Calder Publications – serie

Only UK edition in printA series of sketches and observations of daily life – a crowd gathering in front of shop windows, an old man talking to his grandchild about death, a professor lecturing about Proust and Rimbaud, a woman concealing her disdain at a family gathering – Nathalie Sarraute’s first work of fiction places human existence under the microscope, revealing the dynamics at play between our thoughts and actions beneath the veneer of social convention.First published in 1939 to little fanfare, Tropisms was ahead of its time and finally received the recognition it deserved when it was republished in 1957 at the height of the nouveau roman movement, of which it is now considered a precursor.

Increasingly Samuel Beckett's writing is seen as the culmination of the great literature of the twentieth century – succeeding the work of Proust, Joyce and Kafka. Beckett is a writer whose relevance to his time and use of poetic imagery can be compared to Shakespeare's in the late Renaissance.John Calder has examined the work of Beckett principally for what it has to say about our time in terms of philosophy, theology and ethics, and he points to aspects of his subject's thinking that others have ignored or preferred not to see.Samuel Beckett's acute mind pulled apart with courage and much humour the basic assumptions and beliefs by which most people live. His satire can be biting and his wit devastating. He found no escape from human tragedy in the comforts we build to shield ourselves from reality – even in art, which for most intellectuals has replaced religion. However, he did develop a moral message – one which is in direct contradiction to the values of ambition, success, acquisition and security which is normally held up for admiration, and he looks at the greed, God-worship, and cruelty to others which we increasingly take for granted, in a way that is both unconventional and revolutionary.If this study shocks many readers it is because the honesty, the integrity and the depth of Beckett's thinking- expressed through his novels, plays and poetry, but also through his other writings and correspondence- is itself shocking, to conventional thinking. Yet what he has to say is also comforting. He offers a different ethic and prescription for living – a message based on stoic courage, compassion and an ability to understand and forgive.

Only UK edition in printIn his most famous and perhaps most typical work, Robbe-Grillet explores his principal preoccupation: the meaning of reality. The novel is set on a tropical banana plantation, and the action is seen through the eyes of a narrator who never appears in person, never speaks and never acts. He is a point of observation, his personality only to be guessed at, watching every movement of the other characters’ actions as they flash like moving pictures across the distorting screen of a jealous mind.The result is one of the most important and influential books of our time, a completely integrated masterpiece that has already become a classic.

Only UK edition in printA distressed young man murders the woman he loves in a café, watched by a large crowd. Fascinated by the crime she has witnessed, Anne Desbaresdes returns several times to the scene, forming a relationship with a man who also saw the murder, and drinking through the afternoon with him as he patiently answers her eager questions. Slowly, they find themselves being taken over by forces which threaten their own stability.Moderato Cantabile is a carefully woven tapestry of emotion, in which the characters’ inner lives are reflected by the story’s spaces and landscapes.

Only UK edition in printAfter a failed attempt on his life by an unknown terrorist cell, Professor Daniel Dupont decides to fake his own death. The government authorities, believing that the attack is part of a series of political assassinations, send Wallas, a recently promoted special investigator, to the provincial town where the crime took place. As he wanders the confusing streets of the town, he finds himself increasingly lost in a web of conspiracies, doppelgängers and memories.Cleverly deconstructing the detective genre, The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s first published novel, shifts between various characters and time frames, while maintaining the suspense of a conventional thriller. The result is an engrossing examination of consciousness and reality which is also one the founding texts of the nouveau roman school.

Only edition in printSet on a canal linking Glasgow and Edinburgh, Young Adam is the masterly literary debut by one of the most important British post-war novelists. Trocchi’s narrator is an outsider, a drifter working for the skipper of a barge. Together they discover a young woman’s corpse floating in the canal, and tensions increase further in cramped confines with the narrator’s highly charged seduction of the skipper’s wife. Conventional morality and the objective meaning of events are stripped away in a work that proves compulsively readable.

Only UK edition in printA young woman, who works as a maid for a living, takes her charge out to play in a Parisian garden square. Sitting on a bench, she starts talking to a stranger, a travelling salesman, and their conversation gradually turns into an exchange of confidences, as she speaks of her desire for a more stable future and he of his feelings of rootlessness and disillusionment. As the afternoon wears on, the two sense an increasing connection between them. Understated and impressionistic, and consisting almost entirely of dialogue, The Garden Square is one of Marguerite Duras’s finest novels, which she also adapted for the stage.

Only UK edition in printWhen Mathias, a travelling watch salesman, returns after many years to the island of his birth, a young girl is found dead on the rocks. As Mathias makes an increasingly tense recapitulation of his movements on the day of the event, tiny details slowly and inexorably accumulate. Through the warped screen of his distorted mind, the remembered images pile up until the reader is caught in his web of desperation. And yet in the end reality has lost all meaning, as the distinction between the narrator’s recollections and the underlying facts are more and more blurred.This brilliantly executed novel, which showcases all the techniques that have secured Robbe-Grillet’s place in the canon of Western literature, leaves behind a disturbing sense of unrest.

Only edition in printThe first of Roussel’s two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter.A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel’s groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.

Only UK edition in printSet in an unspecified island kingdom, A Regicide tells the story of the statistician Boris who, after the electoral victory of the Church party in the country’s elections, decides to assassinate the King on the day he is to visit the factory where he is employed. As the crime is described and relived, doubt sets in as to whether it has ever taken place.Written in 1949 but only published in 1979, Robbe-Grillet’s first novel is a disquieting and satirical avant-garde political thriller which bridges the gap between traditional novel and the Nouveau Roman genre he would later espouse and make famous.

