Bøger udgivet af Wakefield Press

The Diary of Emily Caroline Creaghe is one of the most remarkable documents of Australian exploration, written by one of the rarest of explorers - a woman.

"Sens-Plastique has now been a companion of mine for nearly 20 years, and so far as I am concerned, Malcolm de Chazal is much the most original and interesting French writer to emerge since the war." -W.H. AudenAfter seeing an azalea looking at him in the Curepipe Botanic Gardens (and realizing that he himself was becoming a flower), Malcolm de Chazal began composing what would eventually become his unclassifiable masterpiece, Sens-Plastique, which would take its final form in 1948. Containing over 2,000 aphorisms, axioms and allegories, the book was immediately hailed as a work of genius by André Breton, Francis Ponge, Jean Dubuffet and Georges Braque. Embraced by the Surrealists as one of their own, Chazal chose to avoid all literary factions and steadfastly anchored himself in his solitary life as a bachelor mystic on the island nation of Mauritius, where he would proceed to write books and paint for the rest of his life. Sens-Plastique employs a strange humor and an alchemical sensibility to offer up an utterly original world vision that unifies neo-science, philosophy and poetry into a new form of writing. Mapping every human body part, facial expression and emotion onto the natural kingdom through subconscious thinking, Chazal presents a world in which humankind is not just made in the image of God, but Nature is made in the image of humankind: a sensual, synesthetic world in which everything in the universe, be it animal, vegetable, mineral or human, employs a spiritual copula. Malcolm de Chazal (1902-81) was a Mauritian writer and painter. Forsaking a career in the sugar industry, he spent the majority of his life in a solitary, mystical pursuit of the continuity between man and nature.

A startlingly contemporary portrait of drug addiction in prewar Paris Published in 1943 (just a year before its author was arrested by the Gestapo for his Resistance activities), The Die Is Cast was a departure for Robert Desnos: a shift from his earlier, frenetic Surrealist prose to a social realism that borrowed as much from his life experience as his career as a journalist. Drawing on his own use of drugs in the 1920s and his doomed relationship with the chanteuse Yvonne George, Desnos here portrays a band of opium, cocaine and heroin users from all walks of life in Paris. It is a startlingly contemporary portrayal of overdoses, arrests, suicides and the flattened solitude of the addict, yet published in occupied Paris, years before "junkie literature" established itself with the Beat Generation. An anomaly both in his career and for having been published under the Occupation by an active member of the Resistance, The Die Is Cast now stands as timely a piece of work as it had been untimely when it first appeared. Robert Desnos (1900-45) was Surrealism's most accomplished practitioner of automatic writing and dictation before his break with André Breton in 1929. His career in journalism and radio culminated in an active role in the French Resistance. Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, and passed through several concentration camps until finally dying of typhoid in Terezín in 1945, a few days after the camp he was in was liberated.

The dinner menu at the Aspara had the usual interesting items such as 'Soap' and 'A Fried Monk' not to mention 'Chicken Amok'. The waiter couldn't tell me what amok meant, but I tried it and it turned out to be, not a crazy chicken running around with a cleaver, but chicken pieces in a soup made with coconut milk and lots of spices and coloured a kind of caterpillar-innards green that was very tasty.Deciphering the menu is half the fun in this mysterious land only just now opening to tourists and travellers. Despite its horrific history, Lydia Laube finds that Cambodia is an ancient, beautiful country populated by friendly, generous people who like to ride motorbikes very fast around corners. Join Lydia, squashed into a taxi with nine or so others, for an unforgettable adventure in Asia.

Catherine Piron is in Noumea, searching for traces of the father she barely remembers. She meets journalist Henri Boulez, her only lead in a foreign country. Their journey into the remote regions of New Caledonia uncovers an extraordinary story ...

A frenzied German Expressionist tale of orgy as salvation in Weimar BerlinOriginally published in German in 1919, Potsdamer Platz was Curt Corrinth's first novel to employ an expressionistic, frenetic prose and presented his excessive vision of free love. Inspired by the sex theories of Freud's controversial disciple Otto Gross, Corrinth preached the sexual orgy as a means to salvation and universal copulation as a new world religion. The book's provincial protagonist, Hans Termaden, arrives in Berlin, where he quickly evolves from city rube to sexual messiah as he converts prostitutes and virgins into sensual warriors and frees men of sexual inhibitions. As word of his exploits spreads, people flock to his headquarters in Potsdamer Platz, turning all buildings into brothels. Police and army attempt to bring order but themselves defect to take part in the spreading copulation as Corrinth's prose itself begins to fragment and melt on the page. Decried in its time, Postdamer Platz can be read today as a portal into the cultural excesses of Weimar Berlin. This first English translation includes the original illustrations done by Paul Klee for the book's 1920 deluxe edition. Curt Corrinth (1894-1960) studied law until serving in the military in World War I, which resulted in his embracing an antiwar and anti-bourgeois stance through his poetry and then through a series of novels, three of which would be banned by the Nazis in 1933. In 1955, he moved to the GDR in East Berlin, where he died five years later.

