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 Sebald.
A 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 wife's 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 Rodenbach's most famous work; it has seen numerous cinematic and operatic adaptations, and inspired the source material for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. It was also a precursor to such authors as André Breton and W.G. Sebald in being the first novel to employ photographs as illustrations--to 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 (1855-98) 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, Mallarmé and Huysmans. He was the author of four novels, eight collections of verse and numerous short stories, plays and critical works.
A rollicking adventure caper satirizing the soon-to-be ubiquitous aspects of spy sagas.
First published posthumously in 1966, Trouble in the Swaths was written by Boris Vian for a small audience of family and friends during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. It is a flippant, at times outrageous parody of genre fiction laced through with bursts of Sadean violence, absurdist slapstick and excessive wordplay in which the author makes his fictionalized debut under such anagrammed monikers as the Baron Visi and
Steeped in sardonic pessimism, this ode to sterility was one of the author's own favorite novels of his career.
Joris-Karl Huysmans' semi-autobiographical third novel, first published in French in 1881, signaled the beginning of his break from the naturalism of Émile Zola and his turn toward a "new naturalism" that laid out the negative consequences of determinism. Domesticity tells the tale of the novelist André Jayant and the artist Cyprien Tibaille, two men struggling between the urges of the body and the urges of the soul, and with the failure of matrimony or artistic endeavor to fulfill the needs of either. More than a psychological character study, though, Domesticity stands as one of the most memorable portraits of late 19th-century Paris and its sad, futile affairs of the heart.
Earning a wage through a career in the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of literary movements: from the grimy naturalism of Marthe to the cornerstone of the decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, to the dream-ridden Surrealist favorite Becalmed.
Wishes gathers together ten pamphlets of homophonic wordplay that Perec sent out from 1970 until his death in 1982, printed at his own expense in limited quantities. These texts and their marriage of sound to meaning present a challenge to any translation, and bring into stark relief the choices translators are often forced to make. This English edition sidesteps such choices, offering two alternate translations: a traditional one focused on the literal content of Perec's texts, and another focused on their formal phonological play.
A previously untranslated gem of Surrealist prose poetry from the acclaimed French novelist.
In 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 (1910-2007), 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 André Breton in particular, to whom he devoted a critical study.
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 de La Ville de Mirmont (1886-1914) 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 Dézert.
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n defense of the poetic, Pascal Quignard pens an impassioned reply to von Hofmannsthal's despondent Lord Chandos
In 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 Brontë, 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.
Nearly 100 years later, a landmark post-Symbolist poem receives its first English translation
When published in 1928, Vulturnus represented a new direction in Léon-Paul Fargue's writing: a shift from the lyrical post-Symbolist melancholy of his early poetry to something more grandiose, dynamic and cosmic. This long prose poem weaves together philosophical dialogue, metaphysical meditation and mournful reminiscence delivered in a language that spirals into scientific terminology and Rabelaisian neologism. Jolted into a nightmare aboard a long-distance train journey, the author finds himself on a voyage that takes him from his hometown to other existences, accompanied by the fanfare of the planets and two companions?Pierre Pellegrin and Joseph Ausudre?who guide him to a terrestrial paradise in quest of a moment of eternity. This first English translation finally introduces an essential yet underrecognized 20th-century voice and includes an essay on the text by René Daumal, who declares that «Vulturnus suffocates me with its obviousness ... I see behind Fargue the great frame of Doctor Faustroll.»
Satirical yet prophetical advertisements for imaginary new products, influential to Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia.
Originally published in book form in 1916, this volume of French author Gaston de Pawlowski's (1874-1933) writings, New Inventions and the Latest Innovations, collects the humorist's fictional columns mocking his era's burgeoning consumerism and growing faith in science.
Édité et publié pour la première fois par Marcel Marien en 1968 dans une édition limitée à 230 exemplaires, six mois après la mort de Paul Nougé, The Subversion of Images est un classique miniature à la fois dans le livre photo et les canons surréalistes. Il rassemble les notes et photographies de Nougé de 1929-1930 pour former un guide de l'image surréaliste. Nougé expose ici sa conception de l'objet et son approche surréaliste, tout en offrant un accompagnement au travail visuel de son collègue René Magritte, dont il a parfois titré les toiles. Comment un enchevêtrement de cordes peut-il provoquer la terreur? Comment la suppression d'un objet peut-elle conduire à la sentimentalité? Quel est l'effet d'une paire de gants sur une miche de pain tranché? Les photographies d'accompagnement de Nougé explorent ces notions et présentent un certain nombre de ses collègues surréalistes belges. Cette traduction est présentée en fac-similé de l'édition originale, avec une postface de Xavier Canonne, directeur du Musée de la Photographie.
A truly mind-bending novel from an author prized for his experimental fusions of nouveau roman techniques and Oulipian constraints
An editor at a Parisian publishing house receives a manuscript by someone calling himself Desiderio--a manuscript that bears an eerie resemblance to his own life and to a book he was planning to write on a Renaissance painter of the same name. He decides to use his vacation time to visit the place from which it was sent--the quaint, historical seaside town of V.--and believes he has identified the author: one Jean Morelle, himself a tourist, who disappeared the very day the manuscript was mailed. The narrator decides to play amateur detective and track down Morelle, unaware that as he becomes more deeply enmeshed in the mystery, the streets of V. will bend around him like a Möbius strip to form a loop that seems to offer no escape.
A portrait of obsession, Vacated Landscape is both ingeniously fractal and exuberantly byzantine. It is the first novel of Jean Lahougue's to be translated into English.
Jean Lahougue (born 1945) is a French novelist. A lifelong Agatha Christie fan, he won (and refused) the Prix Médicis in 1980 for Comptine des Height, a puzzle-novel patterned on Ten Little Indians.
For devotees of Dada and Surrealism, this outlandish, unconventional collection of prose poems amplifies a formerly invisible voice of European modernism
Emil Szittya's earliest known work of significance, The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards, was published in German in Budapest in 1916, yet it portrays the hallucinatory Paris in which the author had chosen a temporary dwelling at that time. Prose poems for lack of a better word, Szittya's "hashish films" were almost lost to time but can now be recognized as similar to the work of Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire. They nevertheless reflect the author's lifelong refusal to ally himself to any literary or artistic movement. It is a strange literary work as international and untethered as the author himself had been, a symbolic map of Montparnasse that incorporated the visual world of the painters around him.
Emil Szittya was the most established pseudonym of the Hungarian-born Adolf Schenk (1886-1964). A vagabond in both his writing and his practice, his life intersected with notable names throughout Europe in the years of high modernism. Schenk eventually settled in Paris, fighting in the Resistance and working at the café Les Deux Magots before dying of tuberculosis.
A nonconformist satire of both bureaucracy and nonconformism from the French polymath and author of Foam of the Days.
Written at the age of 23 for his friends in the winter of 1943-44, Vercoquin and the Plankton was the first of Vian's novels to be published under his own name. Published in 1947, the book came out two months after his succès de scandale I Spit on Your Graves and two months before the publication of his beloved classic The Foam of the Days. At once social documentary, scathing satire and jazz manifesto, Vercoquin and the Plankton describes the collision of two worlds under the Vichy regime: that of the youthful dandyism of the ever-partying Zazous and the murderously maniacal bureaucracy of a governmental office for standardization. In this roman à clef drawn from Vian's own contradictory lives as a jazz musician on the Left Bank and an engineer at the French National Organization for Standardization, the reader is introduced to a handful of characters inhabiting a world lying somewhere between Occupied Paris and Looney Tunes.
Boris Vian (1920-59) 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 dying of a heart attack 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 everyone from Jean-Paul Sartre to Raymond Queneau and Miles Davis, playing trumpet with Claude Abadie and Claude Luter, and an influence on such future kindred spirits as Serge Gainsbourg.
A traveling businessman decides to tarry in an unnamed city, dons a new name and profession on a whim, and rents a room in a hotel on an island at the city's edge. As he wanders through the streets of unvisited storefronts and offices, he encounters a strange constellation of characters: a sinister night watchman, his spiritual half-brother, the professor, and a mute beauty who quickly obsesses him. They in turn lead the narrator into labyrinths of crowded curio shops and secondhand furnishers where the secrets of the island lie buried behind armoires and delirium. As the narrator pieces together the drama at the heart of the abandoned quarter, he discovers missing elements to his own biography and the role he is to play as witness to tragedy.Marcel Béalu's novella, written in the 1940s but not published until 1954, peels away an oneiric banality to reveal doubled lives and secret stories. The Impersonal Adventure utilizes a dreamlike logic to translate postwar trauma, urban devastation and anxiety into a tale that unfolds in the empty streets and bric-a-brac shops of a de Chirico painting.Marcel Béalu (1908-93) was a French poet and novelist who drew inspiration from German Romanticism and French Surrealism, but avoided schools of thought and autobiography. His work was distinct for its dreamlike qualities and has established him as a master of the French fantastique. He made his living as a hat maker (when he first met the poet Max Jacob, who took him under his wing), an antiques dealer, and then as a bookseller.
