Catalog

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	Catalog


	61				Waystations of the Deep Night By Marcel Brion Translated by George MacLennan and Edward Gauvin, with an introduction by George MacLennan Marcel Brion’s romantically surreal short story collection, first published in French in the dark times of 1942, evokes a deep night of strange encounters, enigmatic transformations, and labyrinthine journeys. More information Paper • July 2020 • $16.95 US


	60				The Great Nocturnal: Tales of Dread By Jean Ray Translated, with an afterword, by Scott Nicolay Jean Ray’s 1942 collection, The Grand Nocturnal, would be the first of what would be a stream of titles for which he would later be best remembered. Includes the title story, “The Ghost in the Hold,” “The Seven Castles of the King of the Sea,” “When Christ Walked on the Sea,” and “The Centipede.” More information Paper • May 2020 • $15.95 US


	59				Rogomelec By Leonor Fini Translated by William Kulik and Serena Shanken Skwersky, with an introduction by Jonathan P. Eburne A waking dream that moves from a saffron-dusted port to a sanatorium monastery, where peculiar monks engage in vegetal diets and ritualistic pomp as they await “the celebration of the king.” Originally published in French in 1979, this narrative embodied all the primary qualities of Fini’s visual work. More information Paper • March 2020 • $12.95 US


	58				At the Blue Monkey: 33 Outlandish Stories By Walter Serner Translated, with an introduction, by Erik Butler Thirty-three stories of criminals, con artists, prostitutes, and gadabouts told in underworld slang by ex-doctor Dadaist and “Maupaussant of crime,” Walter Serner. A mordant humor that renders the criminal code into something nearly occult. More information Paper • December 2019 • $15.95 US


	57				The Subversion of Images By Paul Nougé Translated by M. Kasper, with an afterword by Xavier Canonne A facsimile presentation of the Belgian Surrealist’s guidebook to the image assembled after his death, illustrated throughout with the author’s own photographic experiments using such colleagues as René Magritte as props and models. More information Paper • December 2019 • $14.95 US


	56				Cruise of Shadows: Haunted Stories of Land and Sea By Jean Ray Translated, with an afterword, by Scott Nicolay Jean Ray’s second collection of stories written in French appeared six years after his inaugural collection, Whiskey Tales. Seven novellas written in the solitude of prison, including the one widely acknowledged to be his masterpiece, “The Shadowy Street.” With this collection, even as his pseudonyms began to multiply, Jean Ray began to realize his full talent as the godfather of the Belgian School of the Weird. More information Paper • December 2019 • $15.95 US


	55				A Death: Notes of a Suicide By Zalman Shneour Translated, with an introduction, by Daniel Kennedy Jewish modernist Zalman Shneour’s first novel, originally published in Yiddish in 1905, tells the story of a love affair between Shloyme, a young man in an unnamed city in Eastern Europe, and the revolver he purchases, ostensibly to protect himself. A disturbing exploration of alienation, mental health, toxic masculinity, and violence. More information Paper • October 2019 • $15.95 US


	54				A Short Treatise Inviting the Reader to Discover the Subtle Art of Go By Pierre Lusson, Georges Perec, and Jacques Roubaud Translated, with an introduction, by Peter Consenstein Written by a mathematician, a poet, and a mathematician-poet, this 1969 guide to the ancient Chinese game of go was not just the first such guide to be published in France, but a subtle Oulipian guidebook to writing. Go a User’s Manual, or how a set of simple rules and constraints can not only lead to infinite complexities, but also an endless array of bad puns. More information Paper • August 2019 • $14.95 US


	53				The Sundays of Jean Dézert By Jean de La Ville de Mirmont Translated, with an introduction, by André Naffis-Sahely Written before his death at the age of 27 on the front lines of World War I, Jean de La Ville de Mirmont’s undisputed classic offers an understated tale of urban solitude and alienation that outlines the crushing mediocrity of bureaucratic existence. More information Paper • May 2019 • $12.95 US


	52				Samalio Pardulus By Otto Julius Bierbaum Illustrated by Alfred Kubin Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger Bierbaum’s 1908 Gothic novella, the first of his Sonderbare Geschichten (“Weird Stories”) offers the account of the blasphemous painter, Samalio Pardulus, whose monstrous artwork stems from his distorted Gnostic outlook in which the grotesque is but the reflection of a grotesque god. More information Paper • April 2019 • $12.95 US


	51				Curl By T. O. Bobe Translated, with an afterword, by Sean Cotter A melancholic poem and prose portrait of the superhuman Mr. Gică, the world’s greatest barber, as well as of his barbershop: a world that includes opera singers, football players, gladiators, the secret police, fantasies of Edith Piaf, four lost hippies, and a longing for sincerity. More information Paper • March 2019 • $12.95 US


	50				Whiskey Tales By Jean Ray Translated, with an afterword, by Scott Nicolay The first collection of stories, originally published in French in 1925, from the Belgian master of the weird, whose writings charted out a meeting ground between H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Dickens. More information Paper • January 2019 • $15.95 US


	49				Letters, Dreams & Other Writings By Remedios Varo Translated, with an introduction, by Margaret Carson The Surrealist painter’s collected writings, including letters to unknown people, dreams and notes, a draft for a play, exercises in Surrealist automatic writing, and On Homo rodans, a study of a wheeled manlike creature written by the invented anthropologist Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt. More information Paper • November 2018 • $14.95 US


	48				Treatise on Modern Stimulants By Honoré de Balzac Illustrated by Pierre Alechinsky Translated, with an afterword, by Kassy Hayden A mediation on excess by a writer who lived by means of excess. Balzac examines the impact of five stimulants—tea, sugar, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco—on the human body. More information Paper • October 2018 • $12.95 US


	47				Wishes By Georges Perec Translated and transmogrified by Mara Cologne Wythe-Hall The collected seasonal greetings from the master of the literary constraint: homophonic translations that raise the mechanics of the pun to the sublime heights of absurdist punishment, rendered here into English in two separate versions: one semantic, one phonetic. A relentlessly playful depiction of language’s fundamental urge to undermine itself. More information Paper • July 2018 • $17.95 US


	46				Psychology of the Rich Aunt: Being an Inquiry, in Twenty-Five Parts, into the Question of Immortality By Erich Mühsam Translated, with an introduction, by Erik Butler Twenty-five case studies (from Aunt Amalia to Aunt Zerlinde), demonstrating that the Rich Aunt is able to live forever provided she has a nephew waiting in the wings for his inheritance. A tongue-in-cheek portrait of the transformation of morality into mortality under the aegis of Capital. More information Paper • May 2018 • $12.95 US


	45				The Children’s Crusade By Marcel Schwob Foreword by Jorge Luis Borges Translated by Kit Schluter The retelling of the medieval legend of the exodus of some 30,000 children from all countries to the Holy Land: a cruel and sorrowful story mingling history and legend, recounted through the voices of 8 protagonists, from leper to pope. More information Paper • April 2018 • $11.95 US


	44				Imaginary Lives By Marcel Schwob Translated, with an afterword, by Chris Clarke Marcel Schwob’s biographical accounts of such figures of history and legend as “the supposed god” Empedocles, the author Petronius, the pirate Captain Kidd, the painter Paolo Uccello, and the graveyard murderers Burke and Hare. More information Paper • April 2018 • $14.95 US


	43				Hashish By Oscar A. H. Schmitz Illustrated by Alfred Kubin Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger; afterword by James J. Conway Decadent, interlocked tales of Satanism, eroticism, sadism, cannibalism, necrophilia, and death, told by a group of recumbent men in a Parisian “Hashish Club.” More information Paper • March 2018 • $15.95 US


	42				Mademoiselle Bambù By Pierre Mac Orlan Illustrated by Gus Bofa Translated, with an introduction, by Chris Clarke; afterword by Aaron Peck A tale of anxiety and espionage that follows the meandering lives of three secret agents from the various ports of call in wartime Europe to a fantastical denouement in the sinister “Boarding House of Usher.” More information Paper • January 2018 • $22.95 US


	41				The Construction of the Tower of Babel By Juan Benet Translated, with an introduction, by Adrian Nathan West An engineer’s meditation on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1563 painting of the Tower of Babel: the first painting in European art history to feature a building as a protagonist. Also includes the essay, “On the Necessity of Treason.” More information Paper • November 2017 • $14.95 US


	40				Odd Jobs By Tony Duvert Translated by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier, with an introduction, by S. C. Delaney Duvert presents an imaginary French suburb whose strange, grotesque small-town occupations define a once reliable, now presumably vanished way of life, from the functions of “The Snot-Remover” and “The Wiper” to the cruel dramas enacted by “The Skinner” and “The Snowman.” More information Paper • September 2017 • $11.95 US


	39				District By Tony Duvert Translated by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier, with an introduction, by S. C. Delaney Ten vignettes describing the sad, sordid, and sinister aspects to a section of an unnamed French city, and the manners in which the ghost-like human entities that inhabit, live, and wither within it are molded, moved, and absorbed by its spaces. More information Paper • September 2017 • $11.95 US


	38				My Papa and the Maid of Orléans and Other Grotesques By Mynona Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger Mynona’s other 1921 collection of grotesques: E. T. A Hoffmann meets Immanuel Kant through the unlikeliest of looking glasses. Includes “The Art of Self-Embalming,” “The Maiden as Toothpowder,” “Your Panties Are Beautiful!” and “The Amorous Corpse.” More information Paper • July 2017 • $12.95 US


	37				The Unruly Bridal Bed and Other Grotesques By Mynona Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger Philosophical slapstick that blends fairy-tale technology with proto-metafiction and meditations on fornicating plants, aristocratic eugenics, spiritual and physical hermaphroditism, and our excremental sun. More information Paper • July 2017 • $12.95 US


	36				The King in the Golden Mask By Marcel Schwob Translated, with an afterword, by Kit Schluter The first complete translation of Marcel Schwob’s second collection of fiction: twenty-one tales of murder and suicide set in a variety of historical periods, from the Ice Age to the years of the Plague. More information Paper • June 2017 • $14.95 US Temporarily unavailable


	35				The Table By Francis Ponge Translated, with an introduction, by Colombina Zamponi A poetic phenomenology, and arguably Ponge’s most personal work, of the table, the “soil for the pen”: a tribute to the durability underlining the transitoriness of our lives and works. More information Paper • April 2017 • $12.95 US


	34				The Arthritic Grasshopper: Collected Stories, 1934–1944 By Gisèle Prassinos Translated by Henry Vale and Bonnie Ruberg, with an introduction by Bonnie Ruberg Anxious dream tales of sarcastic stains, arrogant hair, liquid frogs, and blue spiders, from the pen of the young Surrealist rebel who would rebel against Surrealism. More information Paper • April 2017 • $16.95 US


	33				Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah: From the Notes of Dr. Renard de Montpensier By Louis Levy Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger A Danish Gothic detective story of psychoanalytic mysticism: featuring a ghost child, a deaf-mute dog, and a manipulative tapeworm. More information Paper • March 2017 • $14.95 US

Spellscover1a

32

Spells
By Michel de Ghelderode
Translated, with an introduction, by George MacLennan

Mystical and macabre tales from the great Belgian dramatist that describe a twilit, oppressed world of diseased gardens, dusty wax mannequins, and sinister relics.

More information

Paper • January 2017 • $17.95 US


	31				The Stairway to the Stars & Dance of the Comets By Paul Scheerbart Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger Four fairy tales of sun, sea, animals, and storm, each set in a different, fantastical locale, joined with Scheerbart’s “Astral Pantomime,” in which a royal retinue dances its way into becoming a celestial body. More information Paper • October 2016 • $13.95 US


	30				The Thief of Talant By Pierre Reverdy Translated, with an introduction, by Ian Seed The Cubist poet’s 1917 novel in verse: a fragmented, evocative portrait of loneliness, paranoia, and depersonalization set in the WWI years of the Parisian avant-garde. More information Paper • September 2016 • $13.95 US


	29				The Cathedral of Mist By Paul Willems Translated, with an introduction, by Edward Gauvin Distilled, ethereal narratives of distant journeys, buried memories, and impossible architecture from the last of the great Francophone Belgian fantasists. More information Paper • July 2016 • $12.95 US


	28				Sweating Blood By Léon Bloy Translated, with an introduction, by Erik Butler Thirty tales of horror and inhumanity, all drawn from the 1870 Franco-Prussian war and told with equal measures of hatred and pathos: heaps of corpses, monstrous butchers, cowardly bourgeois, bloody massacres, seas of mud, drunken desperation, frightful disfigurement, grotesque hallucinations, and ghoulish means of personal revenge. More information Paper • May 2016 • $17.95 US


	27				A Terrace in Rome By Pascal Quignard Translated by Douglas Penick and Charles Ré, with an introduction by Douglas Penick An account of the tormented life of Geoffroy Meaume, a seventeenth-century engraver of encrypted shadows and erotic prints, his own face etched by acid and his mind haunted by a nightmare of desire. More information Paper • April 2016 • $13.95 US


	26				The Pig, in Poetic, Mythological, and Moral-Historical Perspective By Oskar Panizza Translated, with an introduction, by Erik Butler Self-published in 1900, Panizza’s heretical and erudite essay argues that the miraculous swine occupies a central, celestial position as the life-giving force animating the entire universe, usurping the place of God as the beginning and end of all things. More information Paper • March 2016 • $13.95 US


	25				LIFE IN THE FOLDS By Henri Michaux Translated, with an introduction, by Darren Jackson Originally published in French in 1949, Life in the Folds offers a laboratory of fantastical, destructive methods of dealing with a world of suffering, as well as Michaux’s strange ectoplasmic travelogue, Portrait of the Meidosems. More information Paper • March 2016 • $14.95 US


	24				EXEMPLARY DEPARTURES By Gabrielle Wittkop Translated, with an afterword, by Annette David Five exquisitely wrought novellas depicting five “exemplary” deaths in various exotic locations around the globe, from the ruins of a castle overlooking the Rhine to the womb-like warmth of the New York sewers. More information Paper • October 2015 • $16.95 US


	23				MURDER MOST SERENE By Gabrielle Wittkop Translated, with an introduction, by Louise Rogers Lalaurie A cruel portrait of a beautiful, corrupt city state and its equally extravagant, cruel, and corrupt inhabitants, wrapped in the gamey guise of an ornate Venetian murder mystery. More information Paper • October 2015 • $12.95 US


	22				RAKKÓX THE BILLIONAIRE & THE GREAT RACE By Paul Scheerbart Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger Two novellas from the inventor of perpetual motion and father of German science fiction: the tale of a multibillionaire’s overly ambitious project to transform a cliff into an architectural masterpiece, and a cartoon space odyssey depicting worm spirits in an intergalactic race to become gods. More information Paper • September 2015 • $13.95 US


	21				THE TRUMPETS OF JERICHO By Unica Zürn Translated, with an introduction, by Christina Svendsen A fierce fable of childbirth, stitched together with anagrams and personal mythology, by German Surrealist Unica Zürn. More information Paper • June 2015 • $12.95 US


	20				DISAGREEABLE TALES By Léon Bloy Translated, with an introduction, by Erik Butler 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,” Léon Bloy. More information Paper • June 2015 • $16.95 US


	19				MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS By Giambattista Marino Translated, with an introduction, by Erik Butler A finely crafted epic poem from the seventeenth-century “poet of the marvelous”: the harrowing account, in four parts, of King Herod and his campaign to murder the infants of his kingdom. More information Paper • May 2015 • $17.95 US


	18				A DILEMMA By Joris-Karl Huysmans Translated, with an introduction, by Justin Vicari A nasty, mordant tale of bourgeois greed and manipulation, written shortly after Huysmans’s most famous work, Against the Grain. More information Paper • April 2015 • $12.95 US


	17				THE EMPEROR OF CHINA, THE MUTE CANARY, AND THE EXECUTIONER OF PERU By Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes Translated, with an introduction, by Christopher Butterfield Three savage plays from the Paris Dada Movement’s secretary, whose brutal depictions of violent sexuality and nightmarish tyranny draw a link from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi to the work of Georges Bataille. More information Paper • December 2014 • $17.95 US


	16				THE CREATOR By Mynona Translated, with an introduction, by Peter Wortsman; illustrations by Alfred Kubin; Afterword by Detlef Thiel Mynona’s most sustained “grotesque”: a tale of angel breeding and dream technology that explicates Friedlaender’s notions of Kantian idealism through the lens of E. T. A. Hoffmann. More information Paper • November 2014 • $13.95 US


	15				THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE EMPLOYEE By Honoré de Balzac Translated, with an introduction, by André Naffis-Sahely; illustrations by Louis Joseph Trimolet Originally published in 1841 and never before translated, Balzac’s Physiology was one of the first texts to analyze the growing phenomenon of bureaucracy and its unsettling ability to congeal any form of action. An anecdotal and axiomatic guidebook to the different characters and functions to be found in the office setting. More information Paper • September 2014 • $13.95 US


	14				FLAMETTI, OR THE DANDYISM OF THE POOR By Hugo Ball Translated by Catherine Schelbert, with an introduction and chronology by Marc Dachy; illustrations by Tal R The tale of the rise and fall of Max Flametti and his vaudeville troupe: a Dada prequel to Hugo Ball’s own Cabaret Voltaire, and a description of a frenetic, wartime Zurich where stages rotated with prison cells. More information Paper • June 2014 • $17.95 US


