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Originally published in Danish in 1910, Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah is a fevered pulp novel that reads like nothing else of its time: an anomaly within the tradition of the Danish novel, and one that makes for a startlingly modern read to this day. Combining elements of the serial film, detective story and gothic horror novel, Kzradock is a surreal foray into psychoanalytic mysticism.Opening in a Parisian insane asylum where Dr. Renard de Montpensier is conducting hypnotic séances with the titular Onion Man, the novel escalates quickly with the introduction of battling detectives, murders and a puma in a hallucinating movie theater before shifting to the chalk cliffs of Brighton. It is there that the narrator must confront a ghost child, a scalped detective, a skeleton, a deaf-mute dog and a manipulative tapeworm in order to properly confront his own sanity and learn the spiritual lesson of the human onion.When Gershom Scholem read the novel in its 1912 German translation on the recommendation of Walter Benjamin, he concluded: “This is a great book, and it speaks a formidable language … This book lays out the metaphysics of doubt.”

This fierce fable of childbirth by German Surrealist Unica Zürn 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 Zürn'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 Zürn (1916–70) was born in Grünewald, 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.

The unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement, admired by Mallarmé, Jarry and Gide, in a new translationWhen Marcel Schwob published The Book of Monelle in French in 1894, it immediately became the unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement, admired by such contemporaries as Stéphane Mallarmé, Alfred Jarry and André Gide. A carefully woven assemblage of legends, aphorisms, fairy tales and nihilistic philosophy, it remains a deeply enigmatic and haunting work more than a century later, a gathering of literary and personal ruins written in a style that evokes both the Brothers Grimm and Friedrich Nietzsche. The Book of Monelle was the result of Schwob’s intense emotional suffering over the loss of his love, a “girl of the streets” named Louise, whom he had befriended in 1891 and who succumbed to tuberculosis two years later. Transforming her into the innocent prophet of destruction, Monelle, Schwob tells the stories of her various sisters: girls succumbing to disillusionment, caught between the misleading world of childlike fantasy and the bitter world of reality. This new translation reintroduces a true fin-de-siècle masterpiece into English.A secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño, Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman (whom he translated into French). Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and he was the uncle of Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun.

A collection of previously unpublished erotic manuscripts from the author of The Songs of BilitisA bestselling author in his time, Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925) was a friend of, and influence on, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde and Stephane Mallarmé among others. He achieved instant notoriety with Aphrodite and The Songs of Bilitis, but it was only after his death that Louÿs' true legacy was to be discovered: nearly 900 pounds of erotic manuscripts were found in his home, all of them immediately scattered among collectors and many subsequently lost. Since then, it has become clear that Louÿs is the greatest French writer of erotica there ever was. The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners was the first of his erotic manuscripts to see publication, and it also remains his most outrageous—an erotic classic in which humor takes precedence over arousal. By means of shockingly filthy advice—ostensibly offered “for use in educational establishments”—couched in a hilariously parodic admonitory tone, Louÿs turns late-nineteenth-century manners roundly on their head, with ass prominently skyward. Whether offering rules for etiquette in church, school or home, or outlining a girl's duties toward family, neighbor or God, Louÿs manages to mock every institution and leave no taboo unsullied. The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners has only grown more scandalous and subversive since its first appearance in 1926.

A how-to manual for the armchair adventurerPierre Mac Orlan’s 1920 Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer was at once a paean to the adventure story, a tongue-in-cheek guidebook to the genre’s real-life practitioners and a grim if unspoken coda to the disasters of World War I. “It must be established as a law that adventure in itself does not exist,” Mac Orlan stipulates. “Adventure is in the mind of the one who pursues it, and no sooner is he able to touch it with his finger than it vanishes, to reappear much farther off in another form, at the limits of the imagination.” This handbook outlines two classes of adventurer: the active adventurer (sailors, soldiers, criminals) and the passive adventurer (sedentary parasites who draw sustenance from the exploits of the former). Roaming from battlefields to pirate ships to port-town taverns, and offering advice on reading, traveling and eroticism, Mac Orlan’s Handbook is ultimately a how-to manual for the imagination, and a formulation of the stark choice all would-be adventurers must face: to live or write.Generally known as the author of Le Quai des brumes (the basis for Marcel Carné’s film of the same name), Pierre Mac Orlan (1882–1970) was a prolific writer of absurdist tales, adventure novels, flagellation erotica and essays, as well as the composer of a trove of songs made famous by the likes of Juliette Gréco. A member of both the Académie Goncourt and the Collège de ’Pataphysique, Mac Orlan was admired by everyone from Raymond Queneau and Boris Vian to André Malraux and Guy Debord.

Mademoiselle Bambù is Pierre Mac Orlan’s take on the spy novel, written and expanded between 1932 and 1966.Set in Hamburg, London, Palermo, Brest and other ports of call in the anxious Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, Mademoiselle Bambù tells the tales of three secret agents: the melancholic adventurer and accidental spy, Captain Hartmann; his enigmatic mistress from Naples (and a double agent for the Germans), Signorina Bambù; and the sinister Père Barbançon, who retires from his life of espionage and murder to eke out his troubled days in an aptly named “Boarding House of Usher,” where shadows are as likely to strangle a man as they are to haunt him.Like all of Mac Orlan’s novels, Mademoiselle Bambù is less a novel than a barometer of societal unease, crippling melancholy and dark humor.Pierre Mac Orlan (1882–1970) was a prolific writer of absurdist tales, adventure novels, flagellation erotica and essays, as well as the composer of a trove of songs made famous by the likes of Juliette Gréco. A member of both the Académie Goncourt and the Collège de ’Pataphysique, Mac Orlan was admired by everyone from Raymond Queneau and Boris Vian to André Malraux and Guy Debord.

Life in the Folds, originally published in French in 1949, is the Belgian-born author and artist Henri Michaux's (1899-1984) most direct exploration of the many forms of suffering, a laboratory of fantastical, destructive energies in which the poet presents his methods for dealing with the world around him. The first two sections offer such items as the Slapping Gun and the Man Sling (in the section "Freedom of Action") to the scenarios that call for defensive measures such as the "Constellation of Jabs" and the visceral "Blow of Fatigue" (in the section "Apparitions"). Also included is one of Michaux's more complex fantastical-anthropological travelogues, "Portrait of the Meidosems," an account of the ways and manners of a population of vague ectoplasmic figures, anguished filaments of sorts that struggle to exist but are never allowed to sit still. This volume charts a turning point in Michaux's life and in the world, where his earlier depictions of visualized psychology and suffering found representation in a traumatized Europe. Imbued by the war years, the Occupation and the horror of the concentration camps, Life in the Folds bears the scars of Michaux's own personal catastrophe--the loss of his wife, who had died of "atrocious burns" the previous year--and concludes with the autobiographical text, "Old Age of Pollagoras," a wearied testament uttered before a haunted "plain of death."

Walter Serner's first story collection, published in German in 1921, brought to narrative form the philosophy of his earlier Dada manifesto/handbook, Last Loosening: A Handbook for the Con Artist & Those Who Wish to Be One life is a con job and demands the skills of a swindler. With its depiction of a world of appearances in which nothing can be trusted, At the Blue Monkey helped establish the ex-doctor and renounced Dadaist as a literary Maupaussant of crime and offers in this first English translation 33 stories of criminals, con artists and prostitutes engaged in varieties of financial insolvency, embezzlement, sexual hijinks, long and short cons, and dalliances with venereal diseases and drugs.Told in a baroque, sometimes baffling poetry of underworld slang in an urban world of bars and rent-a-rooms, these short tales are presented to the reader like so many three-card Montes in which readers come to realize too late that they may well themselves be the literary mark.Walter Serner (1889 1942) helped found the Dada movement and embodied its most cynical and anarchic aspects. After breaking with the movement, he began publishing crime stories and the 1925 novel The Tigress. Moving constantly across Europe, he eventually disappeared and was rumored to have vanished into the criminal milieu he wrote about; in fact he had returned to Czechoslovakia, married and become a schoolteacher. In 1942, he and his wife presumably died after being moved from a concentration camp, his books banned and burned by the Nazis.

"Take it with you to any cafe in any city, and Perec will be both your drinking partner and your tour guide, drawing your attention to each little detail coming and going.” –Ian Klaus, CityLabOne overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday--"what happens," as he put it, "when nothing happens." His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice, where, ensconced behind first one café window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse; a wedding (and then a funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that finally absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.

Twenty four delirious narratives from the highpoint of Surrealist automatic writingA foundational classic of Surrealist literature, The Leg of Lamb brings together the arch-Surrealist Benjamin Péret's short prose: a smorgasbord of automatic writing and fantastical narratives employing everything from the cinematic antics of Buster Keaton and slapstick animation to the storytelling devices of detective novels, alchemical operations and mythology. The Leg of Lamb consists of 24 delirious narratives, including the novella-length works "And the Breasts Were Dying" and "There Was a Little Bakeress." Péret's adult fairy tales bear equal allegiance to Lewis Carroll and the Marquis de Sade, and present one of the clearest examples of Surrealist humor, in which the boundaries between character and object blur, and where a coat rack, artichoke or a pile of manure is just as likely as Napoléon, El Cid or Pope Pius VII to take on the role of hero and adventurer. Péret himself edited this collection toward the end of his life. Originally published in French in 1957, almost all of the stories in this collection had been written in the 1920s, half of them even preceding André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism. The Leg of Lamb offers not only a highpoint of Surrealist automatic writing, but a key chapter in the genesis of the Surrealist movement.

Essays reflecting on the science of imaginary solutions, from an influential figure in pataphysical thoughtPataphysics: 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, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, first appeared in 1911, and over the next 100 years, 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 Mount Analogue and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse of often overlooked Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician. Pataphysical Essays collects 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 volume also includes Daumal’s column for the Nouvelle Revue Française, “Pataphysics This Month.” Reading like a deranged encyclopedia, “Pataphysics This Month” describes a new mythology for the field of science, and amply demonstrates that the twentieth century had been a distinctly pataphysical era.

Cult French author Jean-Pierre Martinet’s obscenely tragic novella, translated into EnglishAdolphe Marlaud’s rule of conduct is simple: live as little as possible so as to suffer as little as possible. For Marlaud, this involves carrying out a meager existence on rue Froidevaux in Paris, tending to his father’s grave in the cemetery across the street, and earning the outlines of a living through a part-time job at the funerary shop on the corner. It does not, however, take into account the intentions of the obese concierge of his building, who has set her widowed sights on his diminutive frame, and whose aggressive overtures are to trigger a burlesque and obscene tragedy. Originally published in 1979, The High Life introduces cult French author Jean-Pierre Martinet into English. It is a novella that perfectly outlines Martinet’s dark vision: the terrors of loneliness, the grotesque buffoonery of sexual relations, the essential humiliation of the human condition and the ongoing trauma of twentieth-century history. 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. Largely ignored during his lifetime, his star has only recently begun to shine in France, and he is now regarded as an overlooked French successor to Dostoyevsky. Reading like an unsettling love child of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jim Thompson, Martinet’s work explores the grimly humorous possibilities of unlimited pessimism.

“The serene and gentle amazement with which [Scheerbart] tells of the strange natural laws of other worlds . . . makes him one of those humorists who, like Lichtenberg or Jean Paul, seem never to forget that the earth is a heavenly body.” —Walter BenjaminFirst published in German in 1913 and widely considered to be Paul Scheerbart’s masterpiece, Lesabéndio is an intergalactic utopian novel that describes life on the planetoid Pallas, where rubbery suction-footed life forms with telescopic eyes smoke bubble-weed in mushroom meadows under violet skies and green stars. Amid the conveyor-belt highways and lighthouses weaving together the mountains and valleys, a visionary named Lesabéndio hatches a plan to build a 44-mile-high tower and employ architecture to connect the two halves of their double star. A cosmic ecological fable, Scheerbart’s novel was admired by such architects as Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, and such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (whose wedding present to Benjamin was a copy of Lesabéndio). Benjamin had intended to devote the concluding section of his lost manuscript “The True Politician” with a discussion of the positive political possibilities embedded in Scheerbart’s “Asteroid Novel.” As translator Christina Svendsen writes in her introduction, “Lesabéndio helps us imagine an ecological politics more daring than the conservative politics of preservation, even as it reminds us that we are part of a larger galactic set of interrelationships.” This volume includes Alfred Kubin’s illustrations from the original German edition.Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, newspaper critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion, who wrote fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that were to influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.