Böcker utgivna av Wakefield Press

"Originally published as Mein Papa und die Jungfrau von Orlâeans: Nebst anderen Grotesken (Mèunchen: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1921)."--Title page verso.

"Originally published as Das widerspenstige Brautbett und andere Grotesken (Mèunchen: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1921)."--Title page verso.

A philosophical fable from a great forgotten German fabulistBilled by its author--the pseudonymous Mynona (German for "anonymous" backward)--as "the most profound magical experiment since Nostradamus," The Creator tells the tale of Gumprecht Weiss, an intellectual who has withdrawn from a life of libertinage to pursue his solitary philosophical ruminations. At first dreaming and then actually encountering an enticing young woman named Elvira, Weiss discovers that she has escaped the clutches of her uncle, the Baron, who has been using her as a guinea pig in his metaphysical experiments. But the Baron catches up with them and persuades Gumprecht and Elvira to come to his laboratory, to engage in an experiment to bridge the divide between waking consciousness and dream by entering a mirror engineered to bend and blend realities. Mynona's philosophical fable was described by the legendary German publisher Kurt Wolff as "a station farther on the imaginative train of thought of Hoffmann, Villiers, Poe, etc.," when it appeared in 1920, with illustrations by Alfred Kubin (included here). With this first English-language edition, Wakefield Press introduces the work of a great forgotten German fabulist. Mentioned in his day in the same breath as Kafka, Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender (1871-1946), was a perfectly functioning split personality: a serious philosopher by day (author of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Intellectual Biography and Kant for Children) and a literary absurdist by night, who composed black humored tales he called Grostesken. His friends and fans included Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus.

A manuscript of obscenely erotic poetry from Pierre Louÿs, written in secret and published after his deathBy turns amusing and offensive, Pierre Louÿs' Pybrac is possibly the filthiest collection of poetry ever published, and offers a taste of what the Marquis de Sade might have produced if he had ever turned his hand to verse. First published posthumously in 1927, Pybrac was, with The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners, one of the first of Louÿs' secret erotic manuscripts to see clandestine publication. Composed of 313 rhymed alexandrine quatrains, the majority of them starting with the phrase "I do not like to see...," Pybrac is in form a mockery of sixteenth-century chancellor poet Guy Du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac, whose moralizing quatrains were common literary fare for young French readers until the nineteenth century. Louÿs spent his life coming up with his own ever-growing collection of rhymed moral precepts (suitable only for adult readers): a dizzying litany describing everything he "disliked" witnessing, from lesbianism, sodomy, incest and prostitution to perversions extreme enough to give even a modern reader pause. With the rest of his erotic manuscripts, the original collection of over 2,000 quatrains was auctioned off and scattered throughout private collections; but like everything erotic, what remains, collected here, conveys an impression of unending absurdity and near-hypnotic obsession.

First edited and published by Marcel Marien in 1968 in a limited edition of 230 copies, half a year after Paul Nougâe's death, The Subversion of Images is a miniature classic in both the photobook and surrealist canons. It collects Nougâe's notes and photographs from 1929-30 to form a guidebook to the surrealist image. Nougâe here outlines his conception of the object and the surrealist approach to it, while also offering an accompaniment to the visual work of his colleague, Renâe Magritte, whose paintings he sometimes titled. How might a tangle of string elicit terror? How might the suppression of an object move one to sentimentality? What is the effect of a pair of gloves on a loaf of sliced bread? Nougâe's accompanying photographs explore these notions, and feature a number of his Belgian surrealist colleagues. This translation is presented as a facsimile of the original edition, with an afterword by Xavier Canonne, director of the Musâee de la Photographie.

Raw and beautiful and completely devoid of pretension, Ali Whitelock's poems will speak to anyone who's ever messed up, been confused, wished they'd done things differently; to anyone who's had an affair and regretted it, who's been loved completely but was too blind to see it.

Paul Heywood-Smith's interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict commenced in London in 1973 at the time of the Yom Kippur War. He was then a young lawyer imbued with the values derived from the fight against apartheid and opposition to the Vietnam War. His thesis is that the conflict is the defining conflict of our time, and has had that status for at least sixty years. It is behind the rise of militant Islam. It was the impetus for 9/11 and 7/7.The Case for Palestine presents the history and the issues objectively - and subjectively - in a way comprehensible by all in society. Not to be informed of the Arab-Israeli conflict is to fail to understand what is happening in our lives: in respect of our privacy, our national defence, our security when travelling, our future and our children's future.Heywood-Smith argues that it is the responsibility of all adult and thinking members of the world community to inform themselves of the background to the conflict and the current issues associated with its resolution.It is not good enough for thinking people to say to themselves 'it's too hard'. Nor is it good enough to say: 'I am not anti-Semitic; I must support Israel.'

