Forthcoming Titles
Little Castles of Bohemia
Gérard de Nerval
Translated, with an introduction, by Napoleon Jeffries
One of Nerval’s last works: an assemblage of memoir, poetry, and theater he himself culled together from the vagabond fragments of his writing in an effort at posterity and mental stability toward the end of his life. Nerval’s “castles” trace out a thread from his early “Odellettes” to his forays into the theater to the hermetic sonnets with which he concluded his oeuvre.
Useless Writers
Ermanno Cavazzoni
Translated, with an introduction, by Jamie Richards
49 fables composing a gallery of writers who contribute absolutely nothing to society, scientifically organized and categorized in accordance to the seven deadly sins and seven contingencies of life. From the scholar of eccentricity and author of Brief Lives of Idiots, Ermanno Cavazzoni.
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Fantastic Orgy
Alexander M. Frey
Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger
Four tales from 1924 Weimar Berlin featuring an assortment of characters depicted with dry humor and macabre compassion. The title story features Phantomata, a female automaton (preceding Fritz Lang's Metropolis by several years), who chooses a paraplegic as a lover.
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The Water Spider and Other Tales
Marcel Béalu
Translated, with an introduction, by Edward Gauvin
One of Béalu's most celebrated narratives, of a man and a water spider who fall in love, is accompanied by eighteen other tales of dreamy discomfort and charming immorality.
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The Drowned Land
Paul Willems
Translated, with an introduction, by Edward Gauvin
Published two years before his death, The Drowned Land was one of Paul Willems’s more pessimistic explorations of the marvelous. In his account of the land of Aquélone, liquidity evolves into myth, and a paradise sinks into horror.
Bar Nicanor: Collected Writings
Clément Pansaers
Translated, with an introduction, by Terry Bradford
The Belgian Dadaist's collected poetry and prose, including the books In Praise of Laziness, Bar Nicanor, and I Gonorrhea. Pansaers was, in the words of Louis Aragon, "a passionate lover of barbarism."
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Scorpions
Yumiko Kurahashi
Translated, with an introduction, by Michael Day
This shockingly subversive 1963 novella questions both literary and societal norms: the transcript of an interview with a woman after the arrest and institutionalization of her and her incestuous brother for their role in a series of horrifying deaths, including the murder of their mother.
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SchrummSchrumm, or The Sunday Quicksands Excursion
Fernand Combet
With an introduction Éric Dessert; translated by K. E. Gormley
The absurd, cruel, and ultimately nightmarish adventures of a young man named SchrummSchrumm who is taken on an unexpected tour bus journey to the distant walled city of Misunderstanding for an eventual excursion to the Quicksands on its outskirts. “SchrummSchrumm is a mad book” (Nicolas d’Estienne d’Orves, Le Figaro Magazine).
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The Sunset Lands
Julien Gracq
Translated, by George MacLennan with an afterword by Bernhild Boie
Julien Gracq's posthumous novel, describing a dream zone between myth and history, and a kingdom of steppes, uncultivated farmland, and hamlets in ruins that refuses to recognize that the barbarians are at its gates.
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The Last Canterbury Tales
Jean Ray
Translated, with an afterword, by Scott Nicolay
After 600 years, Geoffrey Chaucer and his fourteenth-century pilgrims overcome space and time to return to the Tabard Inn in Southwark and spin a new series of tales.