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64 |
Munchausen and Clarissa: A Berlin Novel The fabled Baron Munchausen returns to society at the age of 180, to the delight of young Clarissa. Over the course of a week, the Baron presents his impressions of the fantastical World Exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, and in doing so outlines Scheerbart’s perspective on everything from architecture and painting to music and literature. Paper • January 2021 • $14.95 US |
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63 |
Brief Lives of Idiots A perfect month of 31 idiots drawn from real life: fools unable to recognize their family, who fail miserably in their attempts at suicide, are convinced that Christ was an extraterrestrial, or find the experience of a concentration camp to not be so bad. Paper • December 2020 • $14.95 US |
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62 |
Circles of Dread The Belgian master’s 1943 collection of what would come to be identified as weird literature. Includes “The Hand of Goetz von Berlichingen,” “The Marlyweck Cemetery,” “The Man Who Dared,” and other stories. Paper • October 2020 • $15.95 US |
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61 |
Waystations of the Deep Night 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. Paper • July 2020 • $16.95 US |
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60 |
The Great Nocturnal: Tales of Dread 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.” Paper • May 2020 • $15.95 US |
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59 |
Rogomelec 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. Paper • March 2020 • $12.95 US |
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58 |
At the Blue Monkey: 33 Outlandish Stories 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. Paper • December 2019 • $15.95 US |
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57 |
The Subversion of Images 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. Paper • December 2019 • $14.95 US |
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56 |
Cruise of Shadows: Haunted Stories of Land and Sea 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 Gloomy Alley.” 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. Paper • December 2019 • $15.95 US |
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55 |
A Death: Notes of a Suicide 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. Paper • October 2019 • $15.95 US |
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54 |
A Short Treatise Inviting the Reader to Discover the Subtle Art of Go 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. Paper • August 2019 • $14.95 US |
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53 |
The Sundays of Jean Dézert 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. Paper • May 2019 • $12.95 US |
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52 |
Samalio Pardulus 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. Paper • April 2019 • $12.95 US |
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51 |
Curl 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. Paper • March 2019 • $12.95 US |
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50 |
Whiskey Tales 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. Paper • January 2019 • $15.95 US |
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49 |
Letters, Dreams & Other Writings 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. Paper • November 2018 • $14.95 US |
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48 |
Treatise on Modern Stimulants 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. Paper • October 2018 • $12.95 US |
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47 |
Wishes 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. Paper • July 2018 • $17.95 US |
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46 |
Psychology of the Rich Aunt: Being an Inquiry, in Twenty-Five Parts, into the Question of Immortality 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. Paper • May 2018 • $12.95 US |
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45 |
The Children’s Crusade 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. Paper • April 2018 • $11.95 US |
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44 |
Imaginary Lives 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. Paper • April 2018 • $14.95 US |
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43 |
Hashish Decadent, interlocked tales of Satanism, eroticism, sadism, cannibalism, necrophilia, and death, told by a group of recumbent men in a Parisian “Hashish Club.” Paper • March 2018 • $15.95 US |
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42 |
Mademoiselle Bambù 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.” Paper • January 2018 • $22.95 US |
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41 |
The Construction of the Tower of Babel 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.” Paper • November 2017 • $14.95 US |
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40 |
Odd Jobs 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.” Paper • September 2017 • $11.95 US |
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39 |
District 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. Paper • September 2017 • $11.95 US |
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38 |
My Papa and the Maid of Orléans and Other Grotesques 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.” Paper • July 2017 • $12.95 US |
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37 |
The Unruly Bridal Bed and Other Grotesques 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. Paper • July 2017 • $12.95 US |
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36 |
The King in the Golden Mask 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. Paper • June 2017 • $14.95 US Temporarily unavailable |
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35 |
The Table 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. Paper • April 2017 • $12.95 US |
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34 |
The Arthritic Grasshopper: Collected Stories, 1934–1944 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. Paper • April 2017 • $16.95 US |
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33 |
Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah: From the Notes of Dr. Renard de Montpensier A Danish Gothic detective story of psychoanalytic mysticism: featuring a ghost child, a deaf-mute dog, and a manipulative tapeworm. Paper • March 2017 • $14.95 US |
