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Pierre Reverdy - The Thief of Talant
Wakefield Press 2016 ISBN 9781939663191 Acqn 26389
Pb 11x18cm 144pp 11.50
Challenged by his friend, poet and art critic Max Jacob, to write a novel, Pierre Reverdy produced
this fragmented, beautiful assemblage of loneliness, paranoia and depersonalization drawn from
his own experience of Paris in the early 20th century, the sometimes antagonistic atmosphere of
the avant-garde and his own troubled relationship with Jacob, who tended to detect the threat of
his literary treasures being plagiarized among everyone he knew. Toward the end of his life,
Reverdy confirmed that the alienated, anxious thief of this novel in verse was a portrait of
himself (Talant conveys both the dual echo in French of talent and the small town of Talan
near Dijon, thereby evoking a potential plagiarizer from the countryside), and Abel the Magus, a
semi-satirical portrait of Jacob.
Originally published in French in 1917, The Thief of Talant is a radical experiment in verse and
narrative, a moving evocation of the loss (and recovery) of self and an encrypted guidebook to
the heroic years of Cubism.
Pierre Reverdy (18891960) was a reclusive yet integral component of the early Parisian avantgarde and a friend to painters such as Modigliani, Picasso and Gris, who, with fellow poets such
as Apollinaire and Jacob, came to represent a faction known as the Cubist poets. In 1926,
Reverdy withdrew from Paris for a life of seclusion in the northwest of France.
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Paul Scheerbart - The Stairway to the Sun & Dance of the Comets
Wakefield Press 2016 ISBN 9781939663214 Acqn 26390
Pb 11x18cm 128pp 12ills 11.50
The Stairway to the Sun & Dance of the Comets brings together two short books, originally
published in 1903, by the anti-erotic godfather of German science fiction, Paul Scheerbart. The
Stairway to the Sun contains four fairy tales of sun, sea, animals and storm, each set in a
different, fantastical locale, from the giant palace of an astral star to a dwarfs underwater glass
lair in the jellyfish kingdom. Scheerbarts sad, whimsical tales provide gentle though unexpected
morals that outline his work as a whole: treat animals as one would treat oneself, mutual
admiration will never lead to harm and if one is able to remember that the world is grand, one will
never be sad.
Dance of the Comets, though published as an Astral Pantomime, was originally conceived as a
scenario for a ballet, which Richard Strauss had planned to score in 1900 (and which Mahler
accepted for the Vienna Opera). Though the project was never realized, Scheerbarts written
choreography of dance, gesture, costume, feather dusters, violet moon hair and a variety of stars
and planets outlines a sequence of events in which everyone--enthusiastic maid, temperamental
king, indifferent executioner, foolish poet--seeks, joins and, in some cases, becomes a celestial
body: a staging of Scheerbarts lifelong yearning for a home in the universe.
Paul Scheerbart (18631915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, critic, draftsman, visionary,
proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion.
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Michel de Ghelderode Spells
Wakefield Press 2016 ISBN 9781939663207 Acqn 26391
Pb 15x23cm 280pp 4ills 14.50
Hitherto unavailable in English, Spells, by the Belgian dramatist Michel de Ghelderode, ranks
among the 20th centurys most noteworthy collections of fantastic tales. Like Ghelderodes plays,
the stories are marked by a powerful imagination and a keen sense of the grotesque, but in these
the author speaks to us still more directly. Written at a time of illness and isolation, and conceived
as a fresh start, Spells was Ghelderodes last major creative work, and he claimed it as his most
personal and deeply felt one: a set of written spells through which his fears, paranoia and
nostalgia found concrete form.
By turns mystical, macabre and whimsically humorous, and set in the unsettled atmosphere of
Brussels, Ostend, Bruges and London, Spells conjures up an uncanny realm of angels, demons,
masks, effigies and apparitions, a twilit, oppressed world of diseased gardens, dusty wax
mannequins and sinister relics.
Combining the full contents of both the 1941 and 1947 editions, this translation of Spells is the
most comprehensive edition yet published.
Michel de Ghelderode was born in Brussels in 1898. After nearly a decade of penning fiction,
drama, literary journalism and puppet plays, in 1926 he began to write almost entirely for the
theatre and the following ten years saw the creation of most of his major plays. After 1936 he
suffered from poor health and his involvement with the theatre diminished. In the later 1940s,
performances of his plays in Paris sparked a major awakening of interest in his work. Ghelderode
died in 1962; the interior of his apartment, packed with books, pictures, puppets and masks, has
been reassembled in Brussels as the Muse-Bibliothque Michel de Ghelderode.
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Gisele Prassinos - The Arthritic Grasshopper and Other Tales
Wakefield Press 2016 ISBN 9781939663221 Acqn 26392
Pb 15x23cm 240pp 15ills 13.95
First discovered, celebrated and published by the Surrealists at the age of 14 (they declared her
the new Alice), Gisle Prassinos quickly found herself established in the literary world as a fount
of automatic tales freighted with transgressive humour and a pervading sense of threatened
feminine identity. Gisle Prassinos tone is unique, claimed Andr Breton, all the poets are
jealous of it. Swift lowers his eyes, Sade shuts his candy box. The Arthritic Grasshopper and
Other Tales gathers together all of her literary prose from 1934 to 1944, an assortment of anxious
dream tales drawn from journals and plaquettes, introduced and illustrated by such admirers as
Paul luard, Man Ray and Hans Bellmer. The 72 stories include such longer, novella-length tales
as Sondue, The Executioner and The Dream.
Gisle Prassinos (19202015) was born in Istanbul of a Greek father and an Italian mother. One
summer day at the age of 13 and in a fit of boredom, she began to compose short absurdist
vignettes, filling up pages of paper with tales of sarcastic stains, arrogant hair and liquid frogs.
Her first collection was published in 1935, with a preface by Paul luard and a frontispiece
portrait by Man Ray. With World War II, Prassinos stopped publishing, but in 1954 she returned to
literature with a series of novels and stories still imbued with a Surrealist sensibility.
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