A serious artist and a literary clown nonpareil, Max Jacob was born in Brittany in 1876 and died in a Nazi prison camp in 1944. His influence on modern French poetry was profound, and his modernist lyrical verse is still widely read. Much of his other work is equally exciting and original, but has waited decades for capable translators. Hesitant Fire makes available for the first time in English some of his best prose. The translators, Moishe Black and Maria Green, have succeeded in catching his gift for linguistic innovation, for mimicry and buffoonery often a millimeter away from melancholy.
This anthology displays Jacob’s versatility, for he wrote in a dozen styles. The Story of King Kabul the First and Gawain the Kitchen-Boy is a fable populated by Balibridgians and Bouloulabassians. Excerpts from In Defense of Tartufe reveal the poet’s mysticism and aestheticism. Those from The Flowering Plant offer brilliant social analysis behind a mask of the Absurd. Flim-Flam studies such characters as “The Lawyer Who Meant to Have Two Wives Instead of One” and “The Unmarried Teacher at the High School in Cherbourg.” The Dullard Prince blends autobiography and fiction. Letters to Mrs. Goldencalf and other imaginary members of the bourgeoisie are taken from The Dark Room. Never before published, “The Maid” was inspired by a contemporary murder case. Also included here are portions of The Bouchaballe Property, Jacob’s favorite of his own novels; entries from A Traveler’s Notebook; personal letters; and four religious meditations. For many English-language readers, Hesitant Fire will be in introduction to a writer who was an immediate precursor of Surrealism, who was a close friend of Picasso and Apollinaire, who converted to Catholicism but retained an intensely Jewish outlook, and who produced work that is still vivid nearly a half-century after his death.

Hesitant Fire: Selected Prose of Max Jacob (French Modernist Library)

Literature & Fiction

JACOB, MAX

Black, Moishe

History & Criticism

University Of Nebraska Press

Beloved for his whimsy as much as his genius, Max Jacob wrote works for every age and taste. In the two stories contained in this volume, 'The Story of King Kabul the First and Gawain the Kitchen-Boy' and 'Vulcan's Crown,' he writes for the young at heart. The stories appear with the original drawings by Roger Blachon from the French edition of 1971. The hero of 'King Kabul' is Gawain the kitchen-boy, who dreams of marrying Julia, daughter of Kabul the First, King of the Balibridgians. To earn Julia's favor, Gawain becomes the best cook in the world. King Kabul enjoys Gawain's cooking but refuses to let his daughter marry a mere cook. In order to win Julia's hand, Gawain sees that he must do something more heroic than cooking. 'Vulcan's Crown' is a tale of fantastic adventure involving Toulic, a humpbacked tailor and blacksmith in small-town Brittany. One day as Toulic peels onions for his soup, the Lord Jesus Christ appears and tells Toulic that he will soon be rich. But first he must earn his wealth. Toulic goes off to sea with a drunken admiral, flies through the air on a fish's back, listens to unlikely but evocative poetry, and is mockingly crowned by the King of the Cheeses before returning home.

The Story of King Kabul the First & Gawain the Kitchen-Boy: Histoire Du Roi Kaboul Ier Et Du Marmiton Gauwain ; Followed by Vulcan's Crown

Children's Books

Green, Maria

The Story of King Kabul the First and Gawain the Kitchen-Boy = Histoire Du Roi Kaboul Ier Et Du Marmiton Gauwain ; Followed by Vulcan's Crown

Univ of Nebraska Pr

As outspoken in his day as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens are today, American freethinker and author ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL (1833-1899) was a notorious radical whose uncompromising views on religion and slavery (they were bad, in his opinion), women's suffrage (a good idea, he believed), and other contentious matters of his era made him a wildly popular orator and critic of 19th-century American culture and public life. As a speaker dedicated to expanding intellectual horizons and celebrating the value of skepticism, Ingersoll spoke frequently on such topics as atheism, freedom from the pressures of conformity, and the lives of philosophers who espoused such concepts. This collection of his most famous speeches includes the lectures: [ "The Gods" (1872) [ "Humboldt" (1869) [ "Thomas Paine" (1870) [ "Individuality" (1873) [ "Heretics and Heresies" (1874)

Filibuth ou La Montre En Rr

History

BiblioLife

Filibuth ou La Montre En Rr (French Edition)

Literary

Le Roi de Béotie

Filibuth: Ou, La Montre En Or (French Edition)

Contemporary

Nabu Press

In the first years of the 20th century, friends Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Appolinaire, with associated artists and writers including Georges Braque, Jean Cocteau, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein, Pierre Reverdy and Alfred Jarry, gathered in a ramshackle house in Paris. From its improvised studios and stages emerged the early expressions of Modernism: Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, incorporation of collage in painting and vernacular in poetry. Jacob's masterwork, The Dice Cup (Le Cornet à Dés), has never before been available in a full English edition. This completely new translation includes the Preface of 1916, with Jacob's critique of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Mallarme, and his strictures and inspirations for the true prose poem:"The author who has situated his work can use all the enchantments: language, rhythm, musicality and spirit." "I am convinced that artistic emotion ceases where analysis and thought intersect: something else provokes thought and gives the feeling of beauty.""A work of art is a force that attracts, that absorbs the available forces of the one who comes close to it.""The poem is a constructed object... the prose poem is a jewel."from The Dice Cup:THE PRESSI entered timidly: there was an ostrich that was losing its feathers and, on a white stucco pedestal, a bronze bird whose plumage was represented by a series of engraved shells. It was Mr. Abel Hermant or someone like Mr. Abel Hermant who appeared, as soon as the hallway door opened: "Ah! young man!" said he, "you come for the hundred sous!" I learned later that a hundred sous were given to everybody who came there. At the mention of a hundred sous, the ostrich dropped a feather and the bronze bird flew away. Anyway, the vestibule was deserted and dusty, pins were kept in iron boxes painted with the portraits of great men, Cuvier, Buffon, etc... "Ah! Young man," repeated Mr. Abel Hermant or someone of the same ilk, "you come for the hundred sous!" And the birds recommenced their motions. "No, sir! It's free! It's a free delivery!" My future spiritual guide did not listen any further: "free delivery" had edified him, he turned his back on me. The ostrich put on his policeman's hat and looked at me with worried curiosity. The bronze bird was even more bronze.

The Dice Cup

Poetry

Independently published

The first English translation of the Cubist poet’s most important collection of verse poems―a wild grab bag of contradictory styles 
When Max Jacob published The Central Laboratory in 1921, Parisian Dada had just officially come to an end and Surrealism was yet to be born. The poetic scene in Paris was between definitions, and Jacob embodied that moment. 
The Central Laboratory is distinctly modern, yet utterly discordant with anything else that had been published before: a grab bag of popular genres, operettas, Breton folk song, nonsense poetry, nursery rhyme, doggerel, parody and puns in which sound often trumps sense and Jacob changes register on a dime. Employing Symbolist obscure reference, Cubist fracturing of perspective and Dadaist discontinuity, Jacob’s art of mixed signals and mocked allegory formulates a camp sensibility, a “queering” of literary style as riddled with contradiction as Jacob himself had been in his lifetime. 
A century after its initial publication in French, the book remains utterly peculiar and lost for too long in the shadow of Jacob’s more famous book of prose poems, The Dice Cup. Jacob himself said of The Central Laboratory: “it sums up 20 years and reflects 20 states of soul, often 20 styles either suffered or created by me.” 
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 such figures as 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.

The Central Laboratory

Wakefield Press

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