La croisade des enfants de 1896 de Marcel Schwob raconte la légende médiévale de l'exode de quelque 30 000 enfants de tous les pays en Terre sainte, qui se sont rendus sur les rives de la mer qui, au lieu de se séparer pour leur permettre de marcher jusqu'à Jérusalem, ont les a livrés à des marchands qui les ont vendus comme esclaves en Tunisie ou à une mort par noyade. C'est une histoire cruelle et douloureuse mêlant histoire et légende, que Schwob raconte à travers les voix de huit protagonistes différents: un goliard, un lépreux, le pape Innocent III, un clerc, un qalandar et le pape Grégoire IX, ainsi que deux enfants croisés, dont la foi naïve finit par se transformer en peur et en angoisse grandissantes.
In 1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers would found the College of Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic René Daumal was the first to elaborate upon Alfred Jarrys unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished novel Mount Analogue and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse of often overlooked Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician. Pataphysical Essays collects Daumals overtly pataphysical writings from 1929 to 1941, from his landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay, The Pataphysics of Ghosts. Daumals Treatise on Patagrams offers the reader everything from a recipe for the disintegration of a photographer to instructions on how to drill a fount of knowledge in a public urinal. This volume also includes Daumals column for the Nouvelle Revue Française, Pataphysics This Month.
A Rimbaudesque novella of wayward wanderlust and liberty from the cofounder of Surrealism.
Conceived in a hospital bed in 1917 and written a few months later after his fateful encounter with Lautréamont's Maldoror, Philippe Soupault's novella The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle preceded the author's involvement with Parisian Dada and the Surrealist movement he would later launch with his friends. Inspired by a schoolmate's sudden departure for Greenland on a whim and his subsequent disappearance, Soupault imagines his alter ego's adventures as entries in a journal both personal and fictional. Adopted by an Inuit tribe, Pirouelle drifts from one encounter to another, from one casual murder to another, until his life of liberty and spontaneity leads him to stasis at the edge of existence.
After taking an active part in French Dada, Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) cofounded the Surrealist movement with André Breton and Louis Aragon, and authored with Breton The Magnetic Fields, the first official Surrealist work. After being expelled from the movement for the crime of being «too literary,» he devoted his life to writing, travel, journalism and political activity (for which he was put in prison by the collaborationist Vichy government).
An updated, expanded edition of Remedios Varo's translated writings, including pieces never before published in any language
With the 2018 publication of Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings, Wakefield Press introduced the writings of Surrealist painter Remedios Varo into English for the first time. These texts, never published during her lifetime, present something of a missing chapter, and offer the same qualities to be found in her visual work: an engagement with mysticism and magic, a breakdown of the border between the everyday and the marvelous, a love of mischief and an ongoing meditation on escape in all its forms. This new, expanded volume brings together the painter's collected writings, an unpublished interview, letters to friends and acquaintances, dream accounts, notes for unrealized projects, a project for a theater piece, whimsical recipes for controlled dreaming, exercises in Surrealist automatic writing and prose-poem commentaries on her paintings. It also includes her longest manuscript, the pseudoscientific "On Homo rodans": an absurdist study of the wheeled predecessor to Homo sapiens (the skeleton of which Varo had built out of chicken bones). Written by the invented anthropologist Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, the essay utilizes eccentric Latin and a tongue-in-cheek pompous discourse to explain the origins of the first umbrella and in what ways «Myths» are merely «corrupted Myrtles.» Also included are newly discovered writings, including three short stories, never before published in any language.
