two novels by STEFAN THEMERSON Introduction by KEITH WALDROP
Two riotous dada novels by the Polish-born British writer Stefan Themerson (1910-1988), who, with his wife Franciska ran the Gaberbocchus Press in London. Gaberbocchus published both Kurt Schwitters and Bertrand Russell ‹ and their extremes unite in Themerson¹s individual brand of phoosophical dadaism. Bayamus is the story of a three-legged creature (with one leg attached to a roller skate) and his visit to the "Theater of Semantic Poetry"‹ a book of wordplay both serious and silly. Cardinal Pölätüo reveals the identity of Apollinaire¹s unknown father, who in Themerson¹s account turns out to be a high-ranking member of the church with murderous interests in both Modernist poetry and Freudian psychology. Themerson¹s best novels in their first U.S. publication.
256 pages 6x8 Paper $15.95 ISBN 1-878972-21-9
edited, with a biographical essay, by RUTH BERNARD YEAZELL
Alice James (1848-1892) was the sister of Henry and William James, as literary as her more famous brothers but -- as was typical for a Victorian woman, even from a family like the James¹ -- never formally educated, and deprived of any opportunities for a "career." In a biographical essay, Professor Ruth Bernard Yeazell of Yale University argues that instead, James made a career of her lifelong neurasthenic illness and anticipation of death. In this selection of letters, many written from the invalid¹s bed, one finds Alice James witty and lyrical, but always deeply morbid: an artist of the deathbed, reminiscent of Kafka¹s fictional Hunger Artist. Critic Elaine Showalter has called this, "a book everyone interested in women¹s history and literature will want."
240 pages 6x8 Paper $15.95 ISBN 1-878972-20-0
by ALFRED JARRY
translated and annotated by SIMON WATSON TAYLOR
with an introduction by ROGER SHATTUCK
This is the most important novel by the legendary author of the play Ubu Roi -- it is here that Jarry described the philosophy underlying his work, in an outrageous novel of fantasy and philosophy that can only be compared to Rabelais or Sterne. Written in 1898 but refused for publication in the author's lifetime, Faustroll recounts the adventures of the inventor of pataphysics, the "science of imaginary solutions." "Jarry would have found an audience more readily had he written simply a work of science fiction, a symbolist narrative, a bawdy tale, or a spiritual allegory. As it is, Faustroll is [all of these] at the same time," writes Roger Shattuck. "The complement to the Ubu plays. . . a stupendous effort to create out of the ruins Ubu had left behind a new system of values."
192 pages 6x8 Paper $13.95 ISBN 1-878972-07-3
AURELIA and other writings
by GERARD DE NERVAL
translated by GEOFFREY WAGNER, ROBERT DUNCAN, and MARC LOWENTHAL
This beautiful nineteenth-century book was a favorite of artist Joseph Cornell's, and its author was championed by both Proust and Breton, albeit for different reasons. An account of the author's unrequited passion for an actress and his subsequent descent into madness, Aurélia is a confessional document of dreams, obsession, and insanity. One of the original self-styled bohemians, Nerval was well known in his own day for parading a lobster on a pale blue ribbon through the gardens of the Palais-Royal, and for his romantic suicide in 1855, hanging from an apron string he insisted was the garter of the Queen of Sheba, with the final pages of Aurélia in his pocket. Included in this collection are other important novellas by the author, and his poem-cycle Chimeras. "Our dreams are a second life . . ."
224 pages 6x8 Paper $15.95 ISBN 1-878972-09-X
THE HEARING TRUMPET
by LEONORA CARRINGTON
Leonora Carrington, the distinguished British-born Surrealist painter who lived with Max Ernst in 1930's Paris and subsequently emigrated to Mexico City, is also a writer of extraordinary imagination. The Hearing Trumpet tells the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet by her paranoid but clairvoyant friend Carmella only to discover that what her family is saying is that she is to be committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is conveniently open. Occult twin to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet is a fantastical tour-de-force that has been translated and celebrated throughout the world.
"Reading The Hearing Trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days."
- - Luis Bunuel
WATCHFIENDS AND RACKSCREAMS: works from the final period
by ANTONIN ARTAUD
translated by CLAYTON ESHLEMAN with BERNARD BADOR
Watchfiends and Rackscreams is the first new English-language anthology of Artaud's writing in nearly twenty years, and reflects an increased awareness in the importance of work from the last years of his life (a show of his visual art from this same period opens next year at MOMA in New York). Cogent theoretical works are paired with the scatological glossolalia written during and after Artaud's incarceration in an asylum at Rodez, including bilingual presentations of Here Lies and Artaud the Mômo, some of the most powerful outpourings ever recorded.
"Clayton Eshleman's translations are the finest and most authentic which have yet been made from Artaud's writings . . . This collection has been wisely selected and magnificently realized. Artaud is being taken into the twenty-first century."
