is an account of physical and
political brutality that unfortunately holds too clear a mirror to world events today. The Massacre
of the Innocents describes unbelievable cruelty while championing the nobility of suffering, all
brilliantly translated and presented in ottava rima.
Italian poet and adventurer Giambattista Marino (15691625) was deemed "the king of his age,"
and his very name came to define the style of an epoch: marinismo, a shorthand summation of
the bizarre inventiveness and ornate excesses of Baroque poetry. In and out of jail, and escaping
an assassination attempt by a rival, Marino spent a good part of his life in Northern Italy and
France before returning to his birthplace of Naples. His most famous work, L'Adone (Adonis),
stands as one of the longest Italian epics ever written, and for two centuries was deemed a
monstrous epitome of Baroque bad taste.
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Unica Zurn - The Trumpets Of Jericho

This fierce fable of childbirth by German Surrealist Unica Zrn 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 Zrn'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 Zrn (191670) was born in Grnewald, 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.
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Leon Bloy - Disagreeable Tales

Pb 15x23cm 200pp 1ills 13.50
Thirty tales of theft, onanism, incest, murder and a host of other forms of perversion and cruelty
from the "ungrateful beggar" and "pilgrim of the absolute," Lon Bloy. Disagreeable Tales, first
published in French in 1894, collects Bloy's narrative sermons from the depths: a cauldron of
frightful anecdotes and inspired misanthropy that represents a high point of the French Decadent
movement and the most emblematic entry into the library of the "Cruel Tale" christened by Villiers
de l'Isle-Adam. Whether depicting parents and offspring being sacrificed for selfish gains, or
imbeciles sacrificing their own individuality on a literary whim, these tales all draw sustenance
from an underlying belief: the root of religion is crime against man, nature and God, and that in
this hell on earth, even the worst among us has a soul.
A close friend to Joris-Karl Huysmans, and later admired by the likes of Kafka and Borges, Lon
Bloy (18461917) is among the best known but least translated of the French Decadent writers.
Nourishing antireligious sentiments in his youth, his outlook changed radically when he moved to
Paris and came under the influence of Barbey d'Aurevilly, the unconventionally religious novelist
best known for Les Diaboliques. He earned the dual nicknames of "The Pilgrim of the Absolute"
through his unorthodox devotion to the Catholic Church, and "The Ungrateful Beggar" through his
endless reliance on the charity of friends to support him and his family.
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Paul Scheerbart The Perpetual Motion Machine The Story of an Invention

The Young Girl's Handbook Of Good Manners

Georges Perec An Attempt At Exhausting A Place In Paris

Honore de Balzac Treatise On Elegant Living

Charles Fourier The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy

Rene Daumal - Pataphysical Essays

Jean-Pierre Martinet - The High Life

Benjamin Peret - The Leg of Lamb. Its Life and Works

The Book Of Monelle

Paul Scheerbart - Lesabendio. An Asteroid Novel

A Handbook For The Perfect Adventurer Pierre Mac Orlan

Jean Ferry - The Conductor And Other Tales

Flametti, Or The Dandyism Of The Poor

Pierre Louys Pybrac

The Physiology Of The Employee Balzac

The Creator by Mynona

A Dilemma - Joris-Karl Huysmans

Giambattista Marino - The Massacre Of The Innocents

Unica Zurn - The Trumpets Of Jericho

Leon Bloy - Disagreeable Tales

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