A raucous, macabre tale of failure from the filmmaker-turned-writer whose work has garnered cultish attention in recent years
Georges Maman is a down-and-out actor sinking into despair and no longer able to scrape by, failing to make his mark even in the porno industry; Dagonard is a loudmouthed camera assistant who executes his refusal to read a room with almost surgical skill. Their paths cross one evening in a bar, and the two proceed to share a night in Paris: drink, dinner and psychological torture. Drawing from his own aborted career as an assistant director in the film industry, Jean-Pierre Martinet's last novel (before he quit writing) describes a sordid, cynical and disturbingly humorous descent into the hell of failure and the company we keep there. With Their Hearts in Their Boots is joined by "At the Back of the Courtyard on the Right," an equally dark and lengthy poetic essay inspired by the work of Henri Calet, a kindred literary spirit whose dimmed star Martinet helped to resuscitate through his brief career as a literary critic.
Jean-Pierre Martinet (1944-93) wrote only a handful of novels, including what is largely regarded as his masterpiece: the psychosexual study of horror and madness Jérôme.
William Boyle is from Brooklyn. His books include Gravesend, which was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France.
"A captivating exercise in intriguing symbolism." --John Taylor, Times Literary Supplement
When Jean Maleux, a young sailor, is appointed assistant keeper of the Ar-Men lighthouse off the coast of Brittany, he is drawn into a dark world of physical peril, sexual obsession and necrophilia. The lighthouse is home to the eccentric, embittered keeper Mathurin Barnabas: an irascible and grizzled old man who appears to be more animal than human.
Time passes in alternating stages of mind-numbing monotony and bouts of horror as our hero struggles against the endless assaults of wind and loneliness, with only his duties and his mute companion for distraction. The sea evolves into a wild force and the lighthouse itself into a monster that Jean must tame if he is to survive. First published in French in 1899 and never before translated, The Tower of Love will be of keen interest to readers of Decadent, Symbolist and Romantic horror fiction.
Rachilde was the pen name of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860-1953). She was the only female writer for the literary journal Le decadent.
Melanie C. Hawthorne is a professor in the Department of Global Languages & Cultures at Texas A&M University. She is the translator of Rachilde's novels The Juggler and Monsieur Vénus.
A compilation of 16 rigorous, eccentric essays commissioned by the German founder of psychophysics.
The original 1824 German publication of Stapelia Mixta united a bevy of eccentric proposals, meditations and displays of consciously excessive learning that strove for an unusual clarity of absurdity, which was the hallmark of the pseudonymous author Dr. Mises. Aiming for a broader reading audience, it was titled after a flower, but one of such a stench as to guarantee originality. And such was the originality of these semiserious flights of excess that came under the cover of Dr. Mises, who wrote on everything from landscaping to the spiritual lives of plants and heavenly bodies while also conducting pioneering research in optics and experimental psychology.
The 16 essays of this collection include discussions of dancing, drugs, immortality, perception and psychology. These increasingly inventive essays start with a relatively digestible "Encomium of the Belly" before developing into a complicated, prepataphysical exploration of Spatial Symbolism.
Dr. Mises was the pen name of the founder of psychophysics, Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-87), an alter ego he adopted for his more speculative and satirical writing.
Erik Butler is a researcher at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University.
Together with other disillusioned illusionists, the titular magician exposes the dark underside of art, intent on unveiling life's elegant deception.
In following the tales of these magicians of madness, Diabelli offers unique confessional accounts of linguistic self-destruction. Chief among them is prestidigitator Grazio Diabelli, who refuses an invitation to perform and instead discourses on the history of escapology as he contemplates his own final and permanent disappearing act. Also waiting in the wings is August Stramm, "pianistic abortion" applying for the post of orchestra minion despite being hard of hearing; and Anatol Zentgraf, private scholar and maniacal reader who is the alleged epicenter of an earthquake. Added to this first English edition is Burger's tale "The Laughter Artist," an account of a nameless professional artist of cachinnation whose mother's backstage visit induces a fatal culmination of his art.
Sternberg's rule-breaking, genre-defying novel upends the humdrum workday world.
A nameless employee stands outside the door to an office, hesitating to enter because he is five minutes late. This banal opening then launches into a frenetic narrative that switches genres, modes and universes with abandon. From an account of his feral childhood with a nymphomaniacal mother, to his early development of a third arm and a second head, the employee unspools his subsequent life as department-store wrapper, ladder-descending bureaucrat, traveling salesman, murder suspect and other occupations. Years return and reverse through a series of inflicted hellscapes as a tension builds between an untrammeled imagination willing to commit any crime and the inescapable rigidity of the mind.
First published in French by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1958, The Employee was awarded the Grand Prix de l'Humour Noir in 1961. This first English-language translation presents an entropic exercise of the imagination that will leave readers bewildered and breathless.
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