	13				PYBRAC By Pierre Louÿs Translated, with an introduction, by Geoffrey Longnecker; illustrations by Toyen Quite possibly the filthiest book of poems ever written, Pybrac offers a taste of what the Marquis de Sade might have produced if he had ever turned his hand to verse. More information Paper • April 2014 • $13.95 US


	12				THE CONDUCTOR AND OTHER TALES By Jean Ferry Translated, with an introduction, by Edward Gauvin; illustrations by Claude Ballaré Tales of pataphysical humor and surreal nightmare by Raymond Roussel’s first exegete. Illustrated by Calude Ballaré, with four extra stories not in the original edition. More information Paper • November 2013 • $13.95 US


	11				A HANDBOOK FOR THE PERFECT ADVENTURER By Pierre Mac Orlan Translated, with an introduction, by Napoleon Jeffries A guidebook to living out the passive adventure, with advice on what to read, where to travel, and what the armchair navigator needs in order to nourish erotic inclinations and exploit the idiocies of active adventurers. More information Paper • October 2013 • $12.95 US


	10				LESABÉNDIO: AN ASTEROID NOVEL By Paul Scheerbart Translated, with an introduction, by Christina Swendsen; illustrations by Alfred Kubin Admired by such luminaries as Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, Lesabéndio describes life on the planet Pallas, where rubber-based lifeforms employ architecture to connect the two halves of their double-star. More information Paper • November 2012 • $16.95 US Temporarily unavailable


	9				THE BOOK OF MONELLE By Marcel Schwob Translated, with an afterword, by Kit Schluter The fin-de-siècle “golden book” of the French Symbolists: a haunting mediation on death, prostitution, and cruelty: Nietzsche meets the Brothers Grimm. More information Paper • October 2012 • $12.95 US


	8				PATAPHYSICAL ESSAYS By René Daumal Translated, with an introduction, by Thomas Vosteen René Damaul's collected writings on the science of imaginary solutions, from 1929–1941: from the pataphysics of laughter to the pataphysics of ghosts. More information Paper • April 2012 • $13.95 US


	7				THE HIGH LIFE By Jean-Pierre Martinet Translated, with an introduction, by Henry Vale Cult author Jean-Pierre Martinet’s grotesque and tragic tale of phallus-man, tomb guardian, and would-be nonentity, Adolphe Marlaud. More information Paper • April 2012 • $11.95 US


	6				THE HIERARCHIES OF CUCKOLDRY AND BANKRUPTCY By Charles Fourier Translated, with an introduction, by Geoffrey Longnecker The nineteenth-century French utopian socialist and proto-feminist’s satirical taxonomies of the male cuckold and fraudulent bankruptcy. More information Paper • October 2011 • $12.95 US


	5				THE PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE: THE STORY OF AN INVENTION By Paul Scheerbart Translated, with an introduction, by Andrew Joron The German fantasist’s diaristic, diagrammed documentation of his efforts to invent a perpetual motion machine: a blend of humorous speculation and visionary frustration. More information Paper • April 2011 • $12.95 US


	4				THE LEG OF LAMB: ITS LIFE AND WORKS By Benjamin Péret Translated, with an introduction, by Marc Lowenthal The arch-Surrealist’s collected short fiction: exercises in slapstick intransigence and delirious mythology from the heady era of the “sleeping fits” of the 1920s to Péret's final years of the 1950s. More information Paper • April 2011 • $17.95 US


	3				AN ATTEMPT AT EXHAUSTING A PLACE IN PARIS By Georges Perec Translated, with an afterword, by Marc Lowenthal The Oulipian’s empirical submersion in the “infraordinary”: one overcast weekend spent in an attempt to record everything taking place in a Parisian square, to melancholic and touching effect. More information Paper • September 2010 • $12.95 US


	2				THE YOUNG GIRL'S HANDBOOK OF GOOD MANNERS FOR USE IN EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENTS By Pierre Louÿs Translated, with an introduction, by Geoffrey Longnecker A shockingly filthy, outrageously parodic etiquette manual from the greatest French writer of erotica. More information Paper • March 2010 • $12.95 US


	1				TREATISE ON ELEGANT LIVING By Honoré de Balzac Translated, with an introduction, by Napoleon Jeffries Balzac’s foundational text on French dandyism, replete with aphorisms, anecdotes, and a fictitious encounter with Beau Brummell. More information Paper • March 2010 • $12.95 US