- - Stephen Barber, author of Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs
354 pages 6x8 Paper $15.95 ISBN 1-878972-18-9
HOW I WROTE CERTAIN OF MY BOOKS
by Raymond Roussel
edited by Trevor Winkfield
introduction by John Ashbery
translated by John Ashbery, KENNETH KOCH, HARRY MATHEWS, and TREVOR WINKFIELD
Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), next-door neighbor of Marcel Proust, can be described without exaggeration as the most eccentric writer of the twentieth century. His unearthly style based on elaborate linguistic riddles and puns fascinated the Surrealists, above all Duchamp, but also writers as diverse as Gide, Robbe-Grillet, and Foucault (author of a book-length study of Roussel). The title essay to this collection, "How I Wrote Certain of my Books," is the key to Roussel's method, and it is accompanied by selections from all his major works of fiction, drama, and poetry, skillfully translated by his New York School admirers Ashbery, Koch, Mathews, and Winkfield.
"The President of the Republic of Dreams."
- - Louis Aragon
"The translations are all first-rate . . . the best way to get a sense of Roussel's linguistic density is through the title essay, and through Winkfield's excellent notes."
- - Lee Smith, Artforum
288 pages 6x8 Paper $15.95 ISBN 1-878972-14-6
PARIS PEASANT
by Louis Aragon
translated by simon watson taylor
"I was seeking . . . a new kind of novel that would break all the traditional rules governing the writing of fiction . . . a novel that the critics would be obliged to approach empty-handed." Aragon's Paris Peasant, first published in 1926, is one of the central works of Surrealism, a work that helps define the movement itself. Largely a detailed description of a Parisian passage about to be torn down to make way for a new boulevard, Paris Peasant is also part fiction, part memoir, and part treatise. One of the great experiments in prose of the Surrealist era, it remains as vital and challenging as on original publication. Aragon consulted with Simon Watson Taylor on this authoritative translation, which has never before been published in the U.S.
"No one could have been a more astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by such intoxicating reveries about a sort of secret life of the city. . . ."
- - André Breton
224 pages 6x8 Paper $13.95 ISBN 1-878972-10-3
IN YOUTH IS PLEASURE
by Denton Welch
foreword by William S. Burroughs
First published in 1945, In Youth is Pleasure is a beautiful and unassuming coming-of-age novel by the English writer and painter Denton Welch, who died in 1948 at the age of thirty-three. Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is fifteen, and the novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school -- but as in all of Welch's work what is most important are the details of Orville's surroundings. Welch is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation who, as William Burroughs describes in his introduction, "makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes." Included is the first U.S. publication of I Left my Grandfather's House, an account of an idyllic walking tour undertaken when Welch was eighteen.
"Welch has achieved a curious kind of cult status, his name bandied about by critics but little known among the public at large . . . This exquisitely designed reissue is an exhilarating literary event."
- - New York Newsday
- - Out!
272 pages 6x8 Paper $15.95 ISBN 1-878972-13-8
A VOICE THROUGH A CLOUD
by Denton Welch
Exact Change continues its program of reprinting the work of British novelist Denton Welch (1915-1948) with this heatbreaking autobiographical account of the author's recovery from a bicycling accident that left him partially paralyzed at the age of twenty. Dominated by Welch's acute powers of observation, A Voice through a Cloud is a tour-de-force of both self-analysis and external description, as Welch lies in hospital and struggles with his illness, and his relationships with family and doctor. Finished as Welch was dying from complications resulting from the accident, and first published posthumously in 1950, A Voice through a Cloud's account of a young man's struggle with debilitating illness has sad and unforseen parallels to contemporary life.
256 pages 6x8 Paper $15.95 ISBN 1-878972-15-4
LAST NIGHTS of PARIS
by Philippe Soupault
translated by William Carlos Williams
Written in 1928 by one of the founders of Surrealism and translated the following year by William Carlos Williams, Last Nights of Paris is related to Surrealist novels like Paris Peasant but also to the American expatriate novels of its day such as Day of the Locust. The story concerns the narrator's obsession with a mysterious woman who leads him into an underworld that promises to reveal the secrets of the city itself . . . and in Williams' beautifully direct translation it reads like a lost Great American Novel. A portrait of the city that entranced both its native writers and the Americans who traveled to it in the twenties, Last Nights of Paris is a rare collaboration between Parisian literary circles at the root of both French and American modernism.
"Soupault's nocturnal ramblings include street murders, stopped clocks, and unexpected breezes. This sweet strangeness may very well make you sentimental."
- - Voice Literary Supplement
192 pages 6x8 Paper $13.95 ISBN 1-878972-05-7
EVERYBODY'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by Gertrude Stein
In 1937 Gertrude Stein wrote a sequel to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but this darker and more complex work has been long misunderstood and neglected. An account of her experiences as a result of writing a bestseller, Everybody's Autobiography is as funny and engaging as Toklas, but it is also a searing meditation on the meaning of identity, success, and America. Posing as the representative American, Stein responds to the tradition of Thoreau and Henry Adams: "I used to be fond of saying that America, which was supposed to be a land of success, was a land of failure. Most of the great men in America had a long life of early failure and a long life of later failure."
"Everybody's Autobiography is among the very best of Gertrude's writing . . . [it] speaks with the true and original voice of Gertrude Stein, without apparent art or bravado."
- - Janet Hobhouse
336 pages 6x8 Paper $15.95 ISBN 1-878972-08-1
COMPOSITION IN RETROSPECT
by John Cage
Written in his characteristic "mesostics" (linked lines of prose poetry), Composition in Retrospect is a statement of methodology in which John Cage examines the central issues of his work: indeterminacy, nonunderstanding, inconsistency . . . Finished only shortly before his death in 1992, Composition in Retrospect completes the documentation of Cage's thought that began with his classic book Silence (1961), but it is an introduction and invitation to his work as much as a summary or conclusion. It is accompanied (as Cage requested) by "Themes and Variations," a piece written in 1982 about friends and heroes such as Jasper Johns, Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Duchamp, and Erik Satie. Together these pieces form a volume which is both a testament to the artists Cage admired, and a clear statement of his own ars poetica.
"Masterful and wise composition, playful and serious, and absolute music despite being made of language."
- - L.A. Reader
184 pages 6x8 Paper $13.95 ISBN 1-878972-11-1
HEBDOMEROS and other writings
by Giorgio de Chirico
translated by John Ashbery, Louise Bourgeois, Damon Krukowski, and Mark Polizzotti
The artist de Chirico's novel Hebdomeros is an astonishing dream-like book of situations and landscapes reminiscent of his paintings. In his introduction John Ashbery calls Hebdomeros "the finest work of Surrealist fiction," noting that de Chirico "invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel . . . His long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom of narration . . . his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality." With a collection of previously untranslated or uncollected writings, including a second, fragmentary novel called M. Dudron's Adventure.
"This novel contains maddeningly brilliant mental photographs of an active mind's eye . . . De Chirico creates a painterly universe in every sentence . . . Exact Change's stellar line of Surrealist reprints may very well boast de Chirico's novel as its flagship."
- - Seattle Weekly
280 pages 6x8 Paper $15.95 ISBN 1-878972-06-5
MALDOROR and the complete works
by COMTE DE LAUTREAMONT
translated by Alexis Lykiard
Breton wrote that Maldoror is "the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential." Little is known about its pseudonymous author aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846), and early death in Paris (1870). Lautréamont's writings bewildered his contemporaries but the Surrealists modeled their efforts after his lawless black humor and poetic leaps of logic, exemplified by their oft-quoted slogan, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!" Maldoror's shocked publisher refused to bind the sheets of the first edition . . . and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book which warns the reader, "Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger."
"Lautréamont's style is hallucinatory, visionary . . . this new fluent translation makes clear its poetic texture and what may be termed its subversive attraction."
- - The New York Times
- - The Washington Post Book World
352 pages 6x8 Paper $15.95 ISBN 1-878972-12-X
THE HERESIARCH & Co.
by Guillaume Apollinaire
translated by Rémy Inglis Hall
A collection of outrageous short stories about heretics, provincial romantics, and adventurers in crime, The Heresiarch & Co. was Apollinaire's first book, and reportedly remained his favorite. Making full use of his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure historical, ecclesiastical, and geographical information, Apollinaire's stories rely neither on the dream, nor on juxtaposition, but nonetheless represent a technique that André Breton called a "formula" for Surrealism. Apollinaire himself wrote, "This is a book for those who love literature, powerful and disturbing, strange and logical . . . The author, amid so many fantastic, tragic, and sometimes sublime inventions, intoxicates himself with a charming erudition with which he also intoxicates his readers."
"The best Surrealist works strive to achieve the music of these stories. Fluid, brief, they read like distilled fairy tales, and they move with a languid speed, like the passage of time in a dream. All of the stories explore the boundaries between life and art in a half-mocking, half-magical way . . . Translated beautifully."
- - Voice Literary Supplement
172 pages 6x8 Paper $13.95 ISBN 1-878972-03-0
THE BLUE OCTAVO NOTEBOOKS
by Franz Kafka
edited by Max Brod
translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins
Kafka's notebooks from 1917-19 contain short stories, fragments of stories, and other literary writings, but were omitted by editor Max Brod from the publication of Kafka's Diaries because "dates are found in them only as a rare exception." The Blue Octavo Notebooks have thus remained little known yet are among the most characteristic of Kafka's work. In addition to the otherwise unpublished material, the notebooks contain some of Kafka's most famous aphorisms in their original context. For this edition the text of the original English-language publication (in a library edition of miscellaneous writings) has been corrected with reference to the German for omissions and discrepancies of sequence.
"Kafka's literary mosaic is again available, this time in paperback . . . Followers of Kafka will require this book and will find it most rewarding."
- - Library Journal
120 pages 6x8 Paper 13.95 ISBN 1-878972-04-9