Barossa Food is a marvellous combination of recipes, history and stories, all coming from the place in Australia that can best lay claim to a distinctive regional food culture; the Barossa Valley. Angela Heuzenroeder draws on the memories, recipe notebooks

A parody of the medieval Lives of the Saints, Ermanno Cavazzoni's Brief Lives of Idiots offers us a perfect month of portraits of idiots drawn from real life, from overly realist writers to fringe-belief obsessives, punctuated every seventh day with a litany of suicides--failed, foolish or fatal to others. This roll call extends the ridiculous to melancholic extremes, introducing us to such exemplary fools as the father and husband unable to recognize his own family, the Marxist convinced that Christ was an extraterrestrial, the would-be saint who finds a private martyrdom through the torturous confinement of a pair of ill-fitting leather oxfords and the man who failed to realize that he had spent two years in a concentration camp. This is a display of myriad idiocy, discovered and achieved by hook or by crook, be it through paranoia, misapplied methodology, religious hallucination or relentless diarrhea. But Cavazzoni engages in neither finger pointing nor celebration. If saints can be counted, idiots cannot: idiocy is ultimately the human condition.

Baron Munchausen returns with visions of mobile architecture and journeys to sausage moons, in this previously untranslated novel from Paul ScheerbartIt is 1905 and a raging stupidity is holding sway over Europe. As an 18-year-old Clarissa and her family take refuge on the icy shores of Lake Wannsee, the legendary Baron Munchausen makes an unexpected appearance at their door. Returning to German society after a century of absence at the ripe age of 180, the Baron is cajoled into presenting his impressions of the World Fair in Melbourne, Australia, to a select gathering of Berlin celebrities. Over the course of a week, the sprightly Baron arrives nightly by sleighmobile to combat the dreary days with a series of fantastical visions and theories: he discusses mobile architecture, the role of technology in the arts and the need for art to ignore nature in its quest to discover new planetary organs and senses; the new household miracles of vacuum tubes for cleaning and potato-peeling machines; the repressive function of sexuality; and the need for progressive taxation. His tales of Melbourne eventually take his audience from a restaurant in the ocean depths to the dwellings of mineral giants in mountain caverns, before culminating in a spiritual voyage to outer space among sausage moons and sun-skins. Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion. Dubbed the “wise clownâ€? by his contemporaries, he opposed the naturalism of his day with fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that would influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.

Written in the mid-1850s before any official or more orthodox history of the South Australian colony had appeared, The Kangaroo Islanders is one of the few colonial novels that represents in fleeting glimpses some of the improvisational and interactive encounters between the colonisers and the colonised on the edges of the island continent.A remarkable and colourful book, this novel represents life on Kangaroo Island in the period between 1802-1836. Rick Hosking has annotated the book extensively with absorbing historical information and fascinating details of personalities and events, making this new edition of The Kangaroo Islanders a delight for both fiction fans and history buffs. And art lovers too, for the book includes pages of many of W.A. Cawthorne's best watercolours, reproduced in colour. A book for omnivores, indeed!

"First published in France in the dark year of 1942, the story collection Waystations of the Deep Night remains the best-known of Marcel Brion's numerous novels and stories in the vein of the strange and the fantastic. The journeys in this volume carry the reader through the surreal vistas of an underground city that appears aboveground as a bizarre theater of facades and a fire-ravaged landscape where souls turn to ash. A young castrato sings his heart out in a lost baroque garden; a child falls under the fateful spell of an enchanted painting; a traveler in a burned-out landscape encounters the Prince of Death; and dancing cats engage in mortal combat in the cellars of an abandoned port city. A self-declared heir of Achim von Arnim and E.T.A. Hoffmann, Brion was also an admirer of the German Romantic writer Novalis and his sequence of Hymns to the Night, but his own imaginative homages to the night are more troublingly ambiguous, possibly an indirect reflection of the dark times in which they were written. Born in Marseille in 1895, Marcel Brion was a freelance writer and critic. In 1964 he was elected to the Acadâemie franðcaise in recognition of both his critical and creative writing, Over the course of a long and productive career he published 20 novels, four volumes of short stories and some 68 nonfiction books covering music, art, literature, history and travel. He died in Paris in 1984." --Amazon.com.