Wakefield Press - Böcker

Exquisitely crafted essays on medieval criminal slang, ancient Greek prostitution, laughter, anarchy and more from the endlessly influential Marcel Schwob "All over the world," wrote Jorge Luis Borges, "there are devotees of the writer Marcel Schw...

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An updated, expanded edition of Remedios Varo's translated writings, including pieces never before published in any language With the 2018 publication of Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings, Wakefield Press introduced the writings of Surrealist pa...

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"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, CityLab One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec se...

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Maimed beggars, female automatons, cultural prosthetics: four tales of opulence, poverty and grotesque empathy from the Weimar Republic First published in 1924, Fantastic Orgy is most notable for its title story, an account of a drinking rout orga...

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In translation at last, a delightfully delirious novel in which absurdity gives way to nightmare This novel by French writer Fernand Combet is at long last available in English. A unique work whose surrealism is one of horror rather than the marve...

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A shocking and transgressive work from one of the key figures of postwar Japanese fiction Yumiko Kurahashi's 1963 novella Scorpions takes the form of a transcript of a one-sided interview with L following the arrest and institutionalization of her...

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A blissful and baneful litany of human stupidity, from Italian fantastical absurdist Ermanno Cavazzoni A parody of the medieval Lives of the Saints, Ermanno Cavazzoni's Brief Lives of Idiots offers us a perfect month of portraits of idiots drawn f...

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The archetypal Symbolist novel, and a gorgeous tapestry of death and melancholy, Bruges-la-Morte was also the first work of fiction to employ photographs in the style of Breton, Drndic and Sebald A widower, Hugues Viane, takes refuge in the decay ...

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"For dry humor from a decadent nihilist, it can't be beat." -M. Kasper, Rain Taxi "The Pig is the Sun...." So begins Oskar Panizza's outrageously heretical and massively erudite essay on the pig, originally published in 1900 in his journal Zurich ...

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In the last days of the Venetian Republic, the successive wives of Count Alvise Lanzi suffer mysterious, agonizing deaths. Murder Most Serene offers a cruel portrait of a beautiful but corrupt city-state and its equally extravagant and corrupt inh...

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Sternberg's rule-breaking, genre-defying novel upends the humdrum workday world A nameless employee stands outside the door to an office, hesitating to enter because he is five minutes late. This banal opening then launches into a frenetic narrati...

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This series of 23 satirically scabrous short texts introduces the reader to an imaginary French suburb via the strange, grotesque small-town occupations that defined a once reliable, now presumably vanished way of life. A catalog of job descriptio...

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"I've just read Marcel Schwob's The Children's Crusade twice over, with deep admiration and reverence. I am profoundly moved: what a work! And to think I'd never heard the name of Marcel Schwob. Who is he?"-Rainer Maria Rilke Marcel Schwob's 1896 ...

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A disorienting, de Chirico-esque detective tale of curio shops and eerie antiquities, penned in France's postwar trauma A traveling businessman decides to tarry in an unnamed city, dons a new name and profession on a whim, and rents a room in a ho...

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A Rimbaudesque novella of wayward wanderlust and liberty from the cofounder of Surrealism Conceived in a hospital bed in 1917 and written a few months later after his fateful encounter with Lautréamont's Maldoror, Philippe Soupault's novella The V...

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A Kafkaesque odyssey across a dreamlike, universal landscape An unnamed adolescent drifter wanders through an unnamed country at an unspecified point in time in search of warmth and comfort. He finds it at a farm engaged in festivities but is imme...

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Essays reflecting on the science of imaginary solutions, from an influential figure in pataphysical thought Pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions, of laws governing exceptions and of the laws describing the universe supplementary to this...

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Baron Munchausen returns with visions of mobile architecture and journeys to sausage moons, in this previously untranslated novel from Paul Scheerbart It is 1905 and a raging stupidity is holding sway over Europe. As an 18-year-old Clarissa and he...

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"A captivating exercise in intriguing symbolism." -John Taylor, Times Literary Supplement When Jean Maleux, a young sailor, is appointed assistant keeper of the Ar-Men lighthouse off the coast of Brittany, he is drawn into a dark world of physical...

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A collection of previously unpublished erotic manuscripts from the author of The Songs of Bilitis A bestselling author in his time, Pierre Lou¿s (1870-1925) was a friend of, and influence on, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde and Stephane Malla...

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Honoré de Balzac's keystone text on dandyism Honoré de Balzac's 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living was a keystone text on dandyism, preceding Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's Anatomy of Dandyism (1845) and Charles Baudelaire's "The Dandy" (in The Painter o...

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Twenty four delirious narratives from the highpoint of Surrealist automatic writing A foundational classic of Surrealist literature, The Leg of Lamb brings together the arch-Surrealist Benjamin Péret's short prose: a smorgasbord of automatic writi...

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Cult French author Jean-Pierre Martinet's obscenely tragic novella, translated into English Adolphe 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 me...

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The unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement, admired by Mallarmé, Jarry and Gide, in a new translation When Marcel Schwob published The Book of Monelle in French in 1894, it immediately became the unofficial bible of the French Symbolist...

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"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 ...

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