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In defense of the poetic, Pascal Quignard pens an impassioned reply to von Hofmannsthal's despondent Lord ChandosIn 1902, Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos Letter articulated a deep crisis of faith in language. Having "lost completely the ability to think or speak of anything coherently," the titular character abandons literature in favor of silence. In The Answer to Lord Chandos, a text that was meticulously crafted over 41 years, Pascal Quignard passionately challenges this withdrawal and urges us not to forsake the power of poetry. His exhortation meditates on Emily Brontë, Handel, Rembrandt and more to demonstrate how literature rejuvenates our connection to the universe. In an introduction to this first English edition, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy illuminates the core question animating this debate, which has resonated within literature since its inception: can poetry give access to the real? Quignard's resounding answer offers a testament to the immense value of literary expression.Pascal Quignard (born 1948) is the author of A Terrace in Rome and more than 60 fiction and nonfiction titles. He has won both the Prix Goncourt, France's top literary prize, and the Formentor Prize for Letters.

A rollicking adventure caper satirizing the soon-to-be ubiquitous aspects of spy sagas First published posthumously in 1966, Trouble in the Swaths was written by Boris Vian for a small audience of family and friends during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. It is a flippant, at times outrageous parody of genre fiction laced through with bursts of Sadean violence, absurdist slapstick and excessive wordplay in which the author makes his fictionalized debut under such anagrammed monikers as the Baron Visi and the detective Brisavion. Despite preceding Ian Fleming's novels by several years, Trouble in the Swaths nonetheless anticipates and ridicules such spy thrillers and their sexism, casual murders, plot twists and technological gadgetry. The adventure involves grenades and machine guns, planes and parachutes, trapdoors and underground caverns, a secret manuscript that endeavors to absorb the novel and, at the center of it all, the core of the narrative maelstrom: the "forked barbarin."Boris Vian (1920-59) was a French polymath best known for his novels: both the crime novels he published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan and the surrealistic writing he published under his own name.

Satirical yet prophetical advertisements for imaginary new products, influential to Marcel Duchamp and Francis PicabiaOriginally published in book form in 1916, this volume of French author Gaston de Pawlowski's (1874-1933) writings, New Inventions and the Latest Innovations, collects the humorist's fictional columns mocking his era's burgeoning consumerism and growing faith in science. From anti-slip soap, gut rests and the pocket-sized yardstick to repurposed spittoons, nasal vacuums, electric oysters and musicographical revolvers, Pawlowski offers a far-sighted critique of technological gadgetry and a cynical promise to remove discomfort from every facet of life, even as World War I raged on and technology was unleashing new horrors onto humanity.Pawlowski's humorous cultural critique and tongue-in-cheek celebration of uselessness and futility bears relevance for today, as technology remains the hoped-for answer to our increasingly troubled human condition. Described with the excessive optimism of the sales pitch, these inventions of yesteryear were also an influence in the arts, admired by such figures as Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Queneau, and standing as a precursor to the work of such artists as Jean Tinguely and today's looming specter of AI-generated artwork and literature.

A previously untranslated gem of Surrealist prose poetry from the acclaimed French novelistIn 1941, Julien Gracq, newly released from a German prisoner-of-war camp, wrote a series of prose poems that would come to represent the only properly Surrealist writings in his oeuvre. Surrealism provided Gracq with a means of counteracting his disturbing wartime experiences; his newfound freedom inspired a new freedom of personal expression, and he gave the collection an appropriate title, Great Liberty: "In the occult dictionary of Surrealism, the true name of poetry is liberation." Gracq the poet rather than the novelist is at work here: Surrealist fireworks lace through bewitching modernist romance, fantasy, black humor and deadpan absurdism. A later, postwar section entitled "The Habitable Earth" presents Gracq as visionary traveler exploring Andes and Flanders and returning to the narrative impulse of his better-known fiction.Julien Gracq (1910-2007), born Louis Poirier, is known for such dreamlike novels as The Castle of Argol, A Dark Stranger, The Opposing Shore and Balcony in the Forest. He was close to the Surrealist movement, and André Breton in particular, to whom he devoted a critical study.

