{"title":"Fiction \u0026 Literature","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"artaud-the-momo","title":"Artaud the Mômo - Antonin Artaud","description":"\u003cp\u003eArtaud the Mômo: and Other Major Poetry by Antonin Artaud \/ ISBN 9783035802351 \/ small paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eArtaud the Mômo is Antonin Artaud’s most extraordinary poetic work from the brief final phase of his life, from his return to Paris in 1946 after nine years of incarceration in French psychiatric institutions to his death in 1948. This work is an unprecedented anatomical excavation carried through in vocal language, envisioning new gestural futures for the human body in its splintered fragments. With black humor, Artaud also illuminates his own status as the scorned, Marseille-born child-fool, the “mômo” (a self-naming that fascinated Jacques Derrida in his writings on this work). Artaud moves between extreme irreligious obscenity and delicate evocations of his immediate corporeal perception and his sense of solitude. The book’s five-part sequence ends with Artaud’s caustic denunciation of psychiatric institutions and of the very concept of madness itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis edition is translated by Clayton Eshleman, the acclaimed foremost translator of Artaud’s work. This will be the first edition since the original 1947 publication to present the work in the spatial format Artaud intended. It also incorporates eight original drawings by Artaud—showing reconfigured bodies as weapons of resistance and assault—which he selected for that edition, after having initially attempted to persuade Pablo Picasso to collaborate with him. 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As its numerous editions (most now rare) over the decades attest, the book has been highly influential: Alejandro Jodorowsky's visionary 1973 film The Holy Mountain is a loose adaptation of the book, and John Zorn based an eponymous album on it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis edition, a gorgeous addition to the Exact Change list, brings the original 1959 English translation by Roger Shattuck―widely considered the best―back into print.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLeft unfinished after Daumal’s death from tuberculosis in 1944―in mid-sentence, as he broke from writing to receive a visitor―Mount Analogue offers a compelling and philosophically resonant chronicle of a group of travelers seeking the titular mountain, based on the symbolic calculations of one Father Sogol (“Logos” spelled backward) and his students. As Daumal writes, “Mount Analogue is the symbolic mountain―the way that unites Heaven and Earth, a way which must exist in material and human form, otherwise our situation would be without hope.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTranslator Roger Shattuck, author of many volumes, is perhaps best known for his important book The Banquet Years, a history of the turn-of-the-century French avant-garde.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRené Daumal (1908–44) was a literary prodigy in his teens, publishing poetry that attracted the attention of André Breton and the surrealists. Forging his own path instead of joining the group, he co-created and edited the influential literary journal Le Grand Jeu (1927–32), before turning his attentions to Eastern philosophy under the influence of Gurdjieff and Alexandre de Salzmann (model for the character Father Sogol in Mount Analogue). 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Judith Landry’s vibrant translations render him at once witty and sinister.” -- Jhumpa Lahiri\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Out of a gothic tale...Frightening, lyrical, and provocative.” -- New York Times\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis volume brings together twenty of the best stories written by Dino Buzzati -- author of the celebrated novel The Tartar Steppe and one of the most original voices in twentieth-century literature -- stories which show the Italian master's taste for the bizarre and the humorous, and for exploring the darker recesses of the human psyche. From 'The Collapse of the Baliverna', where a man is racked with guilt at the thought that he might have been responsible for the loss of many lives, to 'The Epidemic', which describes the spread of a 'state influenza' contracted only by people who don t step into line with the government, and 'Terror at the Scala', where the higher echelons of Milan society are gripped with the fear of an impending revolution - these stories show how strange and unexpected events can creep into everyday life and draw ordinary people towards mystery, disquiet and, ultimately, catastrophe.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Alma Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39270190514352,"sku":"9781847497369","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Catastrophe-Buzzati-cover-9781847497369.jpg?v=1659915787"},{"product_id":"chasm-a-weekend","title":"Chasm - A Weekend - Dorothea Tanning","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eChasm: A Weekend by Dorothea Tanning \/ ISBN 9780349012629 \/ paperback from Virago Modern Classics\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Tanning's fictional debut unquestionably deserves to be recognized as a complete artistic success . . . Tanning has assembled all the ingredients necessary for an extraordinary drama of love and betrayal, jealousy and regret...told in confident, fluid prose highlighted by passages of hallucinatory beauty\"--Guardian\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the stark beauty of the desert, a mansion built by a madman rears its impudent architecture like an insult.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe estate is called Windcote, 'its very name a masquerade', and its master, the odious Raoul Meridian, has invited a group of guests to spend a weekend, during the course of which they will find themselves driven by obsessions and confusions unlike any they've experienced before. Untouched by the fevers and failures around her is the indomitable child Destina, who will lead them into the heart of a mysterious canyon, where desire and cruelty forge an implacable truth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"It seems hardly fair that Dorothea Tanning, in a long, passionately inventive career as a painter, should have acquired as well the other harmony of prose, and that her passionate inventions as a writer should be so lovingly, so wisely resolved\"-- Richard Howard\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Virago Modern Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39270241665200,"sku":"9780349012629","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Dorothea-Tanning-Chasm2.jpg?v=1615651223"},{"product_id":"modanizumu-modernist-fiction-from-japan-1913-1938","title":"Modanizumu - Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eModanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938 \/ 9780824832421 \/ discounted copies in new condition\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e***\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRemarkably little has been written on the subject of modernism in Japanese fiction. Until now there has been neither a comprehensive survey of Japanese modernist fiction nor an anthology of translations to provide a systematic introduction. Only recently have the terms \"modernism\" and \"modernist\" become part of the standard discourse in English on modern Japanese literature and doubts concerning their authenticity vis-a-vis Western European modernism remain. This anomaly is especially ironic in view of the decidedly \u003cem\u003emodan\u003c\/em\u003e prose crafted by such well-known Japanese writers as Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kafu, and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro­. By contrast, scholars in the visual and fine arts, architecture, and poetry readily embraced modanizumu as a key concept for describing and analyzing Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis volume addresses this discrepancy by presenting in translation for the first time \u003cstrong\u003ea collection of twenty-five stories and novellas representative of Japanese authors who worked in the modernist idiom from 1913 to 1938\u003c\/strong\u003e. Its prefatory materials provide a systematic overview of the literary movement’s salient features―anti-naturalism, cosmopolitanism, the concept of the double self, and actionism―and describe how modanizumu evolved from its early \"jagged edges\" into a sophisticated yet popular expression of Japanese urban life in the first half of the twentieth century. The modanist style, characterized by youthful exuberance, a tongue-in-cheek tone, and narrative techniques like superimposition, is amply illustrated.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eModanizumu introduces faces altogether new or relatively unknown: Abe Tomoji, Kajii Motojiro, Murayama Kaita, Osaki Midori, Tachibana Sotoo, Takeda Rintaro, Tani Joji, Yoshiyuki Eisuke, and Yumeno Kyusaku. It also revisits such luminaries as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and the detective novelist Edogawa Ranpo. Key works that it culls from the modernist repertoire include Funahashi Seiichi’s Diving, Hagiwara Sakutaro’s \"Town of Cats,\" Ito Sei’s Streets of Fiendish Ghosts, and Kawabata’s film scenario Page of Madness. This volume moves beyond conventional views to place this important movement in Japanese fiction within a global context: an indigenous expression born of the fission of local creativity and the fusion of cross-cultural interaction.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Hawaii Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39270290292912,"sku":"9780824832421","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Modanizumu-Modernist-Fiction-Japan-cover2.jpg?v=1615651342"},{"product_id":"women-in-concrete-poetry-1959-1979","title":"Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWomen in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979, Edited by Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre \/ ISBN 9781734489729 \/ paperback from the publisher Primary Information (2026 reprint)\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA massive, groundbreaking, international anthology of concrete poetry by women, from Mira Schendel to Susan Howe\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis expansive volume is the first collection of concrete poetry by women, with artists and poets from the US, Latin America, Europe and Japan, whose work departs from more programmatic approaches to the genre. Their word-image compositions are unified by an experimental impetus and a radical questioning of the transparency of the word and its traditional arrangement on the page.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOwing, perhaps, to the fact that concrete poetry’s attempt to revolutionize poetry foregrounded the male-dominated channels in which it circulated, some of the women in this volume―Ilse Garnier or Giulia Niccolai, for instance―were active in the movement’s epicenters, yet failed to attain a visibility or ample representation in international anthologies such as Emmett Williams’s Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967) and Mary Ellen Solt’s Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis anthology celebrates their legacy and recontextualizes word-image compositions by other figures working independently. It gathers work by over 40 writers and artists, including Lenora de Barros (Brazil), Mirella Bentivoglio (Italy), Amanda Berenguer (Uruguay), Suzanne Bernard (France), Tomaso Binga (Italy), Blanca Calparsoro (Spain), Paula Claire (UK), Betty Danon (Turkey), Mirtha Dermisache (Argentina), Ilse Garnier (France), Anna Bella Geiger (Brazil), Bohumila Grögerová (Czech Republic), Ana Hatherly (Portugal), Susan Howe (USA), Tamara Jankovic (Serbia), Annalies Klophaus (Germany), Barbara Kozlowska (Poland), Liliana Landi (Italy), Liliane Lijn (USA), Françoise Mairey (France), Giulia Niccolai (Italy), Jennifer Pike (UK), Giovanna Sandri (Italy), Mira Schendel (Brazil), Chima Sunada (Japan), Mary Ellen Solt (USA), Salette Tavares (Portugal), Colleen Thibaudeau (Canada), Rosmarie Waldrop (USA) and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (Germany).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Primary Information","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39270717685936,"sku":"9781734489729","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/WomenInConcretePoetry-cover2.jpg?v=1621913686"},{"product_id":"the-magnetic-fields","title":"The Magnetic Fields - Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Magnetic Fields by Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault \/ ISBN 9781681374604 \/ translated by Charlotte Mandell \/ small paperback in the NYRB Poets series\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e***\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAn indispensable classic of French poetry, this is a new translation of Breton and Soupault's experiment with automatic writing, and also the first known work of literary surrealism. In the spring of 1919, two young men, André Breton and Philippe Soupault, both in a state of shock after World War I, embarked on an experiment. Sick of the literary cultivation of “voice,” sick of the “well-written,” they wanted to unleash the power of the word and to create “a new morality” to replace “the prevailing morality, the source of all our trials and tribulations.” They had a plan. They would write for a week on every day of the week and they would write fast, as fast as possible, in complete secrecy. When the week was over, the writing would be done. No touching up.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis was how The Magnetic Fields, the first sustained exercise in automatic writing, came to be. Charlotte Mandell’s brilliant new translation reveals a key work of twentieth-century literature.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"NYRB Poets","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39270960070832,"sku":"9781681374604","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/MagneticFields-Breton-Soupault-NYRBa.jpg?v=1615651075"},{"product_id":"the-golden-bomb-phantastic-german-expressionist-stories","title":"The Golden Bomb - Phantastic German Expressionist Stories","description":"A 50 Watts favorite. Edited by Malcolm Green from Atlas Press (Polygon in Scotland, 1993, 9780748660582). One used copy, in excellent shape.","brand":"Polygon","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39271696367792,"sku":"9780748660582","price":0.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/GoldenBomb-Phasntastic-German-cov.jpg?v=1621716075"},{"product_id":"bedouin-of-the-london-evening","title":"Bedouin of the London Evening - Rosemary Tonks","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems \u0026amp; Selected Prose by Rosemary Tonks \/ ISBN 9781780373614 \/ paperback from Bloodaxe Books (UK)\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the 1970s, after publishing two extraordinary poetry collections - and six satirical novels - Rosemary Tonks turned her back on the literary world after a series of personal tragedies and medical crises that made her question the value of literature and embark on a restless, self-torturing spiritual quest. This involved totally renouncing poetry and suppressing her own books. Her poetry--published in Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967)--is exuberantly sensuous, a hymn to sixties hedonism set amid the bohemian nighttime world of a London reinvented through French poetic influences and sultry Oriental imagery. All her published poetry is now available in this edition for the first time in over 40 years, along with a selection of her prose.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"A fragrant reopening of a bottle stoppered up forty years ago. As an amplification of the furibund poems that stood out a mile in the sheepish anthologies where they appeared.\"--Poetry\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Tonks was a far superior poet - awesomely sick, wickedly goo...her ugliness is shot through with vital impropriety, a kind of punk feminism that subtly interrogates the empires of English poetry.\"--Chicago Review\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Tonks consumed the city of London during the bohemian '60s with more elan and euphoria than any British poet of her era.\"--Rain Taxi\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bloodaxe Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39271775174832,"sku":"9781780373614","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/RosemaryTonks-BedouinOfTheLondonEvening-cover2.jpg?v=1622085086"},{"product_id":"pataphysical-essays","title":"Pataphysical Essays - Rene Daumal","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePataphysical Essays by Rene Daumal \/ ISBN 9780984115563 \/ small paperback with flaps from \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/spotlight-collection-wakefield-press\"\u003eWakefield Press\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions, of laws governing exceptions and of the laws describing the universe supplementary to this one. Alfred Jarry’s posthumous novel, \u003cem\u003eExploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician\u003c\/em\u003e, first appeared in 1911, and over the course of the century, his pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. 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 Jarry’s unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished novel \u003cem\u003eMount Analogue\u003c\/em\u003e and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse at an often overlooked Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician. \u003cem\u003ePataphysical Essays\u003c\/em\u003e collects Daumal’s overtly pataphysical writings from 1929 to 1941, from his landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay, “The Pataphysics of Ghosts.” Daumal’s “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 collection also collects Daumal’s little-known column for the Nouvelle Revue Française, “Pataphysics This Month.” Reading like a deranged encyclopedia, the articles describe a new mythology for the field of science, and amply demonstrate that the twentieth century had been a distinctly pataphysical era.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePoet, philosopher, and self-taught Sanskrit scholar \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=%22Ren%C3%A9+Daumal%22\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRené Daumal\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e (1908–1944) devoted himself to a lifelong attempt to think through death by means of what he called “experimental metaphysics”: an attempt to address metaphysical questions through scientific methodology. After co-founding the iconoclastic journal Le Grand Jeu and rejecting overtures from the Surrealist movement, he abandoned the literary path to become a disciple of the spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePress\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“\u003cem\u003ePataphysical Essays\u003c\/em\u003e is a short but satisfying read. Not only does it serve as a mirror of Daumal’s own era, but it doubles as a guidebook to our own.”\u003cbr\u003e —Benjamin van Loon, \u003cem\u003eAnobium\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“[I]n spurning the surrealists’ psychoanalytical preoccupations, to tackle head-on the hegemony of empiricism, Daumal might also be considered as presaging contemporary comedy, which today is the vehicle of cultural and political critique for the bold.”\u003cbr\u003e —Sally O'Reilly, \u003cem\u003eArtReview\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wakefield Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39271862567088,"sku":"9780984115563","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/ReneDaumal-PataphysicalEssays2.jpg?v=1621715582"},{"product_id":"theory-of-the-great-game-writings-from-le-grand-jeu","title":"Theory of the Great Game - Writings from Le Grand Jeu","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTheory of the Great Game: Writings from Le Grand Jeu \/ ISBN 9781900565677 \/ 192-page hardback from Atlas Press \/ edited, translated with introduction by Dennis Duncan. Text by René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Maurice Henry, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Roger Vailland, et al. Photographs by Arthur Harfaux.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis book collects the writings of a radical group of writers close to Paris Surrealism--principally René Daumal and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte--as published in their now legendary magazine, Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game). Le Grand Jeu ran to three issues between 1928 and 1930, before collapsing due to its editors' infighting, drug use and vehemently unreasonable aspirations for both art and life. The Grand Jeu is often associated with Surrealism (they were invited to join the group), but their ideas were far more extreme. The magazine was the public face of a group of artists and writers who systematically attacked their perceptions of reality through narcotics, anaesthesia and near-death experiences.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLe Grand Jeu describes a politico-mystical outlook which combined a critique of the apathy and repression of contemporary Western society with a quest to take leave of the individual ego and to reconnect with a collective Universal Mind. The group's esoteric program united narcotic and parapsychological practices with asceticism, revolutionary politics (the Russian Revolution was barely a decade old) and a prophetic mode of poetry which they identified in antecedents such as Rimbaud and Mallarmé. In this definitive collection, the theories of the Grand Jeu are presented in the group's own words for the first time, through the essays and articles which formed the bulk of their magazine.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Atlas Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39271870136496,"sku":"9781900565677","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Daumal-TheoryOfTheGreatGame-AtlasPress2_3d14d6dc-359e-481d-9c5c-40211eb52417.jpg?v=1615651457"},{"product_id":"the-man-of-jasmine-and-other-texts","title":"The Man of Jasmine and Other Texts - Unica Zürn","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Man of Jasmine \u0026amp; Other Texts by Unica Zürn \/ ISBN 9781900565820 \/ hardcover from Atlas Press\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIntense. A 50 Watts favorite.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the 25 years since Atlas Press first published this account by \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=unica+zurn\"\u003eUnica Zürn\u003c\/a\u003e (1916–70) of her long history of mental crises, she has come to be recognized as a great artist at least the equal of her partner, the Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Yet her work is barely comprehensible without the texts printed here―now revised by translator Malcolm Green―in which she demonstrates how Surrealist conceptions of the psyche allowed her to welcome the most alarming experiences as offering access to an inner existence that was the vital source for her artistic output. Green's introduction to this volume was the first study to consider her life and work from this perspective.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eZürn’s first mental collapse was initiated when she encountered her fantasy figure, “the Man of Jasmine,” in the person of the writer and artist Henri Michaux. This meeting plunged her into a hallucinatory world in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. Her greatest works were produced during times of mental crisis, often when confined in asylums, and she tended to encourage the onset of these crises in order to provoke intense creativity. Her description of these episodes reveals how language itself was part of the divinatory method that could aid her recovery or predict a new crisis. Her compulsion for composing anagrams allowed her to release from everyday language an astonishing flood of messages, threats and evocations. This method, and Zürn’s eloquent yet direct style, make this book a literary masterpiece, while providing a rare insight into extreme psychological states.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Atlas Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39271877345456,"sku":"9781900565820","price":23.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/UnicaZurn_ManOfJasmine2.jpg?v=1615651006"},{"product_id":"copy-of-pataphysical-essays","title":"The Cathedral of Mist - Paul Willems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Cathedral of Mist by Paul Willems \/ ISBN 9781939663184 \/ small paperback with flaps published by \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/spotlight-collection-wakefield-press\"\u003eWakefield Press\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThere are a lot of reasons to love this (including the expert translation by Edward Gauvin), but the illustrations by Bette Burgoyne put it over the top (once featured on 50 Watts).\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst published in French in 1983, \u003cem\u003eThe Cathedral of Mist\u003c\/em\u003e is a collection of stories from the last of the great Francophone Belgian fantasists: distilled tales of distant journeys, buried memories and impossible architecture. Described here are the emotionally disturbed architectural plan for a palace of emptiness; the experience of snowfall in a bed in the middle of a Finnish forest; the memory chambers that fuel the marvelous futility of the endeavor to write; the beautiful woodland church, built of warm air currents and fog, scattering in storms and taking renewed shape at dusk, that gives this book its title. \u003cem\u003eThe Cathedral of Mist\u003c\/em\u003e offers the sort of ethereal narratives that might have come from the pen of a sorrowful, distinctly Belgian Italo Calvino. It is accompanied by two meditative essays on reading and writing that fall in the tradition of Marcel Proust and Julien Gracq.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePaul Willems\u003c\/strong\u003e (1912–97) published his first novel, \u003cem\u003eEverything Here Is Real\u003c\/em\u003e, in 1941. Three more novels and, toward the end of his life, two collections of short stories bracketed his career as a playwright.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wakefield Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39271878623408,"sku":"9781939663184","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/PaulWillems_CathedralOfMist-cover_311f8ef8-cfc4-4321-8a5e-4b05d6541840.jpg?v=1621715933"},{"product_id":"king-in-the-golden-mask","title":"The King in the Golden Mask - Marcel Schwob","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe King in the Golden Mask by Marcel Schwob \/ ISBN 9781939663238 \/ paperback with flaps from \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/spotlight-collection-wakefield-press\"\u003eWakefield Press\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst published in French in 1892 and never before translated fully into English, \u003cem\u003eThe King in the Golden Mask\u003c\/em\u003e gathers together twenty-one of Marcel Schwob’s cruelest and most erudite tales. Melding the fantastic with historical fiction, these stories swarm around moments of unexplained violence both historical and imaginary, often blending the two through Schwob’s collaging of primary source documents into fiction. Brimming with murder, suicide, royal leprosy, and medieval witchcraft, this collection describes for us historically attested clergymen furtively attending medieval sabbaths, Protestant galley slaves laboring under the persecution of Louis XIV, a ten-year-old French viscountess seeking vengeance for her unwilled espousal to a money-grubbing French lord, and dice-tumbling sons of Florentine noblemen wandering Europe at the height of the 1374 plague. These writings are of such hallucinatory detail and linguistic specificity that the reader is left wondering whether they aren’t newly unearthed historical documents. To read Schwob is to encounter human history in its most scintillating and ebullient form as it comes into contact with his unparalleled imagination.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=%22marcel+schwob%22\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMarcel Schwob\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e (1867–1905) was a scholar of startling breadth and an incomparable storyteller. A secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño, Schwob was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman. His allegiances were to Rabelais and François Villon, Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe. Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and in doing so paid tribute to the author who could evoke both the intellect of Leonardo da Vinci and the anarchy of \u003cem\u003eUbu Roi\u003c\/em\u003e. He was also the uncle of Lucy Schwob, better remembered today as the Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePress\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Famous in Europe for his uncategorisable, indelible texts, which mix history and phantasmagoria, Marcel Schwob has been too-little known in English for too long. Wakefield Press and its brilliant young translator Kit Schluter is changing all that. \u003cem\u003eThe King in the Golden Mask\u003c\/em\u003e (first published in French in 1892) gathers 21 of Schwob’s most cruel and erudite tales, full of murder, medieval witchcraft, galley slaves, royal intrigue, gambling aristocrats and the plague of 1374. Schwob’s weird hallucinatory fables now not only shine in English, but glow in the dark.”\u003cbr\u003e —Barbara Epler, \u003cem\u003eTank Magazine\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Kit Schluter’s translation from the French is superb and he provides a thoughtful afterward.”\u003cbr\u003e —Martin Billheimer, \u003cem\u003eCounterpunch\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Schwob disbelieved in originality—everything had been said, had been done—but he trusted in the creative spirit. His stories both draw on historical sources and forfeit narrative by instead acknowledging that thieves, pirates, street urchins and prisoners are equally cursed to be human, and to be human is to indulge in casual cruelty. This confluence is unexpected, even jarring. Indeed, the mystery and inexplicability of the stories often result in something profoundly moving.”\u003cbr\u003e —Tristan Foster, \u003cem\u003eMusic \u0026amp; Literature\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Let’s call Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) the Mallarmé of short fiction.”\u003cbr\u003e —Garrett Caples, \u003cem\u003eThe Believer\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wakefield Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39271894745264,"sku":"9781939663238","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/MarcelSchwob-KingInTheGoldenMaskWakefield.jpg?v=1615651327"},{"product_id":"marketa-lazarova","title":"Marketa Lazarova - Vladislav Vancura","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMarketa Lazarova by Vladislav Vancura \/ ISBN 9788086264431 \/ 183-page hardcover from Twisted Spoon Press (Czech)\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eVery attractive little book. Cover by Dan Mayer.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCinematic in approach to draw the reader into the action, as if it were happening right before one's eyes, Marketa Lazarova deserves its place among the classics of interwar modernism, and it was awarded Czechoslovakia's State Prize for Literature upon its publication in 1931. 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A stunning achievement.\" — Jeff VanderMeer\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dorothy Project","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39371618484400,"sku":"9780997366648","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/LeonoraCarrington-CompleteStories.jpg?v=1615651138"},{"product_id":"fantasy","title":"Fantasy - Kim-Anh Schreiber","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFantasy by \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eKim-Anh Schreiber \/ \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eISBN 9781940090115 \/ 134-page paperback from the small press Sidebrow Books\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePart exegesis on Nobuhiko Obayashi’s film HOUSE and part meditation on the ineffable specters that inhabit homes and ancestral histories, FANTASY is a daughter's story of her Vietnamese mother and their twin journeys towards belonging with one another and in the world. Where exilic, inherited memory encounters its limits, FANTASY reaches towards cult cinematic atmospheres, irreverent flowers, pop culture, and photographs with no images, making for a reading experience like no other.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"The semi-autobiographical fantastic FANTASY of Kim-Anh Schreiber is rooted 1\/4 in Vietnamese\/Germanic realism and ancestral context, 1\/2 in Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 HOUSE, 1\/4 in matriarchal estrangement, and 0% bikini-clad pool party. Schreiber uses the fabric of cinema and horror to quasi-measure the length and width of her pre-adolescent and adolescent consciousness. It's a GORGEOUS dress that the ghost in her psyche demands that it wears before falling into ash. Here, in these immolatable, scriptive dialogues with all of her consanguineous, anecdotal, exegetical selves ('who become shoes without feet that walk back and forth' in a house that eats like hungry ghosts), her psyche is cut, recut, uncut, though not forgotten, un-linearly and nonchalantly and numerously, by her relationship to film and her relationship with her Vietnamese mother, surrogated mother in grandmother(s) and auntie(s). Through the art of disfigurement\/defacement, her intimate rapport to pain and her sacral joint, and her friendship with abandonment, she is able to elevate her daughterly North Star duties to subliminal heights. As Kim-Anh Schreiber seeks closure with the uncloseable, we see an acutely talented scholar and inventive memoirist on her way to becoming more than Sandra Bullock's neighbor.\"—Vi Khi Nao\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"'Every seam I encountered in the fabric of my reality was like a disfigurement that someone had smoothed over and left silent,' writes Kim-Anh Schreiber in this remarkable investigation of female anger and resilience, intergenerational trauma, and what might be called the development of literacy in the subject of pain. Schreiber, the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee and a German immigrant, combines recognizable modes—memoir, criticism, dramatic play script—into something as uncategorizable as the film she deploys throughout the book as muse and foil: Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 post-Hiroshima 'horror-comedy' HOUSE, in which generations of women are trapped together in a haunted house. Beginning with extended considerations of the instability of memory ('an evocative curator'), of the 'impossible problem of drawing a picture,' and of the pull to use projection and doubling as bridges across gaps in experience and understanding, FANTASY finally resolves into a flickering, unstable but vivid portrait of a mother and daughter both separated and bonded by history, violence, human fallibility, and love.\"—Anna Moschovakis\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sidebrow Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39371673141424,"sku":"9781940090115","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Kim-Anh-Schreiber-Fantasy2.jpg?v=1621914011"},{"product_id":"copy-of-the-complete-stories-of-leonora-carrington","title":"Exposition - Nathalie Leger","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eExposition by Nathalie Léger, translated by Amanda DeMarco \/ ISBN 9781948980036 \/ 160-page paperback from Dorothy Project\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst sentence: \"Surrender, premeditate nothing, want nothing, neither discern nor dissect nor stare, but rather shift, dodge, lose focus, and--slowing down--consider the only material that presents itself, as it presents itself, in its disorder and even in its order.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e***\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eExposition is the first in a triptych of books by the award-winning writer and archivist Nathalie Léger that includes Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress. In each, Léger sets the story of a female artist against the background of her own life and research—an archivist’s journey into the self, into the lives that history hides from us. Here, Léger’s subject is the Countess of Castiglione (1837–1899), who at the dawn of photography dedicated herself to becoming the most photographed woman in the world, modeling for hundreds of photos, including “Scherzo di Follia,” among the most famous in history. Set long before our own “selfie” age, Exposition is a remarkably modern investigation into the curses of beauty, fame, vanity, and age, as well as the obsessive drive to control and commodify one’s image.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNathalie Léger is the award-winning author of Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress, as well as an editor and archivist. She has curated exhibitions on Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett for the Centre Pompidou, and is Director of the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, an organization dedicated to preserving the archives of modern French writers.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dorothy Project","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39371683365040,"sku":"9781948980036","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/9781948980036-Exposition-Leger2.jpg?v=1615651420"},{"product_id":"copy-of-exposition-1","title":"The Taiga Syndrome - Cristina Rivera Garza","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza \/ ISBN 9780997366679 \/ 128-page paperback from Dorothy Project\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e***\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFairy tale meets detective drama in this David Lynch-like novel by a writer Jonathan Lethem calls \"one of Mexico's greatest...we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFiction. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana. A fairy tale run amok, THE TAIGA SYNDROME follows an unnamed female Ex-Detective as she searches for a couple who has fled to the far reaches of the earth. A betrayed husband is convinced by a brief telegram that his second ex-wife wants him to track her down -- that she wants to be found. He hires the Ex-Detective, who sets out with a translator into a snowy, hostile forest where strange things happen and translation betrays both sense and one's senses. Tales of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood haunt the Ex-Detective's quest, though the lessons of her journey are more experiential than moral: that just as love can fly away, sometimes unloving flies away as well. That sometimes leaving everything behind is the only thing left to do.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"This novel, in a translation by Levine and Kana, is taught, lyrical, and strange, and it fits right in with Dorothy, A Publishing Project's commitment to work that challenges what genres and forms can do. Like the best speculative fiction, it follows the sinuous paths of its own logic but gives the reader plenty of room to play. Fans of fairy tales and detective stories, Kathryn Davis and Idra Novey, will all find something to love. An eerie, slippery gem of a book.\"—Kirkus Reviews, [starred review]\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dorothy Project","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39371738742960,"sku":"9780997366679","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/9780997366679-Taiga-Syndrome2.jpg?v=1615651238"},{"product_id":"the-posthumous-works-of-thomas-pilaster","title":"The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster - Eric Chevillard","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster by Eric Chevillard \/ Translated by Chris Clarke \/ 182-page paperback \/ ISBN 9781734976670 \/ Sublunary Editions \/ 2021\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eÉric Chevillard is counted among the most inventive prose stylists writing in the French language. He has published more than twenty novels, along with several volumes based on his blog, L'Autofictif. Previous translations of his work into English include Prehistoric Times (tr. Alyson Waters, Archipelago), Palafox (tr. Wyatt Mason, Archipelago), The Crab Nebula (tr. Jordan Stump and Eleanor Hardin, Nebraska), Demolishing Nissard (tr. Jordan Stump, Dalkey), and On the Ceiling (tr. Jordan Stump, Nebraska).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe literary world owes a great debt of gratitude to the executors who, charged with burning the remaining papers of their authorial charges, refuse, instead publishing them for the fanatic and meddlesome among us. Collected here are the remaining unpublished works--diaries and drafts, aphorisms and ephemera--of the late Thomas Pilaster, compiled by Marc-Antoine Marson, a longtime friend and fellow writer with whom Pilaster maintained a healthy rivalry. With rough edges and glints of genius present in equal measure, scholars and lay-readers alike will treasure these curious texts--\"So Many Seahorses,\" \"The Vander Sons Company,\" and \"Three Attempts at the Reintroduction of the Man-Eating Tiger Into Our Countryside,\" to name a few--for generations to come.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sublunary Editions","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39373297582256,"sku":"9781734976670","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Chevillard-Thomas-Pilaster2.jpg?v=1622085598"},{"product_id":"the-suspended-vocation","title":"The Suspended Vocation - Pierre Klossowski","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Suspended Vocation by \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e \u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePierre Klossowski \/ \u003c\/span\u003eTranslated by Jeremy M. Davies and Anna Fitzgerald, with an introduction by Brian Evenson \/ slim paperback \/ ISBN 9781734838206\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Seventy years after it was written, Pierre Klossowski’s first novel, The Suspended Vocation, has finally found its way into English, providing the occasion to reassess his subterranean, but nevertheless profound, influence on post-war fiction and philosophy.\"--from \"\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2020\/08\/08\/pierre-klossowski-brilliant-brother-of-balthus\/\" target=\"_blank\"\u003ePierre Klossowski, Brilliant Brother of Balthus\u003c\/a\u003e\" by Ryan Ruby in the NYR\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMade available in English for the very first time by NY based Small Press, Pierre Klossowski's debut novel, The Suspended Vocation, fictionalizes and satirizes the great erotic artist, philosopher, and iconoclast's brief, wartime flirtation with the priesthood, portraying the Church as a haven for conspiracy, idolatry, perversion, and even atheism.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWritten in the form of a disapproving monograph on an anonymous, confessional novel (itself titled The Suspended Vocation), it is the story of the hapless Jérôme, whose lust for holiness leads him astray in a cloistered world full of ideological and physical temptations.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSometimes a knowing critique of \"religious fiction,\" sometimes a wicked self-parody of Klossowski's own lifelong obsessions, and sometimes a sacerdotal spy novel, The Suspended Vocation is one of the strangest and most audacious debuts in twentieth-century literature.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Small Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39373438091440,"sku":"9781734838206","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/SuspendedVocation-Klossowski.jpg?v=1621913799"},{"product_id":"the-hearing-trumpet","title":"The Hearing Trumpet - Leonora Carrington","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington \/ ISBN 9780997366648 \/ 224-page paperback from New York Review Books Classics\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e***\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAn old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLeonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and \u003cem\u003eThe Hearing Trumpet\u003c\/em\u003e is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e[O]ne of the great comic novels of the twentieth century, \u003ci\u003eThe Hearing Trumpet\u003c\/i\u003e reads like a spectacular reassemblage of old and new genres, the campy, illegitimate offspring of Margaret Cavendish’s romances and Robert Graves’s histories, with Thomas Pynchon's riotous paranoia spliced in to keep it limber and receptive to the political anxieties of its moment.—Merve Emre, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHer 1974 novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Hearing Trumpet\u003c\/i\u003e, newly reissued, stands out as something at last truly radical, undoing not only our expectations of time and space, but of the psyche and its boundaries. . . . [A] mind-flaying masterpiece, held together by Carrington’s gifts of wit, imagination and suspense.\u003cbr\u003e—Blake Butler, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA version of Carrington's episode in the sanatorium also found its way into a novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Hearing Trumpet\u003c\/i\u003e, written in the fifties or early sixties. But it's not lightly fictionalized autobiography along the lines of \u003ci\u003eThe Bell Jar\u003c\/i\u003e. Here the experience is transformed into something more fabulist, and much more interesting than the memoir. In the novel, delusions of grandeur become real powers.\u003cbr\u003e—Eliza Gabbert, \u003ci\u003eThe Paris Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Hearing Trumpet\u003c\/i\u003e . . . reads on its parodic surface like an Agatha Christie domestic mystery, but one melted, dissolved by extreme heat into something unthinkably other, and reconstructed as the casebook of an alchemist. . . . It asks its readers to allow the dark, allow the wild and rethink how power works. It is a work of massive optimism. . . . One of the most original, joyful, satisfying, and quietly visionary novels of the twentieth century.\u003cbr\u003e—Ali Smith\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39377193599152,"sku":"9781681374642","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Leonora-Carrington-HearingTrumpet.jpg?v=1615651020"},{"product_id":"the-penguin-book-of-japanese-short-stories","title":"The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, edited by Jay Rubin \/ ISBN 9780241311905 \/ \u003c\/em\u003e\u003cem\u003e576-page paperback from Penguin \/ A major collection of Japanese short stories, many appearing in English for the first time, with an introduction by Haruki Murakami \/ \u003c\/em\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003elight wear from inbound shipping\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e***\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the art of the Japanese short story, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the remarkable practitioners writing today. Edited by acclaimed translator Jay Rubin, who has himself freshly translated some of the stories, and with an introduction by Haruki Murakami, this book is a revelation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStories by writers already well known to English-language readers are included--like Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Murakami, Mishima, Kawabata, and Yoshimoto--as well as many surprising new finds. From Yuko Tsushima's \"Flames\" to Yuten Sawanishi's \"Filling Up with Sugar\" to Shin'ichi Hoshi's \"Shoulder-Top Secretary\" to Banana Yoshimoto's \"Bee Honey,\" The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories is filled with fear, charm, beauty, and comedy.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39386004684976,"sku":"9780241311905","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/PenguinJapaneseStories2.jpg?v=1615651203"},{"product_id":"jakob-von-gunten","title":"Jakob von Gunten - Robert Walser","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eJakob von Gunten by Robert Walser \/ ISBN 9780940322219 \/ paperback from NYRB Classics \/ My favorite book.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Swiss writer \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=robert+walser\u0026amp;type=product\"\u003eRobert Walser\u003c\/a\u003e is one of the quiet geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, Walser wrote a range of short stories, essays, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest. The book is a young man's inquisitive and irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising originality and disconcerting humor, whose beautiful sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of a painting by Henri Rousseau.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"As a literary character, Jakob von Gunten is without precedent. In the pleasure he takes in picking away at himself he has something of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and, behind him, of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau of theConfessions. 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Between these two poles, the book maps Walser’s outer and inner wanderings in various narrative modes. Here you find him writing in the persona of a girl composing an essay on the seasons, of Don Juan at the moment he senses he’s outplayed his role, and of Turkey’s last sultan shortly after he’s deposed. In other stories, a man falls in love with the heroine of the penny dreadful he’s reading (and she with him?), and the lady of a house catches her servant spread out on the divan casually reading a classic. Three longer autobiographical stories—“Wenzel,” “Würzburg,” and “Louise”—brace the whole. In addition to a representative offering of Walser’s short prose, of which he was one of literature’s most original, multifarious, and lucid practitioners, Little Snow Landscape forms a kind of novel, however apparently plotless, from the vast unfinishable one he was constantly writing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39389202481328,"sku":"9781681375229","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/LittleSnowRobertWalser.jpg?v=1621914070"},{"product_id":"copy-of-jakob-von-gunten-1","title":"A Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories - Robert Walser","description":"\u003cp\u003eA Schoolboy's Diary and Other Stories by Robert Walser \/ ISBN 9781590176726 \/ paperback from New York Review of Books Classics\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003c\/em\u003eA Schoolboy’s Diary brings together more than seventy of Robert Walser’s strange and wonderful stories, most never before available in English. 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Throughout, Walser’s careening, confounding, delicious voice holds the reader transfixed.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39389247307952,"sku":"9781590176726","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Walser-Schoolboy-1.jpg?v=1615680693"},{"product_id":"the-penguin-book-of-the-prose-poem","title":"The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Penguin Book of the Prose Poem \/ ISBN 9780141984568 \/ Edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod \/ 480-page paperback from Penguin Classics\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e***\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAn essential anthology that puts contemporary geniuses Eileen Myles and Margaret Atwood in conversation with literary classics Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde about the liberating and unique combination of poetry and prose\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe prose poem has proven one of the most innovative and versatile poetic forms of recent years. 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Noel-Tod even calls it \"an alternative history of modern poetry.\" In The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Patricia Lockwood and Claudia Rankine rub shoulders with Margaret Atwood and Adrienne Rich; Allen Ginsberg and Gertrude Stein appear with Lu Xun and Jorge Luis; Czeslaw Milosz sits just pages from Eileen Myles.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39389318971568,"sku":"9780141984568","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/PenguinProsePoem2.jpg?v=1615651585"},{"product_id":"copy-of-guilty-the-lost-classic-novel","title":"Machines in the Head - Selected Stories - Anna Kavan (light wear)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMachines in the Head: Selected Stories by Anna Kavan \/ ISBN 9781681374147 \/ paperback from New York Review of Books Classics\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e***\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEnter the strange and haunting world of Anna Kavan, author of mind-bending stories that blend science fiction and the author's own harrowing experiences with drug addiction, in this new collection of her best short stories. Anna Kavan is one of the great originals of twentieth-century fiction, comparable to Leonora Carrington and Jean Rhys, a writer whose stories explored the inner world of her imagination and plumbed the depths of her long addiction to heroin. This new selection of Kavan’s stories gathers the best work from across the many decades of her career, including oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and institutionalization from Asylum Piece (1940), moving evocations of wartime from I Am Lazarus (1945), fantastic and surrealist pieces from A Bright Green Field (1958), and stories of addiction from Julia and the Bazooka (1970). Kavan’s turn to science fiction in her final novel, Ice, is reflected in her late stories, while “Starting a Career,” about a mercenary dealer of state secrets, is published here for the first time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Entering this haunting realm, the reader will crave to plunge deeper into her metallic and poetically surreal universe.\"--Patti Smith\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKavan experimented throughout her writing career with results that are moving, funny, bizarre, poignant, often unsettling, always unique. Machines in the Head offers American readers the first full overview of the work of a fearless and dazzling literary explorer.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39389695213744,"sku":"9781681374147","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/AnnaKavan-MachinesNYRB.jpg?v=1622082361"},{"product_id":"fantomas-versus-the-multinational-vampires","title":"Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires - Julio Cortazar","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires by Julio Cortazar \/ ISBN 9781584351344 \/ Translated by David Kurnick \/ small paperback from Semiotext(e)\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe first translation of Julio Cortázar's genre-jumping meta-comic\/novella, featuring Cortázar himself, Susan Sontag, and Octavio Paz in a race to prevent international bibliocide.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e***\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst published in Spanish in 1975 and previously untranslated, Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires is Julio Cortázar's genre-jumping mash-up of his participation in the Second Russell Tribunal on human rights abuses in Latin America and his cameo appearance in issue number 201 of the Mexican comic book series Fantomas: The Elegant Menace. With his characteristic narrative inventiveness, Cortázar offers a quixotic meta-comic\/novella that challenges not only the form of the novel but its political weight in contemporary cultural life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNeeding something to read on the train from Brussels (where he had attended the ineffectual tribunal meeting), our hero (Julio Cortázar) picks up the latest issue of the Fantomas comic. He grows increasingly absorbed by the comic book's tale of bibliocide (a sinister bibliophobic plot to obliterate every book from the archives of humanity), especially when he sees the character Fantomas embark upon a series of telephone conversations with literary figures, starting with “The Great Argentine Writer” himself, Julio Cortázar (and also including Octavio Paz and a tough-talking Susan Sontag). Soon, Cortázar begins to erase the thin line between real-life atrocities and fictional mayhem in an attempt to bring attention to the human rights violations taking place with impunity in the country from which he was exiled.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSimultaneously funny and damning—Cortázar makes sure to include the Russell Tribunal's full report as an appendix—the novella is a quick, engaging read, sure to please the author's many fans.—Publishers Weekly\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"semiotext(e)","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39390054056112,"sku":"9781584351344","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/FantomasVersustheMultinationalVampires2.jpg?v=1615651696"},{"product_id":"memoirs-of-a-space-traveler","title":"Memoirs of a Space Traveler - Stanislaw Lem","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMemoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy, by \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=stanislaw+lem\"\u003eStanislaw Lem\u003c\/a\u003e \/ ISBN 9780262538503 \/ paperback from MIT Press\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe travels of Ijon Tichy, a Gulliver of the space age, who encounters faulty time machines, intelligent washing machines, suicidal potatoes, and other puzzling phenomena. Memoirs of a Space Traveler follows the adventures of Ijon Tichy, a Gulliver of the space age, who leads readers through strange experiments involving, among other puzzling phenomena, faulty time machines, intelligent washing machines, and suicidal potatoes. The scientists Tichy encounters make plans that are grandiose, and strike bargains that are Faustian. They pursue humanity's greatest and most ancient obsessions: immortality, artificial intelligence, and top-of-the-line consumer items.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy turns satirical, philosophical, and absurd, these stories express the most starkly original and prescient notions of a master of speculative fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStanisław Lem (1921–2006), a writer called “worthy of the Nobel Prize” by the New York Times, was an internationally renowned author of novels, short stories, literary criticism, and philosophical essays. His books have been translated into forty-four languages and have sold more than thirty million copies.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39392588595376,"sku":"9780262538503","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Lem-SpaceTraveler2.jpg?v=1615646927"},{"product_id":"copy-of-memoirs-of-a-space-traveler","title":"The Invincible - Stanislaw Lem","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Invincible by \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=stanislaw+lem\"\u003eStanislaw Lem\u003c\/a\u003e \/ ISBN 9780262538473 \/ paperback from MIT Press. I'm glad MIT Press brought some Lem back into print in nice editions.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the grand tradition of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Stanisław Lem's The Invincible tells the story of a space cruiser sent to an obscure planet to determine the fate of a sister spaceship whose communication with Earth has abruptly ceased. Landing on the planet Regis III, navigator Rohan and his crew discover a form of life that has apparently evolved from autonomous, self-replicating machines—perhaps the survivors of a “robot war.” Rohan and his men are forced to confront the classic quandary: what course of action can humanity take once it has reached the limits of its knowledge? In The Invincible, Lem has his characters confront the inexplicable and the bizarre: the problem that lies just beyond analytical reach.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStanisław Lem (1921–2006), a writer called “worthy of the Nobel Prize” by the New York Times, was an internationally renowned author of novels, short stories, literary criticism, and philosophical essays. His books have been translated into forty-four languages and have sold more than thirty million copies.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39392595116208,"sku":"9780262538473","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Lem-Invincible2.jpg?v=1615646538"},{"product_id":"head-to-toe-portrait-of-suzanne","title":"Head-to-Toe Portrait of Suzanne - Roland Topor","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eHead-to-Toe Portrait of Suzanne by Roland Topor \/ ISBN 9780993148750 \/ Small paperback from the legends at Atlas Press (UK)\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWorking from the 1960s on, the French writer, artist and illustrator Roland Topor (1938–97) was an all-round maverick known for his paintings and drawings as much as for his novels (such as The Tenant), plays and short stories, all dominated by a sense of irrational, everyday menace. He was also a filmmaker, actor (appearing as Renfield in Herzog's Nosferatu) and the cofounder, with Arrabal and Jodorowsky, of the Panic performance art movement. The tone of Topor’s fiction and art could be interpreted as humorous, but it’s a humor pushed deep into discomfort, almost to the point of total horror. From the collision of these factors, rooted in the author’s experiences and his irrepressible personality, come works increasingly seen as unique in European art and writing of the late 20th century.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHead-to-Toe Portrait of Suzanne tells of an isolated, misanthropic narrator and his encounter with the beautiful Suzanne, an old flame from his past. It is at once a fable, a love story of enormous tenderness and a tale of increasingly unpleasant events that culminate in horror and atrocity. With its distinct blend of sympathetic cynicism and grotesquerie, Head-to-Toe Portrait of Suzanne―Topor’s first work to be translated into English in half a century―offers an ideal introduction to the work and worldview of an artist currently undergoing a major reassessment and rediscovery in his home country and beyond.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Atlas Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39401746530480,"sku":"9780993148750","price":13.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Topor-Head-to-Toe-Portrait-of-Suzanne.jpg?v=1615778579"},{"product_id":"munchausen-and-clarissa-a-berlin-novel","title":"Munchausen and Clarissa - Paul Scheerbart","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMunchausen and Clarissa: A Berlin Novel by Paul Scheerbart \/ ISBN 9781939663511 \/ small paperback with flaps \/ \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/spotlight-collection-wakefield-press\"\u003eWakefield Press\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBaron Munchausen returns with visions of mobile architecture and journeys to sausage moons, in this previously untranslated novel from Paul Scheerbart.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is 1905 and a raging stupidity is holding sway over Europe. As an 18-year-old Clarissa and her family take refuge on the icy shores of Lake Wannsee, the legendary Baron Munchausen makes an unexpected appearance at their door. 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, to a select gathering of Berlin celebrities. 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. 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 among sausage moons and sun-skins.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=paul+scheerbart\"\u003ePaul Scheerbart\u003c\/a\u003e (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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wakefield Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39415821729968,"sku":"9781939663511","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/PaulScheerbart-Munchausen.jpg?v=1622084571"},{"product_id":"medusas-daughters","title":"Medusa's Daughters - Magic and Monstrosity from Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siecle","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMedusa's Daughters edited by Theodora Goss \/ ISBN 9781941360361 \/ 300-page paperback with flaps \/ Lanternfish Press \/ Clockwork Editions\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Dr. Theodora Goss has gathered a collection of strengths: gothic tales of women, by women, some of which had been lost to time and forgetting...creating a gothic landscape that is at once timeless and timely, filled with brilliant, angry, determined women who leap right off the page.”—Fran Wilde\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“\u003cem\u003eMedusa’s Daughters\u003c\/em\u003e is a sinister Gothic delight, full of unrepentant witches, ghosts, dryads, and changelings. Goss is an expert guide to the strange codes of fin-de-siècle patriarchy and the bold, monstrous women who defied them.”—Barbara Barrow\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter a period of decline, Gothic literature underwent a revival at the end of the 1800s. As the century turned, women writers such as Vernon Lee, Mary Coleridge, and Rosamund Mariott Watson left an indelible mark on fantasy and horror literature. Like Medusa herself, their poetry and short stories embody the very essence of magic and monstrosity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCurated and annotated by award-winning fantasy author and Victorianist Theodora Goss, this collection of rare and strange gems serves as a tantalizing sampler of work by fin-de-siècle women writers, whose legacy still echoes in the speculative fiction we know and love today.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lanternfish Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39415876976816,"sku":"9781941360361","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/MedusasDaughters-cov.jpg?v=1615943236"},{"product_id":"the-collected-poems-of-chika-sagawa","title":"The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa \/ paperback in the Modern Library Torchbearers series\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWinner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation \/ The electrifying collected works of “one of the most innovative and prominent avant-garde poets in early twentieth-century Japan” (The New Yorker) \/ Translated by and with an introduction by Sawako Nakayasu\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAn important and daringly experimental voice in Tokyo’s avant-garde poetry scene, Chika Sagawa broke with the gender-bound traditions of Japanese poetry. Growing up in isolated rural Japan, Sagawa moved to Tokyo at seventeen, and begin publishing her work at eighteen. She was immediately recognized as a leading light of the male-dominated Japanese literary scene; her work combines striking, unique imagery with Western influences. The results are short, sharp, surreal poems about human fragility and the beauty of nature from Japan’s first female Modernist poet.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Modern Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39431653720240,"sku":"9780593230015","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/ChikaSagawa-Poems-cover.jpg?v=1616114948"},{"product_id":"rogomelec","title":"Rogomelec - Leonor Fini","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eRogomelec by Leonor Fini \/ ISBN 9781939663481 \/ small paperback with flaps published by \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/spotlight-collection-wakefield-press\"\u003eWakefield Press\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003c\/em\u003eOriginally published in French in 1979, \u003cem\u003eRogomelec\u003c\/em\u003e was the third of Leonor Fini’s novels. All the qualities of the paintings for which she is famed can be found in it: an undermining of patriarchy, the ambiguities of gender and the slipperiness of desire, along with darker hints of cruelty and the voluptuousness of fear.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis novella’s ambiguous narrator sets off for the isolated locale of Rogomelec―where a crumbling monastery serves as a sanatorium and offers a cure involving a diet of plants and flowers―and moves through a waking dream of strangely scented monks, vibratory concerts in a cavernous ossuary and ritualist pomp with costumes of octopi and shining beetles. As the days unfold, the narrator discovers that the “the celebration of the king” is approaching, the events of which will lead to a shocking discovery in Rogomelec’s Gothic ruins.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis first English translation includes 14 drawings by Fini that accompanied the novella’s original publication.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBorn in Argentina and raised in Italy, Leonor Fini (1907–96) concluded a rebellious youth with a move to Paris, where there followed six decades of work as artist, illustrator, designer and author with ties to the Surrealist movement. Rejecting the role of muse, her work focused on portrayals of women as subjects with desire rather than objects of desire. She was featured in MoMA’s landmark 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, and imagery from her painting Le Bout du Monde was used by Madonna in her 1994 video \"Bedtime Story.\" Fini’s first Paris show was curated by Christian Dior; while working for Schiaparelli she designed the bottle for Shocking, the designer’s top-selling perfume (and the acknowledged inspiration for Gaultier's torso-shaped bottles). She also designed the costumes for two films, Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet (1954) and John Huston's A Walk with Love and Death (1968). Fini is also well known for her illustrations for Pauline Reage’s Story of O (one of her costumes inspired the book’s final scene).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wakefield Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39463451623600,"sku":"9781939663481","price":12.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/Leonor-Fini-Rogomelec-cov.jpg?v=1621715109"},{"product_id":"circles-of-dread","title":"Circles of Dread - Jean Ray","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eCircles of Dread by Jean Ray \/ ISBN 9781939663528 \/ paperback with flaps from \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/spotlight-collection-wakefield-press\"\u003eWakefield Press\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWartime tales of disquiet and dread from Jean Ray, author of Cruise of Shadows and progenitor of the “Belgian School of the Strange”\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDuring the Occupation, severed from contact with France and other countries, Belgian publishing turned inward, and forgotten authors such as Jean Ray were given new leases on literary life. Embracing the influence of American pulp fiction, Ray’s short stories found a new audience during World War II, and gave voice to a realm of fear and unease that blended fantasy with a Catholic heritage and a distinctly bourgeois everyday.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eCircles of Dread\u003c\/em\u003e, Ray’s fourth short-story collection, was first published in 1943, the same year that saw the appearance of his best-known work, the novel Malpertuis. This collection’s portholes onto sinister fantasy include such stories as “The Marlyweck Cemetery,” “The Inn of the Specters” and “The Story of the Wûlkh.” Ray takes the reader from the quiet streets of Ghent to the scrambled streets of London to the Flinders river in Australia, with tales spun from such materials as the iron hand of Götz von Berlichingen, the black mirror of John Dee, a Moustiers ceramic plate and the shifting, extradimensional menace of a predatory cemetery.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlternately referred to as the “Belgian Poe” and the “Flemish Jack London,” \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=%22jean+ray%22\"\u003eJean Ray\u003c\/a\u003e (1887-1964) delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of Dickens and Chaucer. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition Era, an executioner in Venice and a Chicago gangster in fact covered over a more prosaic existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wakefield Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39463461224624,"sku":"9781939663528","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/JeanRay-CirclesOfDread-cover.jpg?v=1616634932"},{"product_id":"the-great-nocturnal","title":"The Great Nocturnal - Jean Ray","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Great Nocturnal by Jean Ray \/ ISBN 9781939663498 \/ paperback with flaps from \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/collections\/spotlight-collection-wakefield-press\"\u003eWakefield Press\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIn English for the first time, the collection that launched Jean Ray’s reputation as the Belgian master of the weird tale\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter the commercial failure of his 1931 collection of fantastical stories Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray spent the next decade writing and publishing under other names in the stifling atmosphere of Ghent. Only in the midst of the darkest years of the Nazi Occupation of Belgium would he suddenly publish a spate of books under his earlier nom de plume. The first of these volumes was The Great Nocturnal.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublished in 1942, the collection, as its subtitle indicates, consists of tales of fear and dread, but a dread evoked not by the standard tropes of horror but what had by now evolved into Ray’s personal brand of fear, drawn from a specifically Belgian notion of the fantastic that lies alongside the banality of everyday life. An aging haberdasher’s monotonous life opens up to a spiritual fourth dimension (and serial murder); an inebriated young man in a tavern draws cryptic symbols and mutters statements that evoke an inexplicable terror among some sailors, and, as he sobers up, himself; three students drink Finnish Kümmel and keep watch over a deceased woman’s apartment, awaiting a horrific transmutation. Yet these tales are laced with a certain mordant humor that bears as much allegiance with Ambrose Bierce as Edgar Allan Poe, and toy as much with the reader’s expectations as they do with their characters.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/search?q=%22jean+ray%22\"\u003eJean Ray\u003c\/a\u003e (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 authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it of 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wakefield Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39463969915056,"sku":"9781939663498","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/JeanRay-GreatNocturnal-cover.jpg?v=1616640952"},{"product_id":"the-promise","title":"The Promise - Silvina Ocampo","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Promise by Silvina Ocampo \/ ISBN 9780872867710 \/ 120-page paperback from City Lights\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"A bold phantasmagoria, marked by Ocampo's insight that in extremis, delirium can be the highest form of truth.\"--New York Review of Books\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"The world is ready for her blend of insane Angela Carter with the originality of Clarice Lispector.\"—Mariana Enriquez, LitHub\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Both her debut story collection, Forgotten Journey, and her only novel, The Promise, are strikingly 20th-century texts, written in a high-modernist mode rarely found in contemporary fiction.\"—Lily Meyer, NPR\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Of all the words that could define her, the most accurate is, I think, ingenious.\"—Jorge Luis Borges\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"I don't know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us.\"—Italo Calvino\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Few writers have an eye for the small horrors of everyday life; fewer still see the everyday marvelous. Other than Silvina Ocampo, I cannot think of a single writer who, at any time in any language, has chronicled both with such wise and elegant humor.\"—Alberto Manguel\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"This haunting and vital final work from Ocampo, her only novel, is about a woman's life flashing before her eyes when she's stranded in the ocean. . . . the book’s true power is its depiction of the strength of the mind and the necessity of storytelling, which for the narrator is literally staving off death. Ocampo’s portrait of one woman’s interior life is forceful and full of hope.\"—Gabe Habash, Starred Review, Publishers Weekly\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Ocampo is beyond great—she is necessary.\"—Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Like William Blake, Ocampo's first voice was that of a visual artist; in her writing she retains the will to unveil immaterial so that we might at least look at it if not touch it.\"—Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA woman traveling on a transatlantic ship has fallen overboard. Adrift at sea, she makes a promise to Saint Rita, \"arbiter of the impossible,\" that if she survives, she will write her life story. As she drifts, she wonders what she might include in the story of her life—a repertoire of miracles, threats, and people parade tumultuously through her mind. Little by little, her imagination begins to commandeer her memories, escaping the strictures of realism.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTranslated into English for the very first time, The Promise showcases Silvina Ocampo at her most feminist, idiosyncratic and subversive. Ocampo worked quietly to perfect this novella over the course of twenty-five years, nearly up until the time of her death in 1993.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"City Lights","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39483357167792,"sku":"9780872867710","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/SilvinaOcampo-ThePromise-cover.jpg?v=1616901244"},{"product_id":"malina","title":"Malina - Ingeborg Bachmann","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMalina by Ingeborg Bachmann \/ ISBN 9780811228725 \/ 283-paperback from New Directions\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Bachmann’s vision is so original that the effect is like having a new letter of the alphabet.\" --The Guardian\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Ingeborg Bachmann invites the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men: viewed, through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety, and genius.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIngeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) is widely regarded as one of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century. 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This is the first in a series of bizarre experiences that drive Asa deeper into the mysteries of this rural landscape filled with eccentric characters and unidentifiable creatures, leading her to question her role in this world, and eventually, her sanity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBorn in Hiroshima in 1983, Hiroko Oyamada won the Shincho Prize for New Writers for The Factory, which was drawn from her experiences working as a temp for an automaker’s subsidiary. 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This has been particularly so in respect of its rich storytelling tradition...Surrealism draws on older traditions of storytelling, most notably the fairy tale and the Gothic novel...it seeks to capture the mysterious essence of reality and to embody myth and the forces set free by desire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"The range is impressive, and includes several women...Gisele Prassinos...Leonora Carrington and Meret Oppenheim; contemporary writers like Rikki Ducornet. Richardson makes available in English several early treasures, such as Salvador Dali's Reverie and Pierre Unik's Long Live the Bride, a wonderful tale of mistaken identity and metonymical transfer of meaning.\" --Fiona Bradley in the Times Literary Supplement\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"'I went to fetch my car, but my chauffeur, who has no sense at all, had just buried it,' writes Leonora Carrington in this captivating collection of tales from 17 languages.\"--The Observer\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dedalus Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39500717949104,"sku":"9781873982457","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/DedalusBookOfSurrealismIdentity.jpg?v=1617133783"},{"product_id":"collected-poems-of-bob-kaufman","title":"Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eCollected Poems of Bob Kaufman \/ ISBN 9780872867697 \/ 276-page paperback from City Lights\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e***\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e2020 American Book Award Winner\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman is the most comprehensive selection of his verse to date, a volume that contains a lot of previously uncollected work. … this book makes a case for him as a perceptive and eccentric American original, a man who seems to have fallen out of the sky like a meteor.\"—The New York Times\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"The body of work is small but voluminous in intensity, spirit and soul, with a lineage that runs from Charles Baudelaire to Charles Mingus. Kaufman—with his commitment to the art, his surreal eye on the urban experience and beyond it, and his jazz timing—brings San Francisco to life.\"—San Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Twentieth-century American poetry cannot be fully comprehended without Bob Kaufman. City Lights and the editors do a grand service to literature by publishing Kaufman's poetry in one collection. … This is a necessary gift for poets and poetry readers.\"—Booklist\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“He was an original voice. No one else talked like him. No one else wrote poetry like him.”—Lawrence Ferlinghetti\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBob Kaufman (1925–1986) was one of the most important—and most original—poets of the twentieth century. He is among the inaugurators of what today is characterized as the Afro-Surreal, uniting the surrealist practice of automatic writing with the jazz concept of spontaneous composition. 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Following the scent of his butane on one anonymous North Beach afternoon led Philip Lamantia to audibly utter to me that Bob Kaufman as per incandescent singularity is 'our poet.'\"—Will Alexander, author of Compression \u0026amp; Purity\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"City Lights","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39512462098608,"sku":"9780872867697","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/products\/BobKaufman-cover.jpg?v=1617308149"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0510\/5215\/0960\/collections\/BINGATA3.jpg?v=1693248495","url":"https:\/\/50wattsbooks.com\/en-ca\/collections\/fiction-literature.oembed?page=24","provider":"50 Watts Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}