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31 |
The Stairway to the Stars & Dance of the Comets 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. Paper • October 2016 • $13.95 US |
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30 |
The Thief of Talant 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. Paper • September 2016 • $13.95 US |
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29 |
The Cathedral of Mist Distilled, ethereal narratives of distant journeys, buried memories, and impossible architecture from the last of the great Francophone Belgian fantasists. Paper • July 2016 • $12.95 US |
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28 |
Sweating Blood 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. Paper • May 2016 • $17.95 US |
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27 |
A Terrace in Rome 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. Paper • April 2016 • $13.95 US |
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26 |
The Pig, in Poetic, Mythological, and Moral-Historical Perspective 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. Paper • March 2016 • $13.95 US |
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25 |
LIFE IN THE FOLDS 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. Paper • March 2016 • $14.95 US |
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24 |
EXEMPLARY DEPARTURES 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. Paper • October 2015 • $16.95 US |
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23 |
MURDER MOST SERENE 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. Paper • October 2015 • $12.95 US |
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22 |
RAKKÓX THE BILLIONAIRE & THE GREAT RACE 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. Paper • September 2015 • $13.95 US |
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21 |
THE TRUMPETS OF JERICHO A fierce fable of childbirth, stitched together with anagrams and personal mythology, by German Surrealist Unica Zürn. Paper • June 2015 • $12.95 US |
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20 |
DISAGREEABLE TALES 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. Paper • June 2015 • $16.95 US |
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19 |
MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS 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. Paper • May 2015 • $17.95 US |
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18 |
A DILEMMA A nasty, mordant tale of bourgeois greed and manipulation, written shortly after Huysmans’s most famous work, Against the Grain. Paper • April 2015 • $12.95 US |
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17 |
THE EMPEROR OF CHINA, THE MUTE CANARY, AND THE EXECUTIONER OF PERU 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. Paper • December 2014 • $17.95 US |
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16 |
THE CREATOR 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. Paper • November 2014 • $13.95 US |
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15 |
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE EMPLOYEE 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. Paper • September 2014 • $13.95 US |
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14 |
FLAMETTI, OR THE DANDYISM OF THE POOR 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. Paper • June 2014 • $17.95 US |
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13 |
PYBRAC 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. Paper • April 2014 • $13.95 US |
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12 |
THE CONDUCTOR AND OTHER TALES 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. Paper • November 2013 • $13.95 US |
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11 |
A HANDBOOK FOR THE PERFECT ADVENTURER 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. Paper • October 2013 • $12.95 US |
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10 |
LESABÉNDIO: AN ASTEROID NOVEL 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. Paper • November 2012 • $16.95 US |
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9 |
THE BOOK OF MONELLE The fin-de-siècle “golden book” of the French Symbolists: a haunting mediation on death, prostitution, and cruelty: Nietzsche meets the Brothers Grimm. Paper • October 2012 • $13.95 US |
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8 |
PATAPHYSICAL ESSAYS René Damaul's collected writings on the science of imaginary solutions, from 1929–1941: from the pataphysics of laughter to the pataphysics of ghosts. Paper • April 2012 • $13.95 US |
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7 |
THE HIGH LIFE Cult author Jean-Pierre Martinet’s grotesque and tragic tale of phallus-man, tomb guardian, and would-be nonentity, Adolphe Marlaud. Paper • April 2012 • $11.95 US |
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6 |
THE HIERARCHIES OF CUCKOLDRY AND BANKRUPTCY The nineteenth-century French utopian socialist and proto-feminist’s satirical taxonomies of the male cuckold and fraudulent bankruptcy. Paper • October 2011 • $12.95 US |
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5 |
THE PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE: THE STORY OF AN INVENTION The German fantasist’s diaristic, diagrammed documentation of his efforts to invent a perpetual motion machine: a blend of humorous speculation and visionary frustration. Paper • April 2011 • $12.95 US |
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4 |
THE LEG OF LAMB: ITS LIFE AND WORKS 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. Paper • April 2011 • $17.95 US |
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3 |
AN ATTEMPT AT EXHAUSTING A PLACE IN PARIS 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. Paper • September 2010 • $12.95 US |
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2 |
THE YOUNG GIRL'S HANDBOOK OF GOOD MANNERS FOR USE IN EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENTS A shockingly filthy, outrageously parodic etiquette manual from the greatest French writer of erotica. Paper • March 2010 • $12.95 US |
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1 |
TREATISE ON ELEGANT LIVING Balzac’s foundational text on French dandyism, replete with aphorisms, anecdotes, and a fictitious encounter with Beau Brummell. Paper • March 2010 • $12.95 US |
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