Death to the Pigs: Selected Writings of Benjamin Peret (Atlas Anti-Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Péret, Benjamin

Essays & Correspondence

Atlas Pr

When Le Château de Cène (here translated as The Castle of Communion) first appeared in France in 1969, under the sonorous pseudonym of Urbain d’Orlhac, it created a sensation. Immediately recognised as being among the finest works of French literary eroticism (along with, say, Bataille’s Story of the Eye, or Reage’s Story of O), its author was soon identified: the poet and essayist Bernard Noël, born in 1930. 
The author recounts an intense initiatory sexual quest which occurs on a mysterious remote island. Chosen as the moon’s lover the hero undertakes a Dantesque voyage through sucessive levels of pain and ecstasy. The book’s climax is a beatific rite of sexual purification in the Castle of Communion, which is described in a poetic language at once incantatory, crude and almost mystical. The intensity of the book matches its method of composition: dictated into a tape recorder and finished in only 3 weeks, and written as a partial response to the atrocities of the French authorities in Algeria. 
This edition is postfaced by Noël’s essay The Outrage Against Words, his thoughts on the government’s unsuccessful attempts through the courts to supress the novel for "outraging public morals." He illuminates the intimate connection between writing and censorship in general.

The Castle of Communion (Atlas Press)

Buck, Paul

Noël, Bernard

George, Glenda

History & Criticism

The protagonist of "Becalmed" seeks spiritual shelter in the countryside. He finds not rest but a nightmare — a gruesome crumbling house, peasants both stupid and cunning, and the landscape — indeed the whole natural world — in a ghastly state of decay. "A hemorrhage of ordure," Huysmans calls it. His descriptions of Gothic intensity provide a total inversion of naturalism which is emphasized by the remarkable dream passages which intercut the novel. 
In many ways this is Huysmans’ most extraordinary book, and despite its immediately following "Against Nature," Zola called it "his most intense work" — later André Breton celebrated it in his "Anthology of Black Humour."

Becalmed

Huysmans, J.K.

World Literature

Gerhard Roth’s first "novel," originally published in 1972, is a triumphant refutation of the death of modernism: a lucid, morbid and impossible account of what cannot be said, a deranged existence pieced together, an individual at total odds not only with the world and its structures, but with the chemical and biological basis of his own thought.

The Autobiography of Albert Einstein/Begins on Page 9 No Capitalization or Indentation

Roth, Gerhard

Biographies & Memoirs

Artmann, born in 1921, is one of the most remarkable experimental writers of his generation. An Austrian, in the 1950s he was the founder of The Vienna Group with Rühm, Bayer, Wiener and Achleitner. The group’s black romanticism allied with a linguistic scepticism partly derived from Wittgenstein had a great influence on German letters. The Quest for Dr. U is like all Artmann’s works: protean, spanning and subverting all genres (detective fiction, romantic novels, heroic poetry, dada related experiment). Its hero pursues the ghastly Dr. Unspeakable, an ultimate villain, across continents, through situations alternately bizarre and commonplace, always enmeshed in ways of writing text. Dr. U remains a mystery, perhaps he is "not I": a wonderful modernist novel, humorous and entertaining to boot.

The Quest for Dr. U: Or a Solitary Mirror in Which the Day Reflects

Green, Malcolm

Wynand, Derk

Artmann, Hans Carl

Contemporary

Bruges-La-Morte, originally published in 1892, was immediately acknowledged, by Huysmans and Mallarme among others, as one of the greatest achievements of the Decadent movement in French literature. Ostensibly it is the account of a doomed love affair which culminates in a bizarre murder. As important, however, is its dream-like evocation of the "dead city": Bruges, a city of silence, ennui and of desolation, whose "shadows lengthen across the text", and which dictates the inevitably fatal events of the narrative.A peerless poetic novel in a fine contemporary translation which has been carefully revised, this edition also reprints the photographs chosen by the author to illustrate the first edition.

Bruges-La-Morte (Atlas Press)

Rodenbach, Georges

Genre Fiction

"Dada Means Nothing!" So proclaimed Tristan Tzara, the movement's tireless publicist. Yet this did not prevent the most fanatical and talented artists and writers across Europe from rushing to join its ranks. Anti-war, anti-art, anti-dada, from its beginnings in Zurich during the first World War the dadas swept aside the cultural, philosophical and political norms of their time. Utter disgust with a society that had created the war (and then expected to survive the peace) spurred them to ever greater demonstrations of revulsion and derision. Yet it was not all nihilism: many factions worked within the Dada Movement and it was Huelsenbeck's intention to embody most of them in the Dada Almanac. The largest collection of Dadaist texts ever assembled by the movement, it was originally published in 1920 in a mixture of French and German. The Dada Almanac was truly international in scope, with substantial sections from the Swiss and French sections of the movement, it embodies Dada's failings as well as its successes, its excesses, its seriousness, its idiocy, but above all the anarchic vitality which made it such a vital precondition for so much that followed in the fields of art, literature and general cultural terrorism.

The Dada Almanac (Atlas Arkhive, 1)

Arts & Photography

Wolfgang Bauer is best known in his native Austria as a playwright and director, and as the author of a single, oft-reprinted novel: The Feverhead, written in 1966. The Feverhead is written in the form of letters between a couple of not-at-all-bright Austrians. Their correspondence is doomed to failure, nearly every letter crosses in the post and yet they succeed in their quest: the search for a perfect thermometer (and a serial murderer). In fact they both independently discover the secret of the universe in a remote spot thousands of miles from their intended (and different) destinations. Bauer's comedy of errors is enacted by an unusual cast that includes microscopic schoolgirls, ambiguously sexed nuns, incompetent detectives, two ultimately bad poets, living steam engines and a venerable three-eyed sea-captain whose two bodies remain exactly 3.5 metres apart, not to mention: ULF.

The Feverhead

Bauer, Wolfgang

This book collects together works by four "writers" on the fringes of the Dada movement in 1920's Paris. These four took the nihilism of the movement to its ultimate conclusion, their works are remnants of lives lived to the limit and then cast aside with nonchalance and abandon: Vache died of a drug overdose, Rigaut shot himself, Cravan and Torma simply vanished, their fates still a mystery. Yet their fragmentary works - to which they attached so little importancestill exert a powerful allure and were a vital inspiration for the literary movements that followed them. Vache's bitter humour, Cravan's energetic invective, Rigaut's dandyfied introspection, and Torma's imperturbable asperity: all had their influence. This collection contains biographical introductions to each author as well as personal recollections by their contemporaries.

4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts of Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma & Jacques Vache (Anti-Classics of Dada)

Rigaut, Jacques

TORMA, Julien

Vaché, Jacques

The Automatic Muse collects together four remarkable novels from the early days of Surrealism - the 1920's, when the group was experimenting with "automatic writing" and other methods of "forcing inspiration." Despite, or because of, the methods used in their composition these works are remarkable for the differences between them. They are variously mysterious, comic, astonishing, wildly extravagant. Yet they all share a feeling for the marvellous, and a literary style totally unrestrained by the conventions of "literature." Their potent vitality is an ample demonstration of the Surrealist programme and its belief in "the total liberation of man."

The Automatic Muse: Surrealist Novels

LEIRIS, MICHEL

Limbour, Georges

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