wakefield press cambridge (245 resultados)

Paperback. Condición: 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. Condición: new. Paperback. Mynonas self-styled grotesques inhabit an uncertain ground between fairy tale, fetishism and philosophy, satirizing everything from nationalism to philanthropyFirst published in German in 1916, BlackWhiteRed 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 Mynonas 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 (18711946), 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Soft cover. Condición: Very Good. No Jacket. a 6 X 9 inch 201 page soft cover, originally published in 1957 considered a foundational classic of Surrealist literature, no handwriting, wrinkle to top inside corner near spine.

Paperback. Condición: New. With a foreword by Jorge Luis Borges. Translated by Kit Schluter. ; 4 1/2 x 7 "; 50 pages.

Paperback. Condición: 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'epuisement d'un lieu parisien. Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1975. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condición: 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. Condición: 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. Condición: new. Alechinsky, Pierre Ilustrador. Paperback. "A marvel of brash opinion, contemporary society, politics, and memoir. BookforumHonore de Balzac's Treatise on Modern Stimulants is a meditation on five stimulantstea, sugar, coffee, alcohol and tobaccoby an author very conscious of the fact that his gargantuan output of work was driven by an excessive intake (his bouts of writing typically required 10 to 15 cups of coffee a day) that would ultimately shorten his life. First published in French in 1839 as an appendix to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste, this Treatise was at once Balzac's effort at addressing what he perceived to be an oversight in that cornerstone of gastronomic literature; a chapter toward his never-completed body of analytic studies (alongside such essays as Treatise on Elegant Living) that were to form an overarching "pathology of social life"; and a meditation on the impact of pleasure and excess on the body and the role they play in shaping society.Balzac here describes his "terrible and cruel method" for brewing a coffee that can help the artist and author find inspiration; explains why tobacco can be credited with having brought peace to Germany; and describes his first experience of alcoholic intoxication (which required seventeen bottles of wine and two cigars). Beyond its braggadocio and whimsy, though, this treatise ultimately speaks to Balzac's obsession with death and decline, and attempts to confront in capsule form the broader implications of dissipating one's vital forces. This edition includes illustrations to an earlier French edition by Pierre Alechinsky. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condición: new. Paperback. A how-to manual for the armchair adventurerPierre 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 Carnes 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 Greco. A member of both the Academie Goncourt and the College de Pataphysique, Mac Orlan was admired by everyone from Raymond Queneau and Boris Vian to Andre Malraux and Guy Debord. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condición: new. Paperback. 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. 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condición: 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. Condición: new. Paperback. 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 Dezert 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 Dezert emerges as something of a French counterpart to Herman Melvilles own rebel bureaucrat, Bartleby the Scrivenersave that when it comes to being an existential rebel, Jean Dezert goes even further in his will to prefer not to. Jean Dezert 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 (18861914) 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 Dezert. Originally published as Les dimanches de Jean Daezert in 1915. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condición: 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. Condición: new. Paperback. 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 Bront, 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condición: new. Toyen Ilustrador. 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.

Paperback. Condición: new. Klee, Paul Ilustrador. 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 Nachte des neuen Messias: Ekstatische Visionen (Munich, Georg Muller Verlag, 1919)." Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condición: new. Paperback. The hallucinatory English-language debut of an overlooked German Expressionist poetBess Brenck Kalischers 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, Kalischers 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 (18781933) 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 Felixmueller. 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condición: 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. Condición: 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. Condición: new. Paperback. Cult French author Jean-Pierre Martinets obscenely tragic novella, translated into EnglishAdolphe 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 meager 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, Jerome. 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 Celine and Jim Thompson, Martinets work explores the grimly humorous possibilities of unlimited pessimism. "La grande vie was first published in 1979 in the sixth issue of Subjectif, edited by Gerard Guegan" -- T.p. verso. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condición: new. Paperback. District describes, in ten vignettes, the sad, sordid and sinister aspects of a section of an unnamed French city, and the manners in which the ghostlike human entities that live and wither within it are molded, moved and absorbed by its spaces.A noisy metro station, old tenements, buildings going up, along with the fixtures of French communal life: the open-air market, the public garden; the little shops and bars, the lively town squarethe ugly and mundane, the coarse and unmentionable sit side by side with the occasionally burgeoning bit of beauty. With a sense of voyeuristic tension and queasy complicity, the reader is taken on an outcasts tour of city lifefrom construction site to metro, from bar to brothelan analysis of communal living in the conditional tense from the perspective of the absolute exile. One of Duverts last books, it is also one of his shortest: an unexpected return to the roving, fractured eye of the Nouveau Roman that had informed his earliest work. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condición: new. Paperback. This series of 23 satirically scabrous short texts introduces the reader to an imaginary French suburb via the strange, grotesque small-town occupations that defined a once reliable, now presumably vanished way of life.A catalog of job descriptions that range from the disgusting functions of The Snot-Remover and The Wiper to the shockingly cruel dramas enacted by The Skinner and The Snowman, Odd Jobs evinces an outrageous, uncomfortable and savage sense of humor. Through these narratives somewhere between parody and prose poem, Duvert assaults parenthood, priesthood and neighborhood in this mock handbook to suburban living: Leave It to Beaver as written by William Burroughs.Tony Duvert (19452008) earned a reputation as the enfant terrible of the generation of French authors known for defining the postwar Nouveau Roman. Expelled from school at the age of 12 for homosexuality (and then put through a psychoanalytic cure for his condition), Duvert declared war on family life and societal norms through a controversial series of novels and essays (whose frequent controversial depictions of child sexuality and pedophilia often led his publisher to sell his works by subscription only). He won the Prix Medicis in 1973 for his novel Strange Landscape. His reputation faded in the 1980s, however, and he withdrew from society. He died in 2008. "Originally published as Les petits maetiers AFata Morgana 1978"--T.p. verso. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Soft Cover with Attached Dust. Condición: Very Good. Estado de la sobrecubierta: Very Good. 84 pp. Solidly bound copy and attached dust jacket with moderate external wear, crisp pages and clean text. Stain on back of cover.

Paperback. Condición: 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. Condición: new. Paperback. 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-siecle. 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 favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate. "Originally published as Un dilemme, 1888"--Title page verso. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condición: new. Paperback. The final chapter in Francis Ponges interrogation of unassuming objectsWritten from 1967 to 1973 over a series of early mornings in seclusion in his country home, The Table offers a final chapter in Francis Ponges interrogation of the unassuming objects in his life: in this case, the table upon which he wrote. In his effort to get at the presence lying beneath his elbow, Ponge charts out a space of silent consolation that lies beyond (and challenges) scientific objectivity and poetic transport. This is one of Ponges most personal, overlooked, andbecause it was the project he was working on when he diedhis least processed works. It reveals the personal struggle Ponge engaged in throughout all of his writing, a hesitant uncertainty he usually pared away from his published texts that is at touching opposition to the manufactured, durable mother of the table on and of which he here writes. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condición: 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. Condición: 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. Condición: new. Paperback. 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 (19102007), 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 Andre Breton in particular, to whom he devoted a critical study. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condición: new. Paperback. The archetypal Symbolist novel, and a gorgeous tapestry of death and melancholy, Bruges-la-Morte was also the first work of fiction to employ photographs in the style of Breton, Drndic and SebaldA widower, Hugues Viane, takes refuge in the decay of Bruges, living among the relics of his dead wife as he transforms his home and the very city he inhabits into her spatial embalmment. Spinning out his existence in a mournful, silent labyrinth of entombed streets and the cold arteries of canals, Viane takes comfort in his narcissistic delirium, until his world is shaken by the appearance of his wifes doppelganger: a young dancer encountered in the street, whose appearance conjures a sequence of events that will introduce the specter of reality into his ritualist dream-state to disastrous effect.The archetype of the Symbolist novel, Bruges-la-Morte, first published in 1892, remains Georges Rodenbachs most famous work; it has seen numerous cinematic and operatic adaptations, and inspired the source material for Alfred Hitchcocks Vertigo. It was also a precursor to such authors as Andre Breton and W.G. Sebald in being the first novel to employ photographs as illustrationsto allow readers, as Rodenbach put it, to be subject to the presence of the town, feel the contagion of the neighboring waters, sense in their turn the shadow of the high towers reaching across the text.Georges Rodenbach (185598) was one of the major figures of Belgian Symbolism, an essential bridge between the Belgian and Parisian literary scenes, and a friend and colleague of Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, Mallarme and Huysmans. He was the author of four novels, eight collections of verse and numerous short stories, plays and critical works. "Originally published in French as Bruges-la-Morte (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1892)"--Title page verso. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.