Authors

Balzac, Honoré de

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a true monolith of French letters, one of the fathers of realism, and a great abuser of coffee. His Human Comedy ended up consisting of over one hundred interlinked stories and novels, and featured a cast of some two thousand characters. The lesser-known, but equally entertaining and insightful, components to his literary project were his “scientific” physiologies, which Wakefield Press shall be bringing into English.

Published by Wakefield Press

Treatise on Elegant Living

Daumal, René

Poet, philosopher, and self-taught Sanskrit scholar René Daumal (1908–1944) devoted himself to a lifelong attempt to think through death by means of what he called “experimental metaphysics”: an attempt to address metaphysical questions through scientific methodology. After co-founding the iconoclastic journal Le Grand Jeu, and rejecting overtures from the Surrealist movement, he became a disciple of the spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff.

Forthcoming from Wakefield Press

Pataphysical Essays

Louÿs, Pierre

Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925) was a best-selling author in his time, and a friend of and influence on such luminaries as André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, and Stephane Mallarmé. He achieved instant notoriety with Aphrodite and The Songs of Bilitis, and his 1898 novel The Woman and the Puppet has been adapted for the screen in such noteworthy films as Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman and Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire. Since his death, though, his posthumous writings have secured his current renown as France’s greatest, and most prolific, writer of erotica.

Published by Wakefield Press

The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners for Use in Educational Establishments

Martinet, Jean-Pierre

Largely ignored during his lifetime, Jean-Pierre Martinet (1944–1993) explored the grimly humorous possibilities of limitless pessimism in a handful of psychosexual novels of horror and madness that are only now establishing him as the French successor to Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jim Thompson.

Forthcoming from Wakefield Press

The High Life

Perec, Georges

Georges Perec (1936–1982) was a French novelist, essayist, and filmmaker whose linguistic talents ranged from fiction to crossword puzzles to authoring the longest palindrome ever written. Winner of the prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things, and the prix Médicis in 1978 for Life A User’s Manual, Perec was also a member of the Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians devoted to the discovery and use of constraint to encourage literary inspiration.

Published by Wakefield Press

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

Péret, Benjamin

Benjamin Péret (1899–1959) was a Surrealist’s Surrealist, audaciously baroque and incessantly irreverent, a founding member of the Surrealist movement and its only member besides André Breton to remain a Surrealist to the end. He was Salvador Dalí’s favorite poet, an inspiration to Luis Buñuel, and a major influence on Octavio Paz. Péret fought in the Spanish Civil War as a member of the Durutti Column, but also fought every literary current he came up against in his lifetime. He was a fierce antinationalist, a true revolutionary, and a lifelong insulter of priests.

Published by Wakefield Press

The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works

Scheerbart, Paul

Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, newspaper critic, draughtsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture, and would-be inventor of perpetual motion. Dubbed the “wise clown” by his contemporaries, he opposed the naturalism of his day with fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that were to influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.

Published by Wakefield Press

The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention