This is the best known version of the original story that inspired Walt Disney’s classic and has been retold countless times and adapted for screen, stage, prose, and television.

    To his amazement Laura has discovered a way to enter this alluring world and together they travel the vast and glittering landscape. But it cannot last forever.Pushkin Collection editions feature a spare, elegant series style and superior, durable components. The Collection is typeset in Monotype Baskerville, litho-printed on Munken Premium White Paper and notch-bound by the independently owned printer TJ International in Padstow. The covers, with French flaps, are printed on Colorplan Pristine White Paper. Both paper and cover board are acid-free and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.

    In his portrait of Crab, Éric Chevillard gives us a character who is genuinely strange and curiously like ourselves. A postmodernist novel par excellence, The Crab Nebula parodies literary conventions, deconstructs narrative and meaning, and brilliantly combines absurdity and hopelessness with irony and humor. What distinguishes it most of all is the startling originality of Chevillard’s voice and vision. There is whimsy and despair in this novel, pathos and laughter, satire and warm affection. The Crab Nebula is the fifth novel—and the first to be translated into English—by the brilliant young French author Éric Chevillard. His sympathetic yet outrageous portrait of Crab calls to mind works by Melville, Valéry, and Kafka, while never being less than utterly unique.

    Lying in a hospital bed in 1915, recovering from combat wounds suffered in World War I, Apollinaire assembled the fragments of a tragicomic, mock-epic and occasionally obscene autobiography-a-clef: The Poet Assassinated. This novella recounts the life and death of Croniamantal, whose birth is -saluted- by the Eiffel Tower's -beautiful erection, - who rises through the Parisian literary world to proclaim himself - the greatest of living poets, - and who is then torn to pieces by a mob. A statue built -out of nothing, like poetry and glory, - is constructed in his honor. This translation is by Matthew Josephson, an American editor who arrived in Paris just after the war and entered the circle of avant-garde artists and poets that had been galvanized by Apollinaire's life and death. Josephson was among the first to introduce these Dadaists and Surrealists to America, via his small magazine, Broom, and among his most ambitious projects was this translation, published by Broom as a limited-edition book in 1923 and never since reprinted.

    Alfred Jarry's posthumous novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, first appeared in 1911, and over the next 100 years, his pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. In 1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers would found the College of 'Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic René Daumal was the first to elaborate upon Jarry's unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished novel Mount Analogue and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse of often overlooked Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician. Pataphysical Essays collects Daumal's overtly pataphysical writings from 1929 to 1941, from his landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay, "The Pataphysics of Ghosts." Daumal's "Treatise on Patagrams" offers the reader everything from a recipe for the disintegration of a photographer to instructions on how to drill a fount of knowledge in a public urinal. This volume also includes Daumal's column for the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, "Pataphysics This Month." Reading like a deranged encyclopedia, "Pataphysics This Month" describes a new mythology for the field of science, and amply demonstrates that the twentieth century had been a distinctly pataphysical era.Poet, philosopher, and self-taught Sanskrit scholar René Daumal (1908–1944) devoted himself to a lifelong attempt to think through death by means of what he called “experimental metaphysics”: an attempt to address metaphysical questions through scientific methodology. After co-founding the iconoclastic journal Le Grand Jeu and rejecting overtures from the Surrealist movement, he abandoned the literary path to become a disciple of the spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff.

    In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre. For him, no form is out of reach: Theology, historiography, reportage, and memoir--among many others--are fused under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity, and intellect that has made Carrère one of our most distinctive and important literary voices today.97,196 Words introduces Carrère's shorter work to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary texts written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carrère's creative life, the book shows a remarkable mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, 97,196 Words considers the divides between truth, reality, and our shared humanity, exploring remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carrère's own.

    The Woman and the Puppet - which drew some of its inspiration from Bizet''s Carmen, as well as a particular episode in Casanova''s Memoirs - is a precise account of obsessive love, a distillation of the decadence of the turn of the century.

    Like Ghelderode's plays, the stories are marked by a powerful imagination and a keen sense of the grotesque, but in these the author speaks to us still more directly. Written at a time of illness and isolation, and conceived as a fresh start, Spells was Ghelderode's last major creative work, and he claimed it as his most personal and deeply felt one: a set of written spells through which his fears, paranoia and nostalgia found concrete form.By turns mystical, macabre and whimsically humorous, and set in the unsettled atmosphere of Brussels, Ostend, Bruges and London, Spells conjures up an uncanny realm of angels, demons, masks, effigies and apparitions, a twilit, oppressed world of diseased gardens, dusty wax mannequins and sinister relics.Combining the full contents of both the 1941 and 1947 editions, this translation of Spells is the most comprehensive edition yet published.Michel de Ghelderode was born in Brussels in 1898. After nearly a decade of penning fiction, drama, literary journalism and puppet plays, in 1926 he began to write almost entirely for the theater and the following ten years saw the creation of most of his major plays. After 1936 he suffered from poor health and his involvement with the theater diminished. In the later 1940s, performances of his plays in Paris sparked a major awakening of interest in his work. Ghelderode died in 1962; the interior of his apartment, packed with books, pictures, puppets and masks, has been reassembled in Brussels as the Musee-Bibliotheque Michel de Ghelderode.

    Bilingual Edition. Translated from the French by William Stone. A precursor of the symbolists and the surreallists, Gerard de Nerval has fascinated many major literary figures, including Proust and Breton, Eliot and Apollinaire, Michaux and Leiris. The great sonnet cycle, in its marvellous combination of spell, quest and dream, continues to fascinate writers, readers and that special category of writerly readers, translators. Menard's translator is the gifted young poet William Stone, who explains his work in a strongly worded essay: "like a partly submerged crocodile, with one amber eye half open, the foreign line sits, waiting for the anxious translator to make a move."

    A city without a name is cursed by a plague of birds they probably deserve. But when an angry beggar child and his father learn they have the power to lift the curse they "control" birds they cannot agree on how to use their gift, and end up using it on each other, taking out everyone around them, especially those they love. This is BOOK I of a two-volume novel."

     Journalist, