World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2017, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$26.00 - Out of stock
District describes, in ten vignettes, the sad, sordid and sinister aspects of a section of an unnamed French city, and the manners in which the ghostlike human entities that live and wither within it are molded, moved and absorbed by its spaces. A noisy metro station, old tenements, buildings going up, along with the fixtures of French communal life: the open-air market, the public garden; the little shops and bars, the lively town square--the ugly and mundane, the coarse and unmentionable sit side by side with the occasionally burgeoning bit of beauty. With a sense of voyeuristic tension and queasy complicity, the reader is taken on an outcast's tour of city life—from construction site to metro, from bar to brothel—an analysis of communal living in the conditional tense from the perspective of the absolute exile. One of Duvert's last books, it is also one of his shortest: an unexpected return to the roving, fractured eye of the Nouveau Roman that had informed his earliest work.
Translated by S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier, with an introduction, by S. C. Delaney.
Tony Duvert (1945–2008) earned a reputation as the “enfant terrible” of the generation of French authors known for defining the postwar Nouveau Roman. Expelled from school at the age of 12 for homosexuality (and then put through a psychoanalytic “cure” for his condition), Duvert declared war on family life and societal norms through a controversial series of novels and essays (whose frequent 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.
2017, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$26.00 - Out of stock
Odd Jobs by Tony Duvert is a series of 23 satirically scabrous short texts that introduce the reader to an imaginary French suburb via the strange, grotesque small-town occupations that defined a once reliable, now presumably vanished way of life. A catalogue of job descriptions that range from the disgusting functions of “The Snot-Remover” and “The Wiper” to the shockingly cruel dramas enacted by “The Skinner” and “The Snowman". Through these narratives somewhere between parody and prose poem, Duvert assaults parenthood, priesthood and neighbourhood in this mock handbook to suburban living; Leave It to Beaver as written by William Burroughs.
Duvert (1945-2008) earned a reputation as the “enfant terrible” of the generation of French authors known for defining the post-war Nouveau Roman. Expelled from school at the age of 12 for homosexuality (and then put through a psychoanalytic “cure” for his condition), Duvert declared war on family life and societal norms through a controversial series of novels and essays (whose frequent controversial depictions of child sexuality and pedophilia often led 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 2008.
2025, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 17.5 x 115 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$30.00 - In stock -
Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger
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 the author had chosen for a temporary home at that time. It is a strange literary work as international and untethered as the author himself had been, a symbolic map of Montparnasse and memory that incorporates the visual world of the painters around him. It is a notational, hashish-infused dream diary in which Szittya plays with childhood legends and gender roles as he restlessly sifts through poverty and the underworld, splicing together and severing apart synesthetic sensations and visions.
Prose poems, for lack of a better word, Szittya’s “hashish films” were almost lost to time but can be recognized as sitting alongside the work of such contemporaries as Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire. They nevertheless read like an anomaly, reflecting the author’s lifelong refusal to ally himself with any literary or artistic movement.
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 everyone throughout Europe in the years of high modernism, whether he was setting up a publishing house with Blaise Cendrars in Paris, crossing paths with Lenin and Trotsky in Zürich, seeing the birth of Dada in the Cabaret Voltaire with his friends Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, or writing the first books on artists such as Chaïm Soutine and Marc Chagall. Szittya settled in Paris later in life, fighting in the Resistance during the war and working at the café Les Deux Magots before dying of tuberculosis. His many works, in Hungarian, German, and French, include novels, essays, art criticism, and a history of suicide.
2024, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 20.32 x 13.34 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$37.00 - In stock -
When Jean Maleux, a young, naïve sailor, is appointed assistant keeper of the Ar-Men lighthouse off the coast of Brittany, he is drawn into a lonely, dark world of physical peril, sexual obsession, and necrophilia. The lighthouse is a chamber of locked doors and terrible secrets—and home to the eccentric, embittered keeper he is to assist, Mathurin Barnabas: an illiterate, 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, his mind fraying with guilt, 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, this gripping novel retains its shock value even now, and will be of keen interest to readers of Decadence, Symbolism, and Romantic horror fiction.
Rachilde was the pen name of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860–1953). By her mid-twenties she was a prominent figure in Parisian literary circles and was the only female writer for the literary journal Le decadent (1886–1889). Her life and work were unconventional: she was a cross-dresser (in direct violation of French law) who constantly questioned gender identity and social norms, and her 1884 novel Monsieur Vénus was judged to be pornographic and was subsequently banned in Belgium, incurring for the author a sentence of two years in prison and a fine of two thousand francs. In 1889 she married Alfred Vallette, with whom she cofounded the Mercure de France, the most important journal and publishing house of the French Symbolists.
Translated by Jennifer Higgins, with an introduction by Melanie C. Hawthorne
“A captivating exercise in intriguing symbolism.”—John Taylor, Times Literary Supplement
“Gothic, gorgeous, thrilling, unnerving, and deliriously ahead of its time.”—Warren Maxwell, Independent Book Review
2014, English
Softcover, 142 pages, 18 x 11.5 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$33.00 - In stock -
Translated, with an introduction, by Geoffrey Longnecker
Illustrations by Toyen
In turns amusing and offensive, Pierre Louÿs’ Pybrac is possibly the filthiest collection of poetry ever published, and offers a taste of what the Marquis de Sade might have produced if he had ever turned his hand to verse. First published posthumously in 1927, Pybrac was, with The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners, one of the first of Louÿs’ secret erotic manuscripts to see clandestine publication. Composed of 313 rhymed alexandrine quatrains, the majority of them starting with the phrase “I do not like to see…,” Pybrac is in form a mockery of sixteenth-century chancellor poet Guy Du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac, whose moralizing quatrains were common literary fare for young French readers until the nineteenth century. Louÿs spent his life coming up with his own evergrowing collection of rhymed moral precepts (suitable only for adult readers): a dizzying litany describing everything he “disliked” witnessing, from lesbianism, sodomy, incest, and prostitution to perversions extreme enough to give even a modern reader pause. With the rest of his erotic manuscripts, the original collection of over 2,000 quatrains was auctioned off and scattered throughout private collections; but like everything erotic, what remains collected here conveys an impression of unending absurdity and near hypnotic obsession.
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. But it was only after his death that his true legacy was to be uncovered: nearly nine hundred pounds of erotic manuscripts were discovered in his home, all of them immediately scattered among collectors and many lost. The body of work that has since been gathered—manuscripts continue to be discovered—leaves little doubt: Louÿs is the greatest French writer of erotica there ever was.
“Louÿs entered eroticism the way others enter politics or religion”—Jean-Paul Goujon
“One of the great and glorious erotomaniacs of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth”—André Pieyre de Mandiargues
2024, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 17.78 x 11.43 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$32.00 - In stock -
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 loudmouth 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 abandoned his second career as an author) describes a sordid, cynical, and disturbingly humorous descent into the hell of failure and the company we keep there, whether we like it or not.
With Their Hearts in Their Boots is joined by “At the Back of the Courtyard on the Right,” an equally dark and lengthy prose poem of sorts on 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 (1944–1993) wrote only a handful of novels, including what is largely regarded as his masterpiece, the psychosexual study of horror and madness, Jérôme. Reading like an unsettling love child of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jim Thompson, Martinet’s work explores the grimly humorous possibilities of limitless pessimism.
Translated, with an introduction, by Alex Andriesse
"In Andriesse’s translation, Martinet’s account of one man’s progression down the margins of society turns into the stuff of existential horror. This is a far cry from comfort reading, but like a sub-zero breeze—or a shot of high-proof booze—it’s bracing throughout."—Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
2024, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 20.32 x 13.34 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$37.00 - In stock -
Our whole culture is the product of gastric activity. The stomach is an egg from which all the arts and sciences are hatched.
The original 1824 German publication of Stapelia Mixta gathered together a bevy of eccentric proposals, meditations, and displays of consciously excessive learning that strove for what can only be regarded as an unusual clarity of absurdity, which was the hallmark of the pseudonymous author, Dr. Mises. Aiming for a broader reading audience, he presented these essays under the title of a flower, but a flower of such a stench as to guarantee originality.
Such was the originality of these semi-serious flights of excess that came under the cover of Dr. Mises, himself a cover for Gustav Theodor Fechner, founder of psychophysics, 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. He eventually succumbed to a nervous breakdown from the strain of constant work, half-insane from stress and half-blind from his experiments.
The sixteen essays of this collection include discussions of dancing, food, drugs, ancient Greece, the soul and immortality, perception and psychology, the differences and similarities between art, science, and religion, and more. These inventive essays start with a relatively digestible “Encomium of the Belly” and “The World Upside-Down” before developing into increasingly convoluted musings that conclude with a pre-pataphysical exploration of Spatial Symbolism.
Translated, with an introduction, by Erik Butler
Dr. Mises was the pen name of Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), an alter ego he adopted for his more speculative and satiric writing and an outlet for the more troubled element of his thought where he found himself at odds with both himself and the world. While Fechner is remembered as an experimental psychologist, pioneer in experimental psychology, founder of psychophysics, and inspiration for Sigmund Freud and William James, Dr. Mises was more the precursor of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh and Dr. Faustroll: a creature of learning run rampant, ready to entertain any counterargument.
2018, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$30.00 - Out of stock
First published in German in 1902, Hashish is a collection of decadent, interwoven tales of Satanism, eroticism, sadism, cannibalism, necrophilia and death. Encountering the enigmatic dandy Count Vittorio Alta-Carrara in a Parisian eatery, the narrator finds himself invited to a “Hashish Club", where in the dim light of red-filtered candles, a roomful of “recumbent wanderers” explores the abyss of the unconscious. The narrator and the count don a variety of identities as they in turn enter the narratives, sometimes participating in them, other times merely observing them from the vantage point of a shifting divan. Engaging in romantic liaisons with masks and cadavers, taking part in Satanic orgies and carnivals, plotting blasphemy and riding carriages through cityscapes where time loses its bearings, the protagonists draw the reader into their narrative and psychological unmooring.
A forgotten yet important chapter in the lineage of German fantastic and decadent literature, this translation of Hashish is illustrated throughout with drawings by the author's brother-in-law, Alfred Kubin, from the book's second, 1913 German edition.
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 non-fiction works on politics, yoga, astrology, etiquette and Jungian psychology.
2024, Englsih
Softcover, 240 pages, 20.3 x 13.3 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$36.00 - In stock -
An editor at a Parisian publishing house receives a manuscript by someone calling himself Desiderio—a manuscript that bears an eerie (though vague) 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/sender: 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, with sentences that are tiny scale models of the larger narrative, and exuberantly byzantine, full of long parentheticals and odd circumlocutions that form a tantalizing labyrinth that sits somewhere between Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Kafka’s The Castle.
Jean Lahougue (1945–) is an innovative French novelist whose experiments often combine nouveau roman techniques with the detective novel or Oulipian constraints. 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. Vacated Landscape is his first book to appear in English.
Translated, with an afterword, by K. E. Gormley
2024, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$34.00 - Out of stock
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, presented something of a missing chapter, and offered 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 the need for (and the trauma of) escape in all its forms.
This new, expanded volume brings together the painter’s collected writings, an unpublished interview, letters to friends and acquaintances (as well as to people unknown), dream accounts, notes for unrealized projects, a project for a theater piece, whimsical recipes for controlled dreaming, and exercises in Surrealist automatic writing, as well as 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, among them three short stories, never before published in any language.
Edited and translated by Margaret Carson
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 works combine the elements of classical training, alchemical mysticism, and fairy-tale science.
2024, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 20.19 x 13.59 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$32.00 - In stock -
First published posthumously in 1966, Trouble in the Swaths was written for a small audience of family and friends during the Nazi Occupation of Paris, but it presented little evidence of those dark years. 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 Vian makes his fictionalized debut under such anagrammed monikers as the Baron Visi and the detective Brisavion.
Preceding Ian Fleming’s novels by several years, Trouble in the Swaths nonetheless anticipates and ridicules such spy thrillers and their sexism, casual murders, plot twists, and technological gadgetry. The plot quickly shifts from mock realist novel to comic-book escapade as our two young dandy heroes, Count Adelphin de Beaumashin and Sérafinio Alvaraide, quickly abandon the Baroness Pyssenlied’s party to set off on a quest for a missing artifact. The adventure involves bombs and machine guns, planes and parachutes, trapdoors and underground caverns, a secret manuscript that endeavors to absorb the novel, and, at the center of it all, the core of the narrative maelstrom: the forked barbarin.
Translated, with an introduction, by Terry Bradford.
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. He died 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 everyone from 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.
2024, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 17.27 x 10.92 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$29.00 - In stock -
Introduction by Jean-Luc Nancy
Translated by Stéphanie Boulard and Timothy Lavenz
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 the author spent forty-one years meticulously crafting, Pascal Quignard passionately challenges this withdrawal and urges us not to forsake the power of poetry. By uniting us with the tremendous cry at nature’s birth, literature rejuvenates our connection to the universe and transcends the strictures of acquired speech. In this exhilarating exhortation, which meditates on Emily Brontë, Handel, Rembrandt, and the legend of Bluebeard, Quignard inspires us to resurrect the ecstatic eruption of nature through the written word.
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.
Pascal Quignard (b. 1948) is the French author of over sixty books of fiction, essays, and his own genre of fragmented philosophical reflection: an amalgamation of personal journal, historical narrative, and poetic theory. His books in English include The Hatred of Music, All the World’s Mornings, Sex and Terror, and The Sexual Night, as well as the multiple volumes of his ongoing book project The Last Kingdom, which to date includes The Roving Shadows, The Silent Crossing, Abysses, The Fount of Time, and Dying of Thinking.
Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was a French philosopher. The subject of a monograph by Jacques Derrida, his long career saw a wide range of books on various thinkers, art, film, and the ideas of community, justice, and freedom. Nearly all his major works have been translated into English, including The Inoperative Community, The Birth to Presence, The Experience of Freedom, The Gravity of Thought, and Being Singular Plural.
2024, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 17.8 x 11.4 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$32.00 - In stock -
An indefinable polymath of fin de siècle Paris, Charles Cros made work that was simultaneously grounded in literature and science. This collection brings together for the first time in English all of his literary prose. The collection includes proto-science-fiction stories; prose poems; an essay on methods of communication with other planets; and the patent application written with his brother for a (never-built) notating keyboard.
The literary imagination Cros was able to bring into the field of science was matched by the humorous scientific sobriety he introduced into his literature, which he did nowhere so effectively as in the title piece, “The Science of Love”: depicting a young scientist’s painstakingly executed seduction of a woman for the sake of scientific analysis. Also included are stories such as “The Newspaper of the Future” (which presents a 19th-century imagining of artificial intelligence) and “The Stone Who Died of Love.”
Charles Cros (1842–88) was a French writer and inventor. He is credited with submitting the earliest method for recording sound, but his idea for the “Paleophone” was obscured by Thomas Edison’s patent for the phonograph less than a year later.
2024, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 17.8 x 11.4 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$32.00 - In stock -
Foreword by René Daumal
Translated by Terry Bradford
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. A long prose poem, for lack of a better term, but one that 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 alone yet not alone, his mind pinned like an insect, as he sets off on a journey that takes him from his hometown to other existences, accompanied by the fanfare of the planets and two companions—Pierre Pellegrin and Joseph Aussudre—who guide him as Virgil did Dante, though not through hell, but to a sketched-out terrestrial paradise in quest of a moment of eternity: a syphilis of the ether, “one foot godward, two steps brute.”
This first English translation finally introduces an essential yet underrecognized twentieth-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.”
“Vulturnus is an astonishing book.”—Paul Valéry
“A rollicking interplanetary poem.”—Eugene Jolas
Léon-Paul Fargue (1876–1947) was the archetypal poet of Paris, with ties to everyone from Alfred Jarry and Erik Satie to Colette and Maurice Ravel. His work was admired by Rilke, Joyce, and Walter Benjamin. Though his work spanned and was sometimes associated with various literary movements, a bridge of sorts from symbolism to surrealism (though he was opposed to the latter), he kept to his own path throughout his life: a night wanderer who turned his perambulations through Paris into a unique poetry and prose.
“The greatest living poet in France.”—Walter Benjamin
“One of our greatest poets.”—Rainer Maria Rilke
“Fargue taught us to sublimate the life of everyday and make the highest poetry out of it.”—Max Jacob
2015, English
Softcover, 55 pages, 11.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$29.00 - In stock -
This fierce fable of childbirth by German Surrealist Unica Zorn was written after she had already given birth to two children and undergone the self-induced abortion of another in Berlin in the 1950s. Beginning in the relatively straightforward, if disturbing, narrative of a young woman in a tower (with a bat in her hair and ravens for company) engaged in a psychic war with the parasitic son in her belly, The Trumpets of Jericho dissolves into a beautiful nightmare of hypnotic obsession and mythical language, stitched together with anagrams and private ruminations. Arguably Zorn's most extreme experiment in prose, and never before translated into English, this novella dramatizes the frontiers of the body -- its defensive walls as well as its cavities and thresholds -- animating a harrowing and painfully, twistedly honest depiction of motherhood as a breakdown in the distinction between self and other, transposed into the language of darkest fairy tales.
Unica Zorn (1916-70) was born in Grunewald, 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.
2023, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 17.78 x 11.43 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$32.00 - Out of stock
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 Andr Breton in particular, to whom he devoted a critical study.
Artwork by André Masson.
2023, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 17.8 x 11.4 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$29.00 - In stock -
Translated, with an introduction, by Justin Vicari.
Conceived in a hospital bed in 1917, then written a few months later after his first and fateful encounter with Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Philippe Soupault’s novella, The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle, preceded the author’s involvement with the Parisian Dada movement and the adventure of surrealism he would later launch with his friends. Inspired by a Liberian schoolmate’s sudden departure for Greenland on a whim and his subsequent disappearance into that distant country, 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.
Floating between the romantic legacy of Arthur Rimbaud’s abandonment of literature and the banality and loss of personality and morality in the adventurer’s abandonment of society, The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle charts out a troubled tribute to wanderlust and the acte gratuit.
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).
2015, English
Softcover, 116 pages, 12 x 18 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$29.00 - Out of stock
In the last days of the Venetian Republic, the successive wives of Count Alvise Lanzi suffer mysterious, agonizing deaths. Murder Most Serene offers a cruel portrait of a beautiful, corrupt city-state and its equally extravagant, cruel, and corrupt inhabitants; redolent of darkness, death, corruption, poison, and transgression, it is also an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek Venetian romp. Rich in historical detail and bursting with bejeweled putrescence, Gabrielle Wittkop’s chilling memento mori eschews the murder mystery in which it is garbed for a scintillating depiction of physical, moral, societal, and institutional corruption, in which the author plays the role of puppeteer—“present, masked as convention dictates, while in a Venice on the brink of downfall, women gorged with venom burst like wineskins.”
Self-styled heir to the Marquis de Sade, Gabrielle Wittkop (1920–2002) was a French author of 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.
Translated, with an introduction, by Louise Rogers Lalaurie
“To all who suffer under political systems, Wittkop offers a prescription that’s difficult to swallow: the more violent your liberation, the more obscene and criminal you’ll have to become to feel free.” — Joshua Cohen, Harper’s Magazine
“This is dark, rich, deeply disturbing writing, conscious of its artifice and expertly manipulating that.” — M. A. Orthofer, The Complete Review
“This isn’t simply a transcription of past events, but a kaleidoscopic vision of a society on the verge of moral, physical, and political collapse. The inevitable death of the Serene Republic rendered in a precocious admixture of apocalyptic foreboding and arch comedy.” — Karl Wolff, New York Journal of Books
“Wittkop frames her macabre voyeurism in the tradition of the ancient injunction inscribed on the Delphic temple: Know thyself.” — Matt Seidel, The Millions
“[Murder Most Serene] is a romp. Wittkop, too, is a superior writer, and I mean superior to nearly everyone I’ve ever read. These sentences are gorgeous; these sentences are so gorgeous they rekindled my belief in the efficacy of the beautiful. But when I recommend this book to friends, and they dutifully ask me why, I say this, first: Murder Most Serene will be the most fun you have reading this year. It was for me. — Ben Carter Olcott, Three Percent
“[B]y far the most radical of Wittkop’s works thus far available in English, a fascinating—if aesthetically dubious—exploration of Calvinistic world-weariness.” — Mark Molloy, Music & Literature
2015, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$34.00 - In stock -
Translated, with an afterword, by Annette David
Exemplary Departures consists of five exquisitely wrought novellas depicting five “exemplary” deaths in various exotic locations around the globe: a gentleman spy disappears with his secrets into the Malaysian jungle; a young woman agonizes atop a ruined castle overlooking the Rhine; a writer succumbs to alcoholism in the streets of Baltimore; a salesman expires as a vagabond in the sewers of New York; and hermaphroditic twins are assassinated in a stagecoach. Drawing from the remnants of real-life anecdotes—from Edgar Allan Poe’s final days to the agonizing tale of Idilia Dubb—these stories are imagined descents into the death’s supreme indifference. A true modern inheritor of the legacy of the French Decadent writers, Wittkop spins these tales with her trademark macabre elegance and chilling humor, maneuvering in an uncertain space between dark Romanticism, Gothic Expressionism, and Sadistic cruelty. “Death is life’s most important moment” Wittkop had claimed; Exemplary Departures offers five particularly important moments for the English reader’s dubious delectation.
First published as a set of three novellas in 1995, this translation is of the 2012 edition of five novellas, which include the previously unpublished “Mr. T’s Last Secret” and “Claude and Hippolyte.”
Self-styled heir to the Marquis de Sade, Gabrielle Wittkop (1920–2002) was a French author of 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.
2021, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 11.4 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$30.00 - In stock -
In 1905 on the icy shores of Lake Wannsee, the legendary Baron Munchausen makes an unexpected appearance. Returning to German society after a century of absence at the ripe age of 180, the Baron is cajoled into presenting his impressions of the World Fair in Melbourne, Australia. His tales of Melbourne eventually take his audience from a restaurant in the ocean depths to the dwellings of mineral giants in mountain caverns, before culminating in a spiritual voyage to outer space.Over the course of a week, the sprightly Baron arrives nightly by sleighmobile to combat the dreary days with a series of fantastical visions and theories: he discusses mobile architecture, the role of technology in the arts and the need for art to ignore nature in its quest to discover new planetary organs and senses; the new household miracles of vacuum tubes for cleaning and potato-peeling machines; the repressive function of sexuality; and the need for progressive taxation.
Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, 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 would influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.
2022, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 11.5 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$25.00 - Out of stock
Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger.
Black–White–Red, first published in German in 1916, collects six bizarre tales by the “laughing philosopher,” Salomo Friedlaender, who wrote his literary work under the pseudonym Mynona (the reversed German word for “anonymous”). Mynona’s self-styled “grotesques” inhabited an uncertain ground between fairy tale, fetishism, and philosophy: a peculiar form of slapstick that satirized anything from nationalism to philanthropy. In this collection, we encounter a tongue-in-cheek showdown between Goethe and Newton, whose theories of color clash in the form of a nationalistic flag, as well as a striking invention that captures the residual sound waves of Goethe’s voice. In “The Magic Egg,” one of Mynona’s most emblematic and curious tales, a man encounters an enormous bisecting mechanical egg in the middle of the desert that houses a mummy and a possible pathway to utopia on Earth. Other stories see dead lovers arise from their graves to drive off in casket cars and a would-be philanthropist seeking the good life through an offering of tissue to strangers on the street.
“Mynona created a new kind of literary genre, which not only went beyond the inventions of Scheerbart but which also anticipated Dada, surrealism, and above all, contemporary literature of the absurd.”—Kurt Tucholsky
Mynona, a.k.a 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. He died in Paris, ill and in poverty, after Thomas Mann refused to help him emigrate to the United States.s
“Charming, inventive, and indeed droll.”—Tom Bowden, The Book Beat
2014, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 11.5 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$34.00 - Out of stock
A philosophical fable from a great forgotten German fabulistA philosophical fable from a great forgotten German fabulist.
