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Ball, Hugo Hugo Ball (1886–1927) founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, a year after moving there with his wife, Emmy Hennings. In doing so, he helped launch (and according to some accounts, named) the Dada Movement. After authoring one of the first Dada manifestos and some landmark sound poems, he grew disenchanted with the evolution of Dada, broke ties with the movement and relocated to the Swiss countryside with Hennings, where he authored one of the first studies on the work of Hermann Hesse. Published by Wakefield Press |
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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 |
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Béalu, Marcel Marcel Béalu (1908–1993) was a French poet and novelist who drew inspiration from German Romanticism and French surrealism, but avoided schools of thought. His writing was distinctive for its dreamlike qualities and established him as a master of the French fantastique. He made his living as a hatmaker (when he met the poet Max Jacob, who took him under his wing), an antiques dealer, and then as a bookseller. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Benet, Juan A civil engineer by profession, Juan Benet (1927–1993) began writing to pass the long nights of solitude he spent on construction sites in León and Asturias. He self-published his first novel, You Will Never Amount to Anything, in 1961. In 1967, he won the Biblioteca Breve Prize for his novel A Meditation. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Bierbaum, Otto Julius Otto Julius Bierbaum (1865–1910) was a German novelist, poet, journalist, and editor. His 1897 novel Stilpe inspired the first cabaret venue in Berlin a few years later; his last novel, the 1909 Yankeedoodlefahrt, produced a German proverb still in use today: “Humor is when you laugh anyway.” Published by Wakefield Press |
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Bloy, Léon Léon Bloy (1846–1917) 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. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Bobe, T. O. T. O. Bobe is a prize-winning Romanian poet, novelist, and screenwriter living in Bucharest. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Brion, Marcel Over the course of a long and productive career, Marcel Brion (1895–1984) published twenty novels, four volumes of short stories, and sixty-eight non-fiction books covering music, art, literature, history, and travel, and a large number of shorter essays and editorial introductions. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Burger, Hermann Hermann Burger (1942–1989) was a Swiss author, critic, and professor. Author of four novels and several volumes of essays, short fiction, and poetry, he won numerous awards for his work. 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 twentieth-century German prose. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Cavazzoni, Ermanno Ermanno Cavazzoni is the award-winning author of many fantastic and absurd tales. He is a professor at the University of Bologna and a member of the literary group OpLePo, an Italian spin-off of the OuLiPo. Published by Wakefield Press |
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de Chazal, Malcolm Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) was a Mauritian writer and painter. Forsaking a career in the sugar industry, he spent the majority of his life in a solitary, mystical pursuit of the continuity between humankind and nature. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Corrinth, Curt Curt Corrinth (1894–1960) studied law until serving in the military in World War I, which resulted in his embracing an antiwar and anti-bourgeois stance through his poetry and then through a series of frenetically composed novels. Influenced by Freud’s maverick disciple, Otto Gross, Corrinth took Gross’s doctrine of free love to further, near parodic extremes in these 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, his work all but forgotten in the western world. Published by Wakefield Press Potsdamer Platz, or The Nights of the New Messiah: Ecstatic Visions |
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Cros, Charles Charles Cros (1842–1888) was as much Renaissance man as he was poète maudit: a bohemian poet who developed the comic monologue as a theatrical genre, and invented both the phonograph (which he named the “paléophone”) and color photography, though he failed to patent either before Thomas Edison or Louis Ducos du Hauron), among other such inventions as a non-metallic battery and a musical stenographer. Published by Wakefield Press |
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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. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Desnos, Robert Robert Desnos (1900–1945) was one of the leading lights of the surrealist movement and its most accomplished practitioner of automatic writing and dictation before his break with André Breton in 1929. His busy career in journalism and radio culminated in an active role in the French Resistance. Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, and would pass through several concentration camps until finally dying of typhoid in Terezín in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1945, a few days after the camp he was in was liberated. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Duvert, Tony Expelled from school at the age of 12 for homosexuality (and then put through a psychoanalytic “cure” for his condition), Tony Duvert (1945–2008) declared war on family life and societal norms through a controversial series of novels and essays (whose controversial depictions of child sexuality and pedophilia often lead 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 isolation in July 2008 in the commune of Thoré-la-Rochette in central France. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Ferry, Jean Jean Ferry (1906–1974) made his living as a screenwriter for such filmmakers as Luis Buñuel and Louis Malle, cowriting such classics as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Quai des orfèvres and script-doctoring Marcel Carné’s 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 Collège de ’Pataphysique. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Fini, Leonor Leonor Fini (1907–1996) was an artist, illustrator, designer, and author with close ties to the Surrealist movement, but though the Surrealists saw her as one of them, she herself never identified as a Surrealist. Rejecting the role of muse, her work focused on portrayals of women as subjects with desire as opposed to objects of desire, and was groundbreaking in its explorations of mythology, androgyny, death, and life as Mannerist theater. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Fourier, Charles Charles Fourier (1772–1837) was 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. The prophet of the Phalanstery was also a lifelong bachelor. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Ghelderode, Michel de Michel de Ghelderode (Adhémar Adolphe Martens, 1898–1962) was born in Brussels. His strong anti-realist bent was in evidence from the start and he first attracted attention in 1918 with a one-act play written in tribute to Edgar Allan Poe. In the following years he wrote fiction, drama, literary journalism, and puppet plays. After 1936 he suffered from poor health and his involvement with the theater gradually diminished. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Huysmans, Joris-Karl Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) 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, along with the dream-ridden Surrealist favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate. Published by Wakefield Press Forthcoming from Wakefield Press Domesticity |
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Jacob, Max Max Jacob (1876–1944) was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic. A key figure of the bohemian setting of Montmartre Paris and the legendary cubist era, he rubbed shoulders with such figures as Guillaume Apollinaire and Amadeo Modigliani, was a lifelong friend to Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Jean Cocteau, and an influence for a generation of young writers. After experiencing a mystic vision in his studio apartment in 1909, Jacob converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1915, with Picasso as godfather. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, he subsequently died in a deportation camp from bronchial pneumonia. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Kalischer, Bess Brenck Bess Brenck Kalischer (1878–1933) published her first poems in 1905 and began to make a name for herself as part of the second generation of German expressionists in Dresden. She was a friend and colleague of Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona, who used her as a model in several stories and three novels. She died of a “nervous disease” in 1933, her grave left without a headstone until 2014. Published by Wakefield Press |
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de La Ville de Mirmont, Jean Jean de La Ville de Mirmont (1886–1914) died at the age of 27 on the WWI battlefront by a shell explosion. He left behind a collection of poetry that would be published posthumously, a collection of short stories, and the novella for which he is remembered, The Sundays of Jean Dézert. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Levy, Louis Louis Nicolai Levy (1875–1940) was a Danish author, playwright, foreign correspondent, and theater critic who experimented with a wide variety of literary genres, from prose poetry to nursery rhymes to philosophical novels. Though a central literary figure and screenwriter in Copenhagen in the early twentieth century, Levy remains little known today. Published by Wakefield Press Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah: From the Notes of Dr. Renard de Montpensier |
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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 |
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Lusson, Pierre Pierre Lusson is a French mathematician and musicologist. With Jacques Roubaud, he helped introduce the game of Go into France. Published by Wakefield Press A Short Treatise Inviting the Reader to Discover the Subtle Art of Go |
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Mac Orlan, Pierre Pierre Mac Orlan (1882–1970) was a prolific writer of absurdist tales, adventure novels, flagellation erotica, and essays, as well as the composer of a trove of songs made famous by the likes of Juliette Gréco. A member of both the Académie Goncourt and the Collège de ’Pataphysique, Mac Orlan was admired by everyone from Raymond Queneau and Boris Vian to André Malraux and Guy Debord. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Mallard, Alain-Paul Writer and filmmaker Alain-Paul Mallard was born in 1970 and raised in Mexico City. He studied Hispanic literature in his native city, and then studied European intellectual history in Toronto. Tempted by silence, he is the author of a short, highly concentrated body of work. His films include L’origine de la tendresse, Évidences, and L’adoption. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Marino, Giambattista Italian poet and adventurer Giambattista Marino (1569–1625) 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. Published by Wakefield Press |
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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. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Michaux, Henri Through travel journals, prose poems, seismographic drawings, and incantatory exorcisms, Henri Michaux (1899–1984) built a unique world of aggression, fear, hostility, and paranoia, whose fantastical lineaments and fabulist beings offer a number of uncomfortably familiar mirrors to our own contemporary psychological and cognitive discomfort. In 1956 he continued his controlled explorations of the self with a series of mescaline experiments, which he documented in a number of books over the following decade. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Mühsam, Erich Erich Mühsam (1878–1934) was a German-Jewish anarchist writer, poet, playwright, and cabaret songwriter, as well as 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. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Mynona 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 Kids) and a literary absurdist by night, who composed black humored tales he called Grotesken. His friends and fans included Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Karl Kraus. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Nerval, Gérard de Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855) 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 the posthumously published Aurélia, or Dream and Life. After his suicide, his work would grow in stature and go on to influence everyone from Marcel Proust, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Michel Leiris. Published by Wakefield Press The Illuminated, or The Precursors of Socialism: Tales and Portraits Forthcoming from Wakefield Press: Small Castles of Bohemia |
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Nougé, Paul Paul Nougé (1895–1967), a biochemist by trade, was a leading light of Belgian Surrealism and its primary theorist, as well as a decisive influence on such future Lettrists and Situationists as Guy Debord and Gil J Wolman. Decidedly unambitious when it came to literary celebrity, Nougé’s guidance nevertheless steered the Brussels Surrealist group toward a more rational approach to visual and verbal language that contested the Parisian Surrealists’ proclivity for irrationality and occultism. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Panizza, Oskar Oskar Panizza (1853–1921) was a German psychiatrist turned avant-garde author. In 1894 he published his notorious play The Love Council: “A Heavenly Tragedy in Five Acts” for which he was charged with 93 counts of blasphemy and served a year in prison. He subsequently moved to Zurich, he published a journal, Zurich Discussions, the majority of which he wrote himself under a series of pennames. After being expelled from Switzerland, he relocated to Paris, and then spent the last sixteen years of his life in a Bavarian mental institution. Published by Wakefield Press The Pig in Poetic, Mythological, and Moral-Historical Perspective |
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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 A Short Treatise Inviting the Reader to Discover the Subtle Art of Go |
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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 |
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Ponge, Francis Francis Ponge (1899–1988) was both a giant of French twentieth-century poetry, and one of its humblest practitioners. The poet of “things,” he practiced a poetic contemplation—usually in the form of his own unique brand of hesitant, searching prose poem—of the everyday objects that inhabit our lives and share our existence. He did not so much reinvent the shell, cigarette, soap, pebble, sun, oyster, or the asparagus, as forge and share with them a new language. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Prassinos, Gisèle Gisèle Prassinos (1920–2015) was discovered and celebrated at the age of fourteen by the Surrealists, and her stories were immediately embraced by the Parisian avant-garde community and published in all the significant literary journals of the time. With World War II, Prassinos stopped publishing and began to distance herself from the Surrealists. Writing nothing from 1944 to 1954, she then returned to literature with a series of novels and stories that, if still imbued with a Surrealist sensibility, pointed to a new direction in her writing. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Quignard, Pascal Pascal Quignard (b. 1948) is the French author of over sixty books of fiction, essays, and his own particular genre of philosophical reflection: an amalgamation of personal journal, historical narrative, and poetic theory. His books in English include Albucius, All the World’s 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. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Ray, Jean Jean Ray (1887–1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. Alternately referred to as the “Belgian Poe” and the “Flemish Jack London,” Ray delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of his most cherished authors, Charles Dickens and Gregory Chaucer, and is a pivotal figure in what has come to be known as the “Belgian School of the Strange.” Published by Wakefield Press Cruise of Shadows: Haunted Stories of Land and Sea The Great Nocturnal: Tales of Dread Forthcoming from Wakefield Press |
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Reverdy, Pierre Pierre Reverdy (1889–1960) was a reclusive, yet integral component of the early twentieth-century Parisian avant-garde: a friend to painters such as Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and Juan Gris, and to fellow “Cubist poets” such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob. He was to have an influence as a poet and as the editor of the landmark WWI literary journal, Nord–Sud, and on other avant-garde movements, Surrealism in particular. In 1926, Reverdy withdrew from the literary life of Paris for a life of seclusion in the village of Solesmes in the northwest of France. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes (1884–1974) was a French writer and artist, and one of the fiercest adherents of the Paris Dada movement, 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 René 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. Published by Wakefield Press The Emperor of China, The Mute Canary & The Executioner of Peru |
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Rodenbach, Georges Georges Rodenbach (1855–1898) was one of the major figures of Belgian symbolism. He was an essential bridge between the Belgian and Parisian literary scenes, and a friend and colleague of such Belgian literary figures as Emile Verhaeren, Max Elskamp, and Maurice Maeterlinck, and such Parisian figures as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joris-Karl Huysmans. He was the author of four novels, eight collections of verse, and numerous short stories, plays, and critical works. “If it were necessary to assign Rodenbach a place in Belgian literature,” wrote Emile Verhaeren, “it would be easy to define. He would stand in the premier rank of those whose sorrow, pain, subtle sentiment and talent nourished by memory, braid a crown of pale violets on the brow of Flanders.” Published by Wakefield Press |
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Roubaud, Jacques Jacques Roubaud is a French poet and mathematician, a former professor of Mathematics at University of Paris X, a retired Poetry professor from EHESS, and a member of the Oulipo group. His many books translated into English include The Great Fire of London, Some Thing Black, The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart, and The Loop. Published by Wakefield Press A Short Treatise Inviting the Reader to Discover the Subtle Art of Go |
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Scheerbart, Paul Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, newspaper critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture, and would-be inventor of perpetual motion. Dubbed the “wise clown” by his contemporaries, he opposed the naturalism of his day with fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that were to influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction. Published by Wakefield Press Munchausen and Clarissa: A Berlin Novel The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention |
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Schmitz, Oscar A. H. Oscar A. H. Schmitz (1873–1931) lived the life of a literary dandy. Although best remembered in Germany for his second book, Hashish, and the decadent lineage it helped inaugurate in German letters, his output was wide-ranging, from Romantic verse to plays and travel books, to a series of popular nonfiction works on politics, yoga, astrology, etiquette, and Jungian psychology. He died in 1931 of liver disease. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Schwob, Marcel Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a scholar of startling breadth and an incomparable storyteller. The secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño, Schwob was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman (whom he introduced into French). Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and in doing so paid tribute to the man who could evoke both the intellect of Leonardo da Vinci and the anarchy of Ubu Roi. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Serner, Walter Walter Serner (1889–1942) helped found the Dada movement in Zurich and embodied its most cynical and anarchic aspects. After breaking with the movement, he began publishing crime stories as well as the 1925 novel The Tigress. Moving constantly across Europe, he eventually disappeared and was rumored to have vanished into the criminal milieu he wrote about; but he had in fact returned to Czechoslovakia, married, and become a schoolteacher. In 1942, he and his wife presumably died after being moved from a concentration camp, his books banned and burned by the Nazis. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Shneour, Zalman Zalman Shneour (1887–1959) wrote poetry, prose, and plays in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Like many of his generation, his life was spent moving from city to city in search of literary community or escaping political turmoil: from Odessa to Warsaw to Vilne, and on to such Western cities as Bern, Geneva, Berlin, Paris, New York (where he died), and Tel Aviv (where he is buried). His psychological fiction brought the insights of Nietzsche and Freud into the narrative world of Eastern European Jewish life. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Varo, Remedios Remedios Varo (1908–1963) was a Spanish-born painter who entered the Surrealist circle in Paris before the German occupation forced her into exile to Mexico at the end of 1941, where she would stay until the end of her life. Her dream-infused, allegorical work combines the elements of classical training, alchemical mysticism, and fairy-tale science. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Vian, Boris Boris Vian (1920–1959) 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 passing away of a cardiac arrest 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 Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Queneau, and Miles Davis, playing trumpet with Claude Abadie and Claude Luter, and an influence on such future kindred spirits as Serge Gainsbourg. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Willems, Paul Paul Willems (1912–1997) published his first novel, Everything Here is Real, in 1941. Three more novels and, toward the end of his life, two collections of short stories bracketed his career as a playwright. Influenced early on by the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, his work came to be characterized by a distinctly northern brand of magic realism: a distinctly Belgian confrontation with a perpetual crisis of identity and the poetic pessimism that underlies every journey into paradise, imagined or otherwise. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Wittkop, Gabrielle 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, decay, 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.” 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. Published by Wakefield Press |
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Zürn, Unica Unica Zürn (1916–70) was born in Grünewald, Germany. Toward the end of World War II, she discovered the realities of the Nazi concentration camps—a 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. Published by Wakefield Press |
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