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Wartime tales of disquiet and dread from Jean Ray, author of Cruise of Shadows and progenitor of the "Belgian School of the Strange"During the Occupation, severed from contact with France and other countries, Belgian publishing turned inward, and forgotten authors such as Jean Ray were given new leases on literary life. Embracing the influence of American pulp fiction, Ray's short stories found a new audience during World War II, and gave voice to a realm of fear and unease that blended fantasy with a Catholic heritage and a distinctly bourgeois everyday. Circles of Dread, Ray's fourth short-story collection, was first published in 1943, the same year that saw the appearance of his best-known work, the novel Malpertuis. This collection's portholes onto sinister fantasy include such stories as "The Marlyweck Cemetery," "The Inn of the Specters" and "The Story of the Wûlkh." Ray takes the reader from the quiet streets of Ghent to the scrambled streets of London to the Flinders river in Australia, with tales spun from such materials as the iron hand of Götz von Berlichingen, the black mirror of John Dee, a Moustiers ceramic plate and the shifting, extradimensional menace of a predatory cemetery. Alternately referred to as the "Belgian Poe" and the "Flemish Jack London," Jean Ray (1887-1964) delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of Dickens and Chaucer. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the Prohibition Era, an executioner in Venice and a Chicago gangster in fact covered over a more prosaic existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales.

"Originally published as V¶ux by Editions du Seuil, 1989"--Copyright page.

"Originally published as Haschisch: Erzèahlungen, Frankfurt am Main: Sèudwestdeutscher Verlag, 1902"--Title page verso.

"Originally published as Les petits mâetiers ÃFata Morgana 1978"--T.p. verso.

Set in Hamburg, London, Palermo, Brest, and other ports of call in the anxious Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, Mademoisell Bambáu tells the tales of three secret agents: the melancholic adventurer and accidental spy, Captain Hartmann; his enigmatic mistress from Naples (and a double agent for the Germans), "Signorina Bambáu"; and the sinister Páere Barbanðcon, who retires from his life of espionage and murder to eke out his troubled days in an aptly named Boarding House of Usher, where shadows are as likely to strangle a man as they are to haunt him. Like all of Mac Orlan's novels, Mademoiselle Bambáu is less a novel that a barometer of societal unease, crippling melancholy, and dark humor. It is also one of the clearer examples of what the author named the social fantastic: a less romantic notion of the fantastic as it is commonly understood, translated through the lens of modernity. Instead of the eruption of the supernatural into the everyday, Mac Orlan located a new form of the fantastic in the eruption of modernity in social life, with diabolical emanations not in supernatural beings or creatures, but in such real-life human beings as Jack the Ripper, Henri Dâesirâe Landru, and Mta Hari--some of the personages whose influence makes itself known in the novel at hand. -- Provided by publisher.

Translator's introduction: pages vii-xx.

Originally published as Le Voleur de Talan in 1917.

The Stairway to the Sun & Dance of the Comets brings together two short books, originally published in 1903, by the antierotic 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 dwarf's underwater glass lair in the jellyfish kingdom. Scheerbart's 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, Scheerbart's 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 Scheerbart's lifelong yearning for a home in the universe. Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion.

"Originally published as Sueur de sang in 1893."--Title page verso.

The first English translation of the novel awarded the 2000 Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie FrançaiseA Terrace in Rome describes the tormented life of Geoffroy Meaume, a 17th-century engraver of encrypted shadows and erotic prints. After a passionate affair in his youth concludes with his face being burned by acid thrown by his lover's jealous fiancé, Meaume undertakes a lifetime of wandering, his psyche forever engraved by the memory of the woman who spurned him. With a face of boiled leather and a mind haunted by a nightmare of desire, he devotes himself to the black-and-white world of etchings and mezzotints, forsaking the paradise of color to engage in a science of shadows. This fragmented narrative of a man attacked by images is related in 47 short chapters which themselves act as engravings; a tale told by an antiquarian, full of fragmented vision and sexual hell. First published in French in 2000, A Terrace in Rome received the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française that same year, and went on to be translated into 19 languages. This is its first appearance in English. Pascal Quignard (born 1948) has written over 60 books of fiction, essays, and his own particular genre of philosophical reflection that straddles the personal journal, historical narrative and poetic theory. His books in English include Albucius, All the World's Mornings, The Sexual Night, Sex and Terror, On Wooden Tablets: Apronenia Avitia, and The Salon in Wurttemberg, as well as the multiple volumes of his ongoing book project The Last Kingdom, which, to date, includes The Roving Shadows, The Silent Crossing and Abysses.

Ornaments by Jossot and illustrations by Fâelix Vallotton

Originally published in Italian: La strage degl'innocenti / del cavalier Marino. In Amstardam [i.e. Italy?]: Presso Severo Protomastix, [16--?]

"Originally published as Un dilemme, 1888"--Title page verso.

Translation of: Physiologie de l'employae.

A how-to manual for the armchair adventurerPierre Mac Orlan's 1920 Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer was at once a paean to the adventure story, a tongue-in-cheek guidebook to the genre's real-life practitioners and a grim if unspoken coda to the disasters of World War I. "It must be established as a law that adventure in itself does not exist," Mac Orlan stipulates. "Adventure is in the mind of the one who pursues it, and no sooner is he able to touch it with his finger than it vanishes, to reappear much farther off in another form, at the limits of the imagination." This handbook outlines two classes of adventurer: the active adventurer (sailors, soldiers, criminals) and the passive adventurer (sedentary parasites who draw sustenance from the exploits of the former). Roaming from battlefields to pirate ships to port-town taverns, and offering advice on reading, traveling and eroticism, Mac Orlan's Handbook is ultimately a how-to manual for the imagination, and a formulation of the stark choice all would-be adventurers must face: to live or write. Generally known as the author of Le Quai des brumes (the basis for Marcel Carné's film of the same name), Pierre Mac Orlan (1882-1970) was a prolific writer of absurdist tales, adventure novels, flagellation erotica and essays, as well as the composer of a trove of songs made famous by the likes of Juliette Gréco. A member of both the Académie Goncourt and the Collège de 'Pataphysique, Mac Orlan was admired by everyone from Raymond Queneau and Boris Vian to André Malraux and Guy Debord.

Jean Ferry's only published book of fiction, translated into English for the first timeFirst published in French in 1950 in a limited edition of 100 copies, then republished in 1953 (and enthusiastically praised by André Breton), The Conductor and Other Tales is Jean Ferry's only published book of fiction. It is a collection of short prose narratives that offer a blend of pataphysical humor and surreal nightmare: secret societies so secret that one cannot know if one is a member or not, music-hall acts that walk a tightrope from humor to horror, childhood memories of a man never born, and correspondence from countries that are more states of mind than geographical locales. Lying somewhere between Kafka's parables and the prose poems of Henri Michaux, Ferry's tales read like pages from the journal of a stranger in a familiar land. Though extracts have appeared regularly in Surrealist anthologies over the decades, The Conductor has never been fully translated into English until now. This edition includes four stories not included in the original French edition and is illustrated throughout with collages by Claude Ballaré. Jean Ferry (1906-1974) made his living as a screenwriter for such filmmakers as Luis Buñuel and Louis Malle, cowriting such classics as Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Quai des orfèvres and script-doctoring Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis. He was the first serious scholar and exegete of the work of Raymond Roussel (on whom he published three books) and a member of the Collège de 'Pataphysique.

Dancing Before Storms is about times of anger and upheaval and the stories of men and women who had power and influence but were overtaken by events.

Footsteps in an abandoned holiday resort as the cold weather settles in; a knock on the door of a hut in the middle of an isolated bog; a lane in Rotterdam perceptible to only one inhabitant in the city. In Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray began to fully explore the trappings of the ghost story to produce a new brand of horror tale: one that described the lineaments of a universe adjacent to this one, in which objects sweat hatred and fear, and where the individual must face the unknown in utter isolation. First published in 1931, two years after he served his prison sentence for embezzling funds for his literary magazine, Ray's second story collection failed to find the success of his first one, Whiskey Tales, but has emerged over the years as a key publication in the Belgian School of the Strange. It has remained unavailable in its integral form even in French until recently, however, though it contains some of Ray's most anthologized and celebrated stories, including two of his best known, "The Mainz Psalter" and "The Shadowy Alley." This is the book's first English translation, and the second of the volumes of Ray's books to be published by Wakefield Press. Alternately referred to as the "Belgian Poe" and the "Flemish Jack London," Jean Ray (1887-1964) delivered tales of horror under the stylistic influence of his most cherished authors, Charles Dickens and Geoffrey Chaucer. A pivotal figure in what has come to be known as the "Belgian School of the Strange," Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime--Amazon.com

This book is a scientific analysis of the soil and climatic factors affecting wine grape production, and thus, ultimately, wine itself. It provides a reasoned basis for the term 'terroir', and critically examines the science of climate change and how it could affect viticulture and winemaking. Dr John Gladstones is an internationally recognised authority on climate and viticulture, and among other achievements was instrumental in the establishment of the Margaret River wine district in Western Australia.'For anyone interested in the future interaction between climate, climate change and viticulture, this book simply has to be read. Dr John Gladstones's painstaking research is the foundation for his equally carefully constructed conclusions that robustly challenge mainstream opinions. - James Halliday

"In the tunnel-village of Gèoschenen, a man named Hermann Burger has vanished without a trace from his hotel room, suspected of suicide. What is found in his room is not a note, but a 124-page manuscript entitled Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis: an exhaustive manifesto comprising 1,046 "thanatological" aphorisms (or "mortologisms") advocating suicide."--

The most important prose-poem collection of the 20th century, available in a trade publication for the first timeMax Jacob's role in French modernity was essential, and with this second volume of his work from Wakefield Press, it can now be fully and properly assessed. First published in 1917, The Dice Cup stands alongside Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, Rimbaud's Illuminations and Pierre Reverdy's Prose Poems as one of the most important and foundational books of prose poetry. Jacob has been identified as a "cubist poet," but this collection and its shifting style escape any such easy definition: dream accounts are rendered in playful prose that thumbs its nose at the fabular tradition of Baudelaire and Mallarmé and the Romantic disorder of Rimbaud, and subverts both poetic and narrative expectations in favor of dream logic, allusion, transformed autobiography and nonsensical parody. At once mystical and burlesque, the prose poems of Dice Cup are consciously constructed, yet as unstable and unfixed as both Jacob's personality and our own. Max Jacob (1876-1944) was a French poet, painter, writer and critic. A key figure of bohemian Montmartre and the Cubist era, he rubbed shoulders with Apollinaire and Modigliani and was a lifelong friend to Picasso, Gris and Cocteau. Jacob converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1915. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, he died in a deportation camp of pneumonia. Rosanna Warren's critically acclaimed biography of Jacob was published in 2020.

"Originally published as Menneskelget Kzradock, den vaarfriske Methusalem: af Dr. Renard de Montpensiers Optegnelser, 1910."--Title page verso.

Kate's involvement with Mala Sanctuary begins after she rescues an injured koala. Grunt brings together two diverse families, each facing challenging issues.

Gillian Dooley looks to the primary sources to discover Flinders as a friend; a son, a brother, a father and a husband; as a writer, a researcher, a reader, and a musician.

Originally published in French in 1925, Whiskey Tales immediately established the reputation of the Belgian master of the weird, Jean Ray (1887-1964), whose writings in the coming years would come to chart out a literary meeting ground between H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Dickens. A commercial success, the collection earned Ray the appellation of the "Belgian Poe." A year later, however, the author would be arrested on charges of embezzlement and serve two years in prison, where he would write some of his best stories. Something of a prequel to later collections such as Cruise of Shadows or Circles of Terror (both forthcoming from Wakefield Press), Whiskey Tales finds Ray embracing the modes of adventure and horror fiction adopted by such contemporaries as Pierre Mac Orlan and Maurice Renard. Taking us from ship's prow to port, from tavern to dead-end lane, these early tales are ruled by the spirits of whiskey and fog, each element blurring the borders between humor and horror, the sentimental and the sinister, the real and the imagined. A handful of these stories first appeared in English in Weird Tales in the 1930s, but the majority of this collection has never been translated. This first complete English-language edition is the first in many volumes of Jean Ray's books that Wakefield Press will be bringing out over the coming seasons.

A meditation on five stimulants--tea, sugar, coffee, alcohol and tobacco--by an author very conscious of the fact that his gargantuan output of work was driven by an excessive intake (his bouts of writing typically required 10 to 15 cups of coffee a day) that would ultimately shorten his life. First published in French in 1839 as an appendix to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste, this Treatise was at once Balzac's effort at addressing what he perceived to be an oversight in that cornerstone of gastronomic literature; a chapter toward his never-completed body of analytic studies (alongside such essays as Treatise on Elegant Living) that were to form an overarching "pathology of social life"; and a meditation on the impact of pleasure and excess on the body and the role they play in shaping society. Balzac here describes his "terrible and cruel method" for brewing a coffee that can help the artist and author find inspiration; explains why tobacco can be credited with having brought peace to Germany; and describes his first experience of alcoholic intoxication (which required seventeen bottles of wine and two cigars). Beyond its braggadocio and whimsy, though, this treatise ultimately speaks to Balzac's obsession with death and decline, and attempts to confront in capsule form the broader implications of dissipating one's vital forces. This edition includes illustrations to an earlier French edition by Pierre Alechinsky.

Hitherto unavailable in English, Spells, by the Belgian dramatist Michel de Ghelderode, ranks among the 20th century's most noteworthy collections of fantastic tales. Like Ghelderode's 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 Ghelderode's 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 theater 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 theater 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 Musée-Bibliothèque Michel de Ghelderode.