A Rimbaudesque novella of wayward wanderlust and liberty from the cofounder of SurrealismConceived in a hospital bed in 1917 and written a few months later after his fateful encounter with Lautréamont's Maldoror, Philippe Soupault's novella The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle preceded the author's involvement with Parisian Dada and the Surrealist movement he would later launch with his friends. Inspired by a schoolmate's sudden departure for Greenland on a whim and his subsequent disappearance, Soupault imagines his alter ego's adventures as entries in a journal both personal and fictional. Adopted by an Inuit tribe, Pirouelle drifts from one encounter to another, from one casual murder to another, until his life of liberty and spontaneity leads him to stasis at the edge of existence.After taking an active part in French Dada, Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) cofounded the Surrealist movement with André Breton and Louis Aragon, and authored with Breton The Magnetic Fields, the first official Surrealist work. After being expelled from the movement for the crime of being "too literary," he devoted his life to writing, travel, journalism and political activity (for which he was put in prison by the collaborationist Vichy government).

Stephen Orr's impressionistic take on the short story captures a child's bewilderment of what it's like to be alive.

Teen PI Olivia Grace is back on the case, this time investigating her best friend's disappearance.

In English for the first time, the collection that launched Jean Ray's reputation as the Belgian master of the weird taleAfter the commercial failure of his 1931 collection of fantastical stories Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray spent the next decade writing and publishing under other names in the stifling atmosphere of Ghent. Only in the midst of the darkest years of the Nazi Occupation of Belgium would he suddenly publish a spate of books under his earlier nom de plume. The first of these volumes was The Great Nocturnal. Published in 1942, the collection, as its subtitle indicates, consists of tales of fear and dread, but a dread evoked not by the standard tropes of horror but what had by now evolved into Ray's personal brand of fear, drawn from a specifically Belgian notion of the fantastic that lies alongside the banality of everyday life. An aging haberdasher's monotonous life opens up to a spiritual fourth dimension (and serial murder); an inebriated young man in a tavern draws cryptic symbols and mutters statements that evoke an inexplicable terror among some sailors, and, as he sobers up, himself; three students drink Finnish Kümmel and keep watch over a deceased woman's apartment, awaiting a horrific transmutation. Yet these tales are laced with a certain mordant humor that bears as much allegiance with Ambrose Bierce as Edgar Allan Poe, and toy as much with the reader's expectations as they do with their characters. Jean Ray (1887-1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. Alternately referred to as the "Belgian Poe" and the "Flemish Jack London," Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it of his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition Era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence.

Amnesia can numb your pain....... unless it gets you killed.A freak earthquake upends Olivia's world, while two men claim her love. When her memory begins to return in bits and pieces, Olivia discovers embezzlement. With danger lurking all around her, she must continue the charade of amnesia. But will time run out on her before she uncovers the truth?

Penelope Beatty made up her mind long ago she would live and die a Scottish warrior not a wife. But when nearly all her clan is killed and she is betrayed, she loathes doing the unthinkable, but must seek the help of an Englishman who owed her father's his life. Thomas Godfrey never married, but when a Scottish warrior lass shows up needing his aid, he finds her both annoying and irresistible. But the last thing he wants is to marry a woman who fights alongside him. If he was going to marry-which he isn't-it would be to a soft, submissive woman. But when the Lady Brithwin meets the Scottish lass, she's sure she's found the perfect match for Thomas and nothing is going to stop her from seeing a summer wedding.

"Originally published as La croisade des enfants in 1896"--Copyright page.

Originally published in French as Trouver sans chercher (1934-1944) in 1976.

