Unica Zürn, The Trumpets Of Jericho
Translated, with an introduction, by Christina Svendsen
Paperback
This fierce fable of
childbirth by German Surrealist Unica Zürn was written after she had
already given birth to two children and undergone the self-induced
abortion of another in Berlin in the 1950s. Beginning in the relatively
straightforward, if disturbing, narrative of a young woman in a tower
(with a bat in her hair and ravens for company) engaged in a psychic war
with the parasitic son in her belly, The Trumpets of Jericho
dissolves into a beautiful nightmare of hypnotic obsession and mythical
language, stitched together with anagrams and private ruminations.
Arguably Zürn's most extreme experiment in prose, and never before
translated into English, this novella dramatizes the frontiers of the
body—its defensive walls as well as its cavities and
thresholds—animating a harrowing and painfully, twistedly honest
depiction of motherhood as a breakdown in the distinction between self
and other, transposed into the language of darkest fairy tales.
Unica Zürn (1916–70) was
born in Grünewald, Germany. Toward the end of World War II, she
discovered the realities of the Nazi concentration camps—a revelation
which was to haunt and unsettle her for the rest of her life. After
meeting Hans Bellmer in 1953, she followed him to Paris, where she
became acquainted with the Surrealists and developed the body of
drawings and writings for which she is best remembered: a series of
anagram poems, hallucinatory accounts and literary enactments of the
mental breakdowns from which she would suffer until her suicide in 1970.
Joris-Karl Huysmans, A DilemmaTranslated, with an introduction, by Justin Vicari
Paperback
Originally published in book form in French in 1887, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A Dilemma
remains a particularly nasty little tale, a mordantly satiric and cruel
account of bourgeois greed and manipulation that holds up as clear a
mirror to today's neoliberalist times as it did to the French
fin-de-siècle. Written in-between Huysmans’ most famous works—his 1881 Against Nature, which came to define the Decadent movement, and his 1891 exploration of Satanism, Down There—A Dilemma
presents some of the author’s most memorable characters, including
Madame Champagne, the self-appointed Parisian protector of women in
need, and the carnal would-be sophisticate notary Le Ponsart, who wages a
war of words with the bereft pregnant mistress of his deceased grandson
with devastating consequences. In its unflinching portrayal of how
authoritarian language can be used and abused as a weapon, this novella
stands as Huysmans’s indictment of the underlying crime of the novel
itself: a language apparatus employed to maintain the appetites of the
ruling class.
Earning a wage through a career in the French civil service,
Joris-Karl Huysmans
(1848–1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice
through a series of books that influenced a number of different literary
movements: from the grey and grimy Naturalism of books like Marthe and Downstream to the cornerstones of the Decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, along with the dream-ridden Surrealist favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate.
“Huysmans is surrealist in pessimism.”—André Breton
Giambattista Marino, The Massacre Of The InnocentsTranslated, with an introduction, by Erik Butler
Paperback
A finely crafted epic and literary monstrosity
from the seventeenth-century “poet of the marvelous”: the harrowing
account, in four bloody cantos, of King Herod and his campaign to murder
the male infants of his kingdom to prevent the loss of his throne to
the prophesied King of the Jews. The book starts in the pits of Hell,
where the Devil stokes the flames of Herod’s paranoid bloodlust in his
troubled sleep, and concludes in the heights of Heaven where the
“unarmed champions” march on to eternal glory. In between is an account
of physical and political brutality that unfortunately holds too clear a
mirror to world events today. The Massacre of the Innocents
describes unbelievable cruelty while championing the nobility of
suffering, all brilliantly translated and presented in ottava rima.
Italian poet and adventurer
Giambattista Marino (1569–1625) was deemed “the king of his age,” and his very name came to define the style of an epoch: marinismo,
a shorthand summation of the bizarre inventiveness and ornate excesses
of Baroque poetry. In and out of jail, and escaping an assassination
attempt by a rival, Marino spent a good part of his life in Northern
Italy and France before returning to his birthplace of Naples. His most
famous work, L’Adone (Adonis), stands as one of the longest
Italian epics ever written, and for two centuries was deemed a monstrous
epitome of Baroque bad taste.
Bruno Corra, Sam Dunn Is Dead
Paperback
Sam Dunn is Dead, described by its author as a “Futurist
Novel”, was first published in book form by Filippo Marinetti’s Edizioni
Futuriste. However, one will search in vain for any mention of this
work in anthologies or histories of Futurism.
This is doubtless because it is so unlike anything else produced by Futurism (so ardent, so masculine, so positive and so
absurdly serious).
Sam Dunn
is none of these, and above all else it is a miniature masterpiece of
black humour — the last thing likely to be associated with the
posturings of Marinetti and his acolytes.
Not only is
Sam Dunn
funny, despairing, cerebral and ludicrous, it also traces a history of
the modern spirit. Its eponymous hero, a poet in languid 1890s mould,
unleashes a thoroughly contemporary apocalypse upon the world.
Subsequent chapters could be taken for Dadaist or Surrealist texts (but
written a decade before their time), and then the whole edifice is
fatally undermined by forces that are both banal and…
unusual.
Corra
later considered his novel a failure, but he was mistaken. His
sensitivity to the great undertows of history that were then working
their way to the surface seems alarmingly prescient — and anyway his
opinion does nothing to inhibit the reader’s simple enjoyment of the
book’s deliriously ebullient nihilism.
Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game)
René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomt, etc
Between 1928 and 1930 the Paris magazine Le Grand Jeu (The Great
Game) ran to three issues before collapsing because of its editors’
infighting, their over-indulgence in chemical stimulants, and vehemently
unreasonable aspirations for both art and life. The group is often
associated with Surrealism (they were invited to join the group), but
the ideas of the Grand Jeu were far more extreme. The magazine was the
public face of a tightly bound group of artists and writers who since
adolescence had systematically attacked their perceptions of reality by
means of narcotics, anaesthesia and near-death experiences.
Their
writings describe an uncompromising politico-mystical outlook which
combined a critique of the apathy of contemporary Western society with a
quest to take leave of the individual ego and reconnect with a
collective Universal Mind. The group’s esoteric programme united drug
use, occult and parapsychological practices with asceticism,
revolutionary politics (the Russian Revolution was barely a decade old)
and a prophetic mode of poetry which they identified in antecedents such
as Rimbaud and Mallarmé. Such a wildly over-ripe synthesis was no doubt
inevitably doomed, but in its failure the Grand Jeu left an indelible
mark on the history of those movements which have refused point-blank to
accept the world as it is.
The
ideas of the Grand Jeu group are presented here in their own words, as
they appeared in their magazine. This is the first and definitive
collection of these writers to appear in English.
These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:
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