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Self-Shadowing Prey, one of the final texts by the Romanian poet Ghérasim Luca (1913-1994), is clearly constructed around the sought complications of language. Embodying the surrealist operation of play with considerable exactitude and rigor, Self-Shadowing Prey is rich with neologistic stupors, nouns made verbs, and compelling repetitions and linguistic expansions. Language is not merely put into play but made to participate in an erotic act, and words become the locus of an exploding self. This linguistically-joyous text reveals the arresting syntactic creation and creative stammering which Deleuze and Guattari both saw in Luca and what led Deleuze to call him a great poet among the greatest. "If Ghérasim Luca's speech is eminently poetic," Deleuze pronounced, "it is because he makes stuttering an affect of language and not an affectation of speech. The entire language spins and varies in order to disengage a final block of sound, a single breath at the limit of the cry, JE T'AIME PASSIONNÉMENT." Transformed for the first time into English by distinguished translator Mary Ann Caws, this bi-lingual edition of Self-Shadowing Prey gives us yet one more important text by a key figure of the Romanian branch of Surrealism. In addition, it is the first book of Luca's verse ever to be translated into English."Ghérasim Luca is a great poet among the greatest: he invented a prodigious stammering, his own." -Deleuze "Mary Ann Caws' passionate translations render deft, delightful facets of the formidable Ghérasim Luca: virile servings of refreshment and tumult, liberating language from the yoke of Duty. This collection pairs and contrasts well with the churning self-surgery we had the pleasure of smuggling from Romanian. Self-Shadowing Prey calls for vertiginous reading, in exhilarating reflection of the sonorous scintillations of Luca's own reading performances." -Julian and Laura Semilian, translators of Ghérasim Luca's The Inventor of Love & Other Works

Marginalia on Casanova, the first volume of the St. Orpheus Breviary, is Miklos Szentkuthy''s synthesis of 2,000 years of European culture. St. Orpheus is Szentkuthy''s Virgil, an omniscient, poet who guides us not through hell, but through all of recorded history, myth, religion, and literature, albeit reimagined as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings, popes, saints, tyrants, and artists. At once pagan and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Asian and European, St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and mankind in one supra-person and veil, anendless series of masks and personae, humanity in its protean, futural shape, an always changing function of discourse, text, myth, & mentalite.Through St. Orpheus'' method, disparate moments of history become synchronic, are juggled to reveal, paradoxically, their mutual difference and essential similarity. "Orpheus wandering in the infernal regions," says Szentkuthy, "is the perennial symbol of the mind lost amid the enigmas of reality. The aim of the work is, on the one hand, to represent the reality of history with the utmost possible precision, and on the other, to show, through the mutations of the European spirit, all the uncertainties of contemplative man, the transiency of emotions and the sterility of philosophical systems."Marginalia on Casanova relives the despiritualization of the main protagonist''s sensual adventures, though it is less his sex life & more his intellectual mission, the sole determinantof his being, which is the focus of this mesmeric book. Through his own glittering associations and broadly spanning array of metaphors, Szentkuthy analyses and views the 18th centuryand its notion of homogeneity from the vantage point of the 20th century, with the full armor of someone who was, perhaps, one of the last Hungarian Europeans. While a commentary onCasanova''s memoirs, it is also Szentkuthy''s very own philosophy of love.Passion, playfulness, irony, and a whole gamut of protean metamorphoses are what characterize Marginalia on Casanova, a work in which readers will experience both profundity anda taking to wing of essay-writing that is intellectually radiant and which is as sensual and provocative as a gondola ride with Casanova.

Composed over 2,500 years, lost in the deserts of Iraq for 2,000 more, Gilgamesh presents a palimpsest of ancient Middle Eastern cultic and courtly lyrics and lore. The story of a visionary journey beyond the limits of human experience, Gilgamesh is a tale of friendship, adventure, mortality, and loss. The legends it collects ultimately informed Greek and Egyptian myths, Hebrew Scriptures, and Islamic literature.Scholarly translations of Gilgamesh often dilute the expressive force of the material through overzealous erudition. Popular versions of the poem frequently gloss over gaps in the text with accessible and comforting, but ultimately falsely ecumenical language.In this new version, Stuart Kendall animates the latest scholarship with a contemporary poetic sensibility, inspired by the pagan worldview of the ancient work. Transcriptions of all of the available tablets and tales have been harnessed to present a fluid and holistic Gilgamesh, true to the archaic mind. This Gilgamesh is a poem of environmental encounter and, ultimately, ecological disaster. It is a contemporary poem rooted in the origins of our civilization, a record of the first break of light at the dawn of our consciousness."As Gilgamesh enters the domain of the classical¿as it has for several decades now¿each new generation looks for a way to bring it from its ur-world into the living present. Toward this end Stuart Kendall¿s is the exemplary version for our time, a reading that allows the mind to see what had been too long lost to us and what we so much need to make us fully human. This is the place to go for further sustenance.¿¿Jerome Rothenberg

Italian writer/director Elio Petri (1929-1982) is of the cinematic era of Pasolini, Bertolucci, and Bellocchio, and although he is recognized by film scholars as one of the major figures of Italian cinema, his work remains largely unknown outside of Italy. Hardly a marginal figure, Petri began as an assistant to Giuseppe De Santis and his future collaborators would include many of the most renowned film artists of the 20th century: Marcello Mastroianni, Gian Maria Volonté, Dante Ferretti, Ennio Morricone, Ugo Pirro, and Tonino Guerra.Due to Petri's belief that culture is inextricable from political struggle, he was a central figure in the fervent debates of his time on both Italian cinema and culture that arose from the aftermath of World War II to the 1980s. However, while generally characterized as a political filmmaker, this view is limited and reductive, for Petri's films are polemical interrogations of social, religious, and political phenomena as well as acute analyses of moral, psychological, and existential crises. His cinema is also informed by a rich and profound understanding of and engagement with literature, philosophy, psychology, and art, evident for instance in his adaptations of Sciascia's novels, Miller's The American Clock (for the stage), and Sartre's Dirty Hands, as well as in his use of Pop and Abstract Art in The Tenth Victim, A Quiet Place in the Country, and other films.Available for the first time in English, Writings on Cinema and Life is a collection of texts Petri originally published mainly in French and Italian journals. Also included are several art reviews, as well as Petri's essay on Sartre's Dirty Hands, a text forgotten until recently. Petri's affinity for subtle analysis is evident in his clear and precise writing style, which utilizes concrete concepts and observations, cinematographic references, and ideas drawn from literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. There is as well an acute and scathing sense of humor that permeates many of the texts. Petri was the recipient of the Palme d'Or, an Academy Award, and the Edgar Allan Poe award among many others, and in 2005 he was the subject of the documentary Elio Petri: Appunti Su Un Autore. This collection of Petri's writings is an important contribution to the history of cinema and offers further insight into the work, thought, and beliefs of one of cinema's most ambitious and innovative practitioners.

Plays with Films brings together texts of the final three productions of Richard Foreman¿s Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark¿s Church-in-the-Bowery: Zomboid! (2006), Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead! (2007), and Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (2008). In these three exhilarating and challenging works, Foreman turns to a meditation on the mechanical and digital reproductions of screen images within the discipline of theater, and thereby recalibrates and expands the potential relationship we can have with the live art that is theater.Extending the model of theater as a ¿reverberating machine,¿ Foreman¿s use of film in these plays is intimately integrated into the complex network of impulse generators, creating an unprecedented experience of multi-dimensional scriptural space, a new kind of total theater that effectively recharges and redirects the issues of consciousness he has been exploring with indefatigable intensity since the establishment of his theater in 1968. The bodied reality of theatrical experience, and the recognition of unconsciousness within that experience, becomes more fraught with peril in today¿s screened world. These plays, originally conceived as his final theater works (though he did change his mind), engage in ways that continue his ambition to upend habitual thinking and may prove transformative for the individual¿s ability to interpret and understand the threats of deadening conformity and loss of identity through the new digital culture.Employing an innovative typographical presentation, Plays with Films demonstrates how Americäs most daring theater artist alchemizes reproducible and non-reproducible reality into a unique contemplation of the project of self-construction in the 21st century.