Only edition in printThis volume contains Tristan Tzara’s famous manifestos, which first appeared between 1916 and 1921 and became essential texts of the modern movement and models for Breton’s Surrealist manifestos. Art for Tzara was both deadly serious and a game, and the playfulness of his character is apparent not only in his polemic, which often uses dadaist typography, but in the delightful drawings contributed by Francis Picabia.In addition, this volume also contains Tzara’s Lampisteries – articles that throw light on various art forms contemporary with his own work, at a time when art, weary of the old certainties, turned into subjective and often abstract forms, favouring the reality of the mind over that of the senses.

Only UK edition in printIn this volume of typographical (or “concrete”) poems, Alan Riddell weaves words and the very letters they’re made of into shapes and patterns that heighten or, in some cases, completely undermine the professed message of the pieces.When Eclipse was first published in 1972, concrete poetry was still a relatively new art form, and this book was the first substantial one-man collection to be published in Britain. Now, almost fifty years since its inception, this volume provides a unique perspective on this cutting-edge technique.

Only UK edition in printFirst published in French magazines in the 1960s, the essays and interviews collected in this volume tackle two of Sartre’s most enduring concerns as a philosopher: politics and literature. With regard to the former, they develop the notion of the intellectual not only as an aloof theoretician, but also as a constructive agent of change. His writings on literature explore the limitations of language as an exact vehicle for meaning, the author’s lack of ownership of his own words and the avenues that certain types of theatre such as Artaud’s open for non-verbal communication.A useful, concise introduction to Sartre’s thinking, Politics and Literature investigates concepts and highlights conflicts, interrogations and debates that remain topical and relevant to this day.

Babel, Alan Burns’s fourth critically acclaimed novel, contains all the hallmarks of the aleatoric style he helped to define – shot through with seemingly random newspaper headlines, poems, snatches of conversation and anecdote, which both heighten and undermine meaning, and characterized by extreme contrasts of mood and style and startling surrealist juxtapositions of images and ideas.By turns comic and tragic, tender and brutal, religious and blasphemous, the narrative rockets from London to the United States to Vietnam to interstellar space, familiar events are constantly fragmented and reset into new patterns, and ultimately Babel becomes a cautionary tale about the tragedy arising from attempting to build Utopia.

Only edition in printDespite being decorated with a German Service Cross, Willi Wegler is inwardly sickened by both Hitler’s genocidal war and the complicity of his fellow citizens in Third Reich brutalities. Wracked by guilt, he suddenly betrays his country in a profound gesture of protest and self-sacrifice: during the course of an air raid, he fashions an enormous arrow out of hay in an open field, then ignites it as a flaming signal to direct British bombers to the site of the factory where he works – an act that cannot fail to precipitate a series of dramatic events.The Cross and the Arrow – first published in 1944, during the latter stages of the war it describes – portrays a man’s struggle to retain his dignity in defiance of state-sponsored cruelty and explores the role and responsibility of the individual in the face of tragic global events. In its examination of an enemy’s complex heroism, it provides a life-affirming message of humanity’s ultimate capacity for good.

The premature death of Sydney Goodsir Smith at the age of fifty-nine deprived the world of one of the major personalities in twentieth-century British literature.The poems included in this volume, mostly written in Scots dialect – from Skail Wind, first published in 1941, to the verse collections of his maturity and the gentle, philosophical compositions of his later years – show us the journey of a man who understood the world only too well, and are a testament to the inventive genius of his mind.Contains notes and a full glossary.

Only edition in printThe scene opens in Moscow in August 1968. Forty-two-year-old Daniil Petrovich Barkov is a prizewinning writer whose life is at a crossroads. His wife is slowly dying in a hospital bed, and his faith in his country is shaken by the anti-democratic invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops. On a Sunday afternoon in Red Square, Barkov witnesses a peaceful demonstration for human rights. Eight men and women, including a mother and her baby, sit silently on the pavement near Lenin’s tomb and unfurl their banners. Within moments, police whistles are heard, and KGB agents arrest them with shocking brutality. Barkov is moved by the bravery of the protesters, but resists the impulse to join them. The guilt-ridden author vows to write an eyewitness report, a burning polemic against rule by aggression, which will show his growth as an artist.At once an indictment of oppression and an exploration of the role and responsibility of the individual in the face of tragic historical events – themes that preoccupied Maltz throughout his life and artistic career – The Eyewitness Report, left unpublished by its author at his death and presented here for the first time, will cement Maltz’s reputation as one of the finest storytellers and most perceptive thinkers of the last century.

Only edition in printDivided into fifty-seven sections, ‘Hometown’ is an extraordinary work in the long tradition of the Great American Poem. The author’s own compositions, interspersed with quotations from other famous writers and excerpts from historical documents and articles, including an old restaurant menu, create a living tapestry of the city of Denver from its frontier days to its foundation and beyond, woven together by the poet’s unifying gaze and psychedelic imagination.Thirty years in the making, ‘Hometown’ was left unpublished at the death of its author, who regarded it as his most important work. Published here for the first time, alongside the rest of his poetry, including some uncollected pieces, this poem will restore Andrews’s place among the great American poets of the twentieth century.Contains an introduction by Prof. John Burt, Brandeis University and an afterword by Michael Baird.Calder Publications was founded by John Calder in 1949, and became known for the edgy and avant-garde writers it was proud of having in its list. Calder Publications, an imprint of Alma Books, offers a list of books which will challenge and stimulate the serious readers.