This volume collects three savage plays from the man André Breton designated as one of the only "true Dadas" (alongside Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia): The Emperor of China (1916), The Mute Canary (1920) and The Executioner of Peru (1928). The first two have long been acknowledged as highpoints in the Dada movement's contribution to the theater, but in their brutal depictions of violent sexuality and nightmarish tyranny, and their casts of manipulative bureaucrats, murderous henchmen, insane dictators, lascivious virgins, Ubuesque cuckolds and nonsense-spewing enigmas, these plays also echo the work of such other dissident surrealists of the era as Georges Bataille and André Masson. These unsettling theatrical works were significant anticipations of Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty and the Theater of the Absurd of the 1960s. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes (1884-1974) was a French writer and artist, and one of the fiercest adherents of the Paris Dada movement, acting as the group's secretary, and for which he authored some of its most vitriolic texts. Disenchanted with the Surrealist movement that followed, Ribemont-Dessaignes allied himself instead with such other Surrealist dissidents as René Daumal and the Grand Jeu. Throughout his long life, Ribemont-Dessaignes authored a sizable oeuvre of novels, plays, poetry, essays and memoirs, none of which has to date been translated into English.

"Originally published as Flametti, oder, Vom Dandysmus der Armen, 1918."--Title page verso.

"La grande vie was first published in 1979 in the sixth issue of Subjectif, edited by Gerard Guegan" -- T.p. verso.

The final chapter in Francis Ponge's interrogation of unassuming objectsWritten from 1967 to 1973 over a series of early mornings in seclusion in his country home, The Table offers a final chapter in Francis Ponge's interrogation of the unassuming objects in his life: in this case, the table upon which he wrote. In his effort to get at the presence lying beneath his elbow, Ponge charts out a space of silent consolation that lies beyond (and challenges) scientific objectivity and poetic transport. This is one of Ponge's most personal, overlooked, and--because it was the project he was working on when he died--his least processed works. It reveals the personal struggle Ponge engaged in throughout all of his writing, a hesitant uncertainty he usually pared away from his published texts that is at touching opposition to the manufactured, "durable mother" of the table on and of which he here writes.

"Originally published as Le roi au masque d'or in 1892."--Title page verso.

Exquisitely crafted essays on medieval criminal slang, ancient Greek prostitution, laughter, anarchy and more from the endlessly influential Marcel Schwob"All over the world," wrote Jorge Luis Borges, "there are devotees of the writer Marcel Schwob who constitute little secret societies." Spicilege, Schwob's last book published under his name, constitutes the handbook to these societies--to Schwob's work, to himself as erudite scholar and author, and to the twilight of the era of French Symbolism. Schwob was, as Paul Léautaud described him, a "living library," and the critical biographies gathered in the essays of Spicilege display a few of the volumes in that library: his groundbreaking research on François Villon (work that remains a cornerstone to our knowledge of Villon), his passion for Robert Louis Stevenson and his encounters with such less-remembered writers as George Meredith. But it is the carefully developed ideas in these essays and the eccentric yet thorough scholarship that draws them together that are of particular interest today: the understanding of criminal slang in the Middle Ages; the study of prostitution in ancient Greece; the folklore inspired by a Flaubert story; a complex critique of individuality that effectively laid the groundwork for Jarry's "pataphysics"; as well as ruminations on perversity, laughter, biography, love, terror and pity, and art and anarchy.Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) was a scholar of startling breadth, an incomparable storyteller and a secret influence on generations of writers, from Apollinaire and Borges to Roberto Bolaño and J. Rodolfo Wilcock.

Colonial Cousins explores the historic relationships and connections between Australia and India, two colonies of the British Empire. The work considers affinities of landscape and culture, and documents relationships in trade and government, as well as anecdotal links from the time of Gondwana, when the continents were physically joined, to the present.