Illustrations by Alfred Kubin
Translated, with an introduction, by Peter Wortsman
Afterword by Detlef Thiel
Billed by its author—the pseudonymous Mynona (German for “anonymous” backward)—as “the most profound magical experiment since Nostradamus,” The Creator tells the tale of Gumprecht Weiss, an intellectual who has withdrawn from a life of libertinage to pursue his solitary philosophical ruminations. At first dreaming and then actually encountering an enticing young woman named Elvira, Weiss discovers that she has escaped the clutches of her uncle, the Baron, who has been using her as a guinea pig in his metaphysical experiments. But the Baron catches up with them and persuades Gumprecht and Elvira to come to his laboratory, to engage in an experiment to bridge the divide between waking consciousness and dream by entering a mirror engineered to bend and blend realities. Mynona’s philosophical fable was described by the legendary German publisher Kurt Wolff as “a station farther on the imaginative train of thought of Hoffmann, Villiers, Poe, etc.,” when it appeared in 1920, with illustrations by Alfred Kubin (included here). With this first English-language edition, Wakefield Press introduces the work of a great forgotten German fabulist.
Mentioned in his day in the same breath as Kafka, Mynona, a.k.a 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.
2017, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 11.5 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$25.00 - In stock -
Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger.
Originally published in 1921, The Unruly Bridal Bed brings together ten grotesques from the alter-ego of the founder of “Creative Indifference,” and includes such indefinable tales as “Tobias and the Prune,” “Plant Paternity,” “The Dissolute Nose,” “Fried Sphinx Meat,” and “The Great Gold-Plated Flea.” Under his literary pseudonym Mynona (a palindrome for the German “Anonym,” or “Anonymous”), Salomo Friedlaender here displays his unique brand of philosophical slapstick that blends fairy-tale technology with proto-metafiction and at times unsettling meditations on fornicating plants, aristocratic eugenics, spiritual and physical hermaphroditism, and our excremental sun. With its companion volume of grotesques, My Papa and the Maid of Orléans, this collection offers a perfect introduction to the great German humorist’s work.
“Mynona created a new kind of literary genre, which not only went beyond the inventions of Scheerbart but which also anticipated Dada, surrealism, and above all, contemporary literature of the absurd.”—Kurt Tucholsky
Mentioned in his day in the same breath as Kafka, Mynona, a.k.a 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. He died in Paris, ill and in poverty, after Thomas Mann refused to help him emigrate to the United States.
“These are disposable formal scraps, best indigested (and Mynona was obsessed with the stomach, bowels, with consuming) on the train or bus, composed for speed and glued onto life in the megalopolis.”—Martin Billheimer, Counterpunch
2023, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 20.32 x 13.97 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$32.00 - In stock -
Translated, with an afterword, by Scott Nicolay
Published in occupied Belgium in the dark year of 1943 a few months after his celebrated novel Malpertuis, The City of Unspeakable Fear remains one of Jean Ray’s most curious works. Haunting an ambiguous interzone between detective novel, horror fiction, and Anglophile parody, it follows the misadventures of presumed police officer Sidney Terence Triggs upon his retirement to the sleepy English country town of Ingersham. A cast of characters worthy of Charles Dickens awaits his transplantation, from the sympathetic old clerk Ebenezer Doove and the three haberdashing Pumkins ladies to the druggist Theobold Pycroft, the eccentric department store owner Gregory Cobwell, the autocratic Major Chadburn, the feared Lady Florence Honnybingle, and a motley collection of other humorously humdrum inhabitants.
The emphatically commonplace quickly gives way to haunted melodrama as Triggs’s new neighbors begin to die violently or vanish. His false identity as a detective is put to the test under the threat of murderous phantoms as city and citizens come apart at the seams. In The City of Unspeakable Fear, Miss Marple meets H. P. Lovecraft to create a compellingly curious atmosphere in which F stands for both Fear and Fake.
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 Geoffrey Chaucer. A pivotal figure in the “Belgian School of the Strange,” Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the prohibition era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales of fantastical fear.