Translated into English for the first time, this novelized biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously Araud’s most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author’s preoccupations with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, this account of Heliogabalus’ reign invents incidents in the Emperor’s life in order to make the print of the author’s own passionate denunciations of modern existence. 
Heliogabalus is Artaud’s greatest and most revolutionary masterpiece: an incendiary work that reveals both the divine cruelty of the Roman Emperor and that of Artaud himself. -- Stephen Barber

Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist

Antonin Artaud

Arts & Photography

Solar Books

Hammer of the Gods presents Friedrich Nietzsche’s most prophetic, futuristic and apocalyptic philosophies and traces them against the upheavals of the last century and the current millennial panic. This radical re-interpretation reveals Nietzsche as the only guide to the madness in our society which he himself prophesied a century ago; Nietzsche as a philosopher against society, against both the state and the herd; Nietzsche as philosopher with a hammer.

Hammer of the Gods: Apocalyptic Texts for the Criminally Insane (Solar Visionaries)

NIETZSCHE,FRIEDRICH

This special edition includes 'Fragments from a Shattering Mind', previously untranslated texts from 1888-89. Comprising new views on nihilism, the Antichrist, sex, decadence and power, these terminal writings form the revelatory sub-text of a titanic mind on course for apocalyptic meltdown.

ANTICHRIST (Solar Visionaries)

Last, First

Death, Desire, and the Doll is the only complete illustrated biography of Hans Bellmer, and includes detailed analysis of his entire artistic oeuvre.
Featuring many of Bellmer’s surreal/erotic drawings, paintings and sculptures as well as his classic series of Doll photographs, Death, Deisre, and the Doll also tells the complete story of Bellmer’s remarkable life, from Nazi Germany to the inner circle of the Paris Surrealists and beyond. It is a fascinating story which encompasses the history of both surrealist and erotic art and literature, and which firmly positions Hans Bellmer at the forefront of the 20th Century avant-garde. De Sade, Bataille, Jean de Berg and André Pieyre de Mandiargues are just some of the authors whose work Bellmer enhanced with his incredibly perverse and complex illustrations. With his legendary Doll, Bellmer established one of the most disturbing creations in modern art, while his text The Anatomy of the Image remains crucial to understanding the eciprocity between body and imagination.
Including 36 color plates, Death, Desire, and the Doll is a completely updated and revised edition of the standard work on Bellmer.

Death, Desire, and the Doll: The Life and Art of Hans Bellmer (Solar Art Directives)

WEBB, Peter

History & Criticism

While many of the details of Aleister Crowley's flamboyant life have been well documented, Portable Darkness is the first book to tackle the formidable task of collecting the best of his voluminous lifework. In bringing together Crowley's best writings, editor Scott Michaelsen makes Crowleyan philosophy both accessible and intelligible. As an intellectual and mystic, Crowley devoted his life to the study of Qabalah, gematria, numerology, astrology, myth, glyphs, yoga, and linguistics. His intense, methodical exploration of so immense and arcane a range of knowledge has yielded, not surprisingly, a hugely challenging body of literature. In Portable Darkness, Michaelsen has sifted through this vast, often abstruse oeuvre in search of those works which best display and illuminate the razor-sharp insight for which Crowley has become known. The selections in Portable Darkness are organized thematically according to Crowley's favorite subjects: Qabalah and Magick, Yoga and Magick, Sex and Magick, Magick and Law, Magick and Lies. As accompanied by Michaelsen's cogent essays, these texts represent the essential Aleister Crowley, guiding novice and adept alike through the complexities of his notoriously impenetrable writings. Enlightening and revelatory, Portable Darkness is an indispensable lexicon for all those with an interest in the occult.