Thirty tales of theft, onanism, incest, murder and a host of other forms of perversion and cruelty from the "ungrateful beggar" and "pilgrim of the absolute," Laeon Bloy. "Disagreeable Tales," first published in French in 1894, collects Bloy's narrative sermons from the depths: a cauldron of frightful anecdotes and inspired misanthropy that represents a high point of the French Decadent movement and the most emblematic entry into the library of the "Cruel Tale" christened by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Whether depicting parents and offspring being sacrificed for selfish gains, or imbeciles sacrificing their own individuality on a literary whim, these tales all draw sustenance from an underlying belief: the root of religion is crime against man, nature and God, and that in this hell on earth, even the worst among us has a soul.

Translation of a novela, Die Trompeten von Jericho, which originally appeared in Gesamtausgabe Bd. 4.2, pages 331-381 (Brinkman & Bose, Berlin, 1998).

The first translation of Leonor Fini's voluptuous and antipatriarchal gothic novelOriginally published in French in 1979, Rogomelec was the third of Leonor Fini's novels. All the qualities of the paintings for which she is famed can be found in it: an undermining of patriarchy, the ambiguities of gender and the slipperiness of desire, along with darker hints of cruelty and the voluptuousness of fear. This novella's ambiguous narrator sets off for the isolated locale of Rogomelec--where a crumbling monastery serves as a sanatorium and offers a cure involving a diet of plants and flowers--and moves through a waking dream of strangely scented monks, vibratory concerts in a cavernous ossuary and ritualist pomp with costumes of octopi and shining beetles. As the days unfold, the narrator discovers that the "the celebration of the king" is approaching, the events of which will lead to a shocking discovery in Rogomelec's Gothic ruins. This first English translation includes 14 drawings by Fini that accompanied the novella's original publication. Born in Argentina and raised in Italy, Leonor Fini (1907-96) concluded a rebellious youth with a move to Paris, where there followed six decades of work as artist, illustrator, designer and author with ties to the Surrealist movement. Rejecting the role of muse, her work focused on portrayals of women as subjects with desire rather than objects of desire. She was featured in MoMA's landmark 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, and imagery from her painting Le Bout du Monde was used by Madonna in her 1994 video "Bedtime Story." Fini's first Paris show was curated by Christian Dior; while working for Schiaparelli she designed the bottle for Shocking, the designer's top-selling perfume (and the acknowledged inspiration for Gaultier's torso-shaped bottles). She also designed the costumes for two films, Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet (1954) and John Huston's A Walk with Love and Death (1968). Fini is also well known for her illustrations for Pauline Reage's Story of O (one of her costumes inspired the book's final scene).

In the last days of the Venetian Republic, the successive wives of Count Alvise Lanzi suffer mysterious, agonizing deaths. Murder Most Serene offers a cruel portrait of a beautiful but corrupt city-state and its equally extravagant and corrupt inhabitants. Redolent of darkness, death, poison and transgression, it is also an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek Venetian romp.

A collection of previously unpublished erotic manuscripts from the author of The Songs of BilitisA bestselling author in his time, Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925) was a friend of, and influence on, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde and Stephane Mallarmé among others. He achieved instant notoriety with Aphrodite and The Songs of Bilitis, but it was only after his death that Louÿs' true legacy was to be discovered: nearly 900 pounds of erotic manuscripts were found in his home, all of them immediately scattered among collectors and many subsequently lost. Since then, it has become clear that Louÿs is the greatest French writer of erotica there ever was. The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners was the first of his erotic manuscripts to see publication, and it also remains his most outrageous--an erotic classic in which humor takes precedence over arousal. By means of shockingly filthy advice--ostensibly offered "for use in educational establishments"--couched in a hilariously parodic admonitory tone, Louÿs turns late-nineteenth-century manners roundly on their head, with ass prominently skyward. Whether offering rules for etiquette in church, school or home, or outlining a girl's duties toward family, neighbor or God, Louÿs manages to mock every institution and leave no taboo unsullied. The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners has only grown more scandalous and subversive since its first appearance in 1926.