Forthcoming Titles
Domesticity
Joris-Karl Husymans
Translated by George MacLennan, with an introduction by Brian Banks
Huysmans’ semi-autobiographical third novel, published in French in 1881, tells the tale of the novelist André Jayant and the artist Cyprien Tibaille: two men struggling between the urges of their body and the urges of their soul, and with the failure of matrimony or the artistic endeavor to fulfil the needs of either. Steeped in sardonic pessimism, this ode to sterility was one of the author’s own favorite novels of his career.
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Small 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.
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The Messengers
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud
Translated, with an introduction, by Edward Gauvin
In an unnamed country, in an unspecified time, a messenger and his young assistant pursue a dreamlike chain of clues and horror in order to deliver a message sealed in a tube. A Kafkaesque quest told through the lens of Alain-Fournier. One of Chateaureynaud’s earliest works, and winner of the 1974 prix des Nouvelles Littéraires.
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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 Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards
(A Novel against Psicho-Analise)
Emil Szittya
Translated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger
An early and obscure 1916 work by Emil Szittya, friend and colleague of Blaise Cendrars, the Zurich Dadaists, and many other protagonists of the European avant garde: synesthetic, episodic prose poems allegedly generated by hashish hallucinations.
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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.
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The Employee
Jacques Sternberg
Translated, with an introduction, by Matt Seidel
An employee stands outside the door to his office, hesitating to enter because he is five minutes late. A banal opening that immediately launches into a frenetic narrative that gallops across genres, modes, and galaxies. A ferocious, entropic exercise of the imagination that will leave the reader breathless.
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Diabelli
Hermann Burger
Translated, with an introduction, by Adrian Nathan West
Confessional accounts of linguistic self-destruction: a magician preparing his final and permanent disappearing act, a would-be factotum applying for a post to which he is unsuited, a maniacal reader who is the alleged epicenter of an earthquake—disillusioned illusionists intent on unveiling life’s elegant deception.
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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 1968 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).