Portable Darkness: An Aleister Crowley Reader (Solar Visionaries)

CROWLEY, Aleister

Sexologist, cocaine addict, prime inspiration for the Surrealist Movement... and one of the greatest revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century; Sigmund Freud was the founder of modern psychoanalysis, and his key works were in the unlocking of the secrets of dreams. In Dream Psychology, Freud distils and crystallizes the essence of his two key works in this field: The Interpretation Of Dreams (1900), and On Dreams (1901). Defining some of the key concepts which would be later incorporated into the first manifestos of Surrealism, Dream Psychology is an indispensible introduction to Freud, his fundamental principles of oneiric psychoanalysis, and his influence on subsequent generations of thinkers, writers and artists alike. It is also a primary resource for all those intrigued by the occult meaning of dreams, and those wishing to explore Freud's links with the Surrealist Movement. Including: DREAM MECHANISM · DREAM DESIRES · DREAM SECRETS · DREAM SEX · DREAM ANALYSIS · DREAM FUNCTION · DREAM REGRESSION · DREAMS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS With new essays by DM Mitchell and Candice Black on Freud, dreams and Surrealism. Translated by L. Red Liber. Solar Research Archive 1 : Solar Research Archive presents classic texts which influenced the members and affiliates of the Surrealist Group.

DREAM PSYCHOLOGY

In Guillaume Apollinaire's The Eleven Thousand Rods (Les Onze Mille Verges), debauched aristocrat Mony Vibescu and a circle of fellow sybarites blaze a trail of uncontrollable lust, bloody cruelty and depravity across the streets of Europe. Published in 1907 after Apollinaire's researches at the Enfer section of the Bibliotheque Nationale in which he encountered the suppressed "pornographic" work of such authors as de Sade, Restif de la Bretonne and Andrea de Nerciat, The Eleven Thousand Rods is a startling modernist response to those "old masters" of erotica, purposefully expanding and detonating the extremes of obscenity as far as the human imagination will allow. This special Centenary edition is the only uncensored version currently in print, with a new translation by Alexis Lykiard. Guillaume Apollinaire is the avant-garde pioneer who coined the term "Surrealist", and remains one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Solar Erotik Archive 1 : Solar Erotik Archive presents classic fiction by the precursors, members and affiliates of the Surrealist Group.

The Eleven Thousand Rods (Solar Erotik Archive)

APOLLINAIRE, GUILLAUME

Spiralling out of the Surrealist movement alongside the art, photographs & manifestos were a number of experimental films, notably Salvador Dali & Luis Bunuel's 'Un Chien Andalou'. This work revisits these films and explores their making, their themes & images, & the scandals that accompanied their release.

The Age of Gold: Dali, Bunuel, Artaud: Surrealist Cinema (Solar Film Directives)

Short, Robert

A noblewoman is hacked to death, a Russian princess is boldly robbed, a lord's lifeless body is found in a trunk. It is the work of Fantomas, a master of disguise whose diabolical crimes paralyze Parisians with terror. The first volume in a series of wildly popular French thrillers, Fantomas stands as the original pulp fiction.

FANTOMAS: THE CORPSE WHO KILLS (Solar Research Archive)

The 120 Days of Sodom is the most extreme book in the history of literature. The Marquis de Sade narrates the escalating sex-crimes of four libertines who barricade themselves in a remote castle with both male and female victims and accomplices for a four-month, precipitous orgy of sodomy, coprophagia and rape leading inexorably towards torture and human decimation. A masterpiece of black humour, pornographic to a point of excess and aberration never reached by any other writer, and required reading for anyone looking for the seminal origins of contemporary culture's fascination with cruelty and violence, The 120 Days of Sodom is the first and ultimate literary outrage. It also stands as the first attempt by an author to collate a systematic psychopathology of human sexual disorder, pre-dating Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis by a century. Until now, Sade's masterwork was only available in a tame, outdated translation. This new, uncensored and more complete version of The 120 Days of Sodom brings the work back to incendiary life, returning it to the streamlined status of the revolutionary, raw work Sade had intended. Unbearable, unforgettable, violent, cruel, blasphemous, obscene: The 120 Days of Sodom is a unique and addictive detonation of the senses for the discerning 21st century reader. With a preface by Georges Bataille, author of The Story of the Eye.

120 Days of Sodom (Solar Visionaries)

marquis-de-sade

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