My life has been seven-tenths water, Rodney Fox tells us in his extraordinary story. Attacked and almost killed by a great white shark in 1963, spearfishing champion and insurance salesman Rodney Fox's life was changed. He overcame his fears and returned to the sea, determined to make his living there. In 1964, he built the first shark cages enabling divers to safely film and observe great white sharks in their own domain. Hollywood came calling.Pioneer of abalone diving and whale shark diving industries, Rodney Fox has led hundreds of expeditions to introduce filmmakers, scientists, shark researchers and tourists to one of the world's great adventures - each endeavour adding grand stories to an exciting life.

The unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement, admired by Mallarmé, Jarry and Gide, in a new translationWhen Marcel Schwob published The Book of Monelle in French in 1894, it immediately became the unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement, admired by such contemporaries as Stéphane Mallarmé, Alfred Jarry and André Gide. A carefully woven assemblage of legends, aphorisms, fairy tales and nihilistic philosophy, it remains a deeply enigmatic and haunting work more than a century later, a gathering of literary and personal ruins written in a style that evokes both the Brothers Grimm and Friedrich Nietzsche. The Book of Monelle was the result of Schwob's intense emotional suffering over the loss of his love, a "girl of the streets" named Louise, whom he had befriended in 1891 and who succumbed to tuberculosis two years later. Transforming her into the innocent prophet of destruction, Monelle, Schwob tells the stories of her various sisters: girls succumbing to disillusionment, caught between the misleading world of childlike fantasy and the bitter world of reality. This new translation reintroduces a true fin-de-siècle masterpiece into English. A secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño, Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman (whom he translated into French). Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and he was the uncle of Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun.

Essays reflecting on the science of imaginary solutions, from an influential figure in pataphysical thoughtPataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions, of laws governing exceptions and of the laws describing the universe supplementary to this one. Alfred Jarry's posthumous novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, first appeared in 1911, and over the next 100 years, his pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. In 1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers would found the College of 'Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic René Daumal was the first to elaborate upon Jarry's unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished novel Mount Analogue and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse of often overlooked Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician. Pataphysical Essays collects Daumal's overtly pataphysical writings from 1929 to 1941, from his landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay, "The Pataphysics of Ghosts." Daumal's "Treatise on Patagrams" offers the reader everything from a recipe for the disintegration of a photographer to instructions on how to drill a fount of knowledge in a public urinal. This volume also includes Daumal's column for the Nouvelle Revue Française, "Pataphysics This Month." Reading like a deranged encyclopedia, "Pataphysics This Month" describes a new mythology for the field of science, and amply demonstrates that the twentieth century had been a distinctly pataphysical era.

Twenty four delirious narratives from the highpoint of Surrealist automatic writingA foundational classic of Surrealist literature, The Leg of Lamb brings together the arch-Surrealist Benjamin Péret's short prose: a smorgasbord of automatic writing and fantastical narratives employing everything from the cinematic antics of Buster Keaton and slapstick animation to the storytelling devices of detective novels, alchemical operations and mythology. The Leg of Lamb consists of 24 delirious narratives, including the novella-length works "And the Breasts Were Dying" and "There Was a Little Bakeress." Péret's adult fairy tales bear equal allegiance to Lewis Carroll and the Marquis de Sade, and present one of the clearest examples of Surrealist humor, in which the boundaries between character and object blur, and where a coat rack, artichoke or a pile of manure is just as likely as Napoléon, El Cid or Pope Pius VII to take on the role of hero and adventurer. Péret himself edited this collection toward the end of his life. Originally published in French in 1957, almost all of the stories in this collection had been written in the 1920s, half of them even preceding André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism. The Leg of Lamb offers not only a highpoint of Surrealist automatic writing, but a key chapter in the genesis of the Surrealist movement.

Gallipoli hero, Victoria Cross recipient, battalion and brigade commander, conqueror of Damascus and defiant antagonist of the Japanese - by any measure Arthur Seaforth Blackburn was one of Australia's most remarkable soldiers. This, the first Blackburn biography, details the famous battles that shaped Australia. It tells Blackburn's story through the eyes of his comrades, including many from his battalion who survived the horrors of the Burma Railway, and includes photographs taken by Blackburn never published before.