Selected Poems (Liberation classics)

Literature & Fiction

Langston Hughes

Poetry

Serpent's Tail

This book collects together the two most vital "automatic" texts of Surrealism. Breton’s prefatory essay The Automatic Message relates this technique to the underlying concepts and aesthetic of the Surrealist movement. 
The Magnetic Fields (1919) was the first work of literary Surrealism and is thus one of the foundations of modern European thought and writing. This authorised translation is by the poet David Gascoyne, himself a member of the group and a friend of both authors. 
The Immaculate Conception (1930) traces the interior and exterior life of man from Conception and Intra-Uterine Life to Death and The Original Judgement. The central section is a celebrated series of "simulations" of various types of mental instability. 
Maurice Nadeau (in The History of Surrealism) described the book as "An astonishing series of poems in prose, more brilliant than those of either Breton or Eluard on his own . . . if all that remained of the Surrealist movement were the pages of The Immaculate Conception, man, alerted, could not turn away from the astounding mystery of his condition."

Immaculate Conception

Éluard, Paul

BRETON, André

Contemporary

ALFRED JARRY is chiefly known as the creator of UBU, the anti-hero of what is acknowledged as the first "absurd" drama, but this was only one facet of a writer now seen as one of the most vital (and peculiar) influences on the French literature of this century. Visits of Love was Jarry's second novel, originally written for a publisher specialising in erotica (who must have been perplexed by the result). The "visits" consist of a remarkable series of tableaux, dialogues and assignations which deviously undermine the dreary situations of conventional erotic writing. They become more and more extravagant, transcending the everyday, passing beyond death, returning to bizarre versions of historical myths, or to the lavatorial trysts of Madame Ubu. Jarry's intricate style is pushed to its furthest limits, from crude buffoonery to ornate Symbolist texts of earnest intensity. Certain chapters are unique in his writing: Raymond Queneau described The Old Man of the Mountain as Jarry's most perfect work, and ' the episode Fear Visits Love is among his most often reprinted works in France. Despite its curious origins, the novel is an essential part of Jarry's oeuvre.

Visits Of Love (Works)

JARRY, Alfred

Eat My Heart Out

Zoe Pilger

'Judas Iscariot's here, look. Here comes Judas Iscariot...' Nine-year old Sean has never seen anything like what happens on the day Margaret Thatcher takes power and his grandad discovers his uncle voted for her. So begins the start of a family secret and the end of Sean's idyllic childhood in the industrial Midlands-until, one day, deciding that someone's got to stop the train of destruction, he sets out for revenge. A heartbreaking and timely story of a moment of national crisis as felt by one family, How I Killed Margaret Thatcher delivers a devastating English twist on the dictator novel.

How I Killed Margaret Thatcher

Cartwright, Anthony

Genre Fiction

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain At Work

The average person spends 100,000 hours of their life at work, but how much do we really know about what we do with it? What is it really like to work in advertising, to be a train driver, a sex worker or an orthodox rabbi? What do we do in our working hours, and how does that colour our life, beliefs and happiness? And what happens to how we feel about work in a recession? 
In "All Day Long" Joanna Biggs finds the answers to these questions and more, by talking to the interns and bosses, professionals and entrepreneurs, and thinkers and doers who make up the workforce. Her journey takes us from Parliament to the long grassed fields of the Outer Hebrides, from a hospital in Wales to the wings of the Royal Opera House, introducing us to the different worlds of work and the people who inhabit them. 
Full of human detail and street level observation, Joanna Biggs' writing combines genuine empathy with social, cultural and political awareness. Like Studs Terkel's classic book "Working" did several decades ago in America, her book paints a portrait of the UK right now, showing us who we are through what we do.

All Day Long

Biggs, Joanna

Essays & Correspondence

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (Serpent's Tail Classics)

Arts & Photography

Bangs, Lester

Music

Travelling Sprinkler

BAKER, NICHOLSON

Having skewered the problems of falling in and out of love in The Last Girlfriend on Earth , Simon Rich's next book is another subject we can all relate to: parents and their kids. From the perils of raising an actual monster in Manhattan - it's pretty hard to find teachers who really understand the talents of a five-year-old with horns and a taste for blood - to Sell Out , the story of Simon's ancestor, returned to life decades after an industrial accident involving pickling brine, these stories are inventive, witty and sometimes a bit too much like real life.

Spoiled Brats

Simon Rich

Literary

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Books by Serpent's Tail