Swimming is like prayer:palms join and part,join and part,almost without end.--from "On Swimming"Without End draws from each of Adam Zagajewski's English-language collections, both in and out of print--Tremor, Canvas, and Mysticism for Beginners--and features new work that is among his most refreshing and rewarding. These poems, lucidly translated, share the vocation that allows us, in Zagajewski's words, "to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for a long moment or two."

    Born in 1940 in Chur Switzerland, he studied architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich. By 1964 he was producing his first artworks, mostly ink drawings and oils, leading to his first solo exhibition in 1966, followed by the world-wide distribution of his first published posters in 1969. Shortly after, he discovered the airbrush and his own signature freehand style, and created his most well known works, the Biomechanical dreamscapes which formed the cornerstone of his fame. Giger's first book, Necronomicon, published in 1977, servers as the visual inspiration for director Ridley Scott's blockbuster movie Alien, Giger's first film assignment, earning him the 1980 Oscar for "Best Achievement in Visual Effects," for his designs of the film's title character and otherworldly environment. Giger's album covers for Debbie Harry and the band ELP were voted among the 100 best in music history in a survey of rock journalists. Throughout his career, Giger also worked in sculpture and, in 1992, created his first total environment, the Giger Bar in Chur. The Museum H.R. Giger in Chateau Saint-Germain was opened in Gruyeres in 1998. Today, Giger continues to live and work in Zurich with his companion in life Carmen, where his current projects include the realization of his museum bar in Gruyeres.

    Johannes Göransson's translation captures the seething instability of Berg's bizarre compound nouns and linguistic contortions.

    Menaced by scavengers, she nevertheless begins to suspect that the reality within the fortress may be even more unsettling than the blasted environment outside. As she slips unobtrusively towards the city of the dead, she is pursued by a bounty hunter who cuts a bloody swath after her. On one level, Dark Property is an exploration of religious fanaticism. Although Evenson's characters owe more to the Book of Mormon than the Koran, their frightening intensity will spark recognition in both reviewers and readers. This brooding tale is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and J. G. Ballard's more disturbing works of fiction. "I admire Evenson's writing and respect his courage." — Andrew Vachss

    In this volume—the first major selection of Smith's poetry in more than thirty years—editors S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz have presented an extensive array of poetic work that fully reveals Smith's exotic language, imaginative range, and metrical precision. Including work from as early as the precocious Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912) and as late as the posthumously published The Hill of Dionysus (1962), The Last Oblivion features such celebrated works as "Nero," "Ode to the Abyss," and Smith's exquisite elegies to his mentor George Sterling and to his colleague in fantasy, H. P. Lovecraft. Poems on Zothique, Averoigne, and Atlantis, realms in which many of his prose tales are set, are also featured. More than two dozen unpublished or uncollected poems, never previously included in any of Smith's books, make The Last Oblivion a must for Smith devotees. Two full-color illustrations by Clark Ashton Smith and an exhaustive glossary of unusual words and names used in Smith's poetry enhance the volume.

    . . Kenneth Hite is back with more proof that Everything Is A Conspiracy Waiting To Happen. This second collection of Hite's popular columns from Pyramid, our online magazine, contains just as much obscure knowledge, bizarre cross-references, and Things We Weren't Meant To Know as the first one - and it's all updated and annotated! Remember, it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you . . . whoever They are.

    Critical Essays and art. This volume contains over 200 texts by more than fifty participants in the U.S. Surrealist Movement, making this the most comprehensive, diverse and lavishly illustrated compilation of American surrealist writings to have ever been assembled. This anthology "supersedes the narrow and tiresome literary/artistic categorizations to which surrealism is usually assigned by critics, and situates it in the much broader context that surrealists themselves have always preferred: the revolutionary context" - from the Foreword by Franklin Rosemont. Editor Ron Sakolsky is the co-editor of two other Autonomedia anthologies: GONE TO CROATAN: THE ORIGINS OF NORTH AMERICAN DROP-OUT CULTURE and SOUNDING OFF : MUSIC AS SUBVERSION/ RESISTANCE/ REVOLUTION also available from SPD.

    . . . The book discusses expertly the main surrealist artists like Jean Arp, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró, but also treats with considerable understanding the surrealist writing by Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, Julien Graçq and, of course, the so-called 'Pope of Surrealism,' André Breton. . . . This book should turn up in all serious collections on 20th century art."—Publishers Weekly, starred reviewFrom Dada to the Automatists, and from Max Ernst to André Breton, Gérard Durozoi here provides the most comprehensive history of the Surrealist movement. Tracing the movement from its origins in the 1920s to its decline in the 1950s and 1960s, Durozoi tells the history of Surrealism through its activities, publications, and reviews, demonstrating its close ties to some of the most explosive political, as well as creative, debates of the twentieth century.Drawing on a staggering amount of documentary and visual evidence—including 1,000 photos—Durozoi illuminates all the intellectual and artistic facets of the movement, from literature and philosophy to painting, photography, and film, thus making History of the Surrealist Movement its definitive encyclopedia.

    Guy Billout offers 33 paintings, each of which challenges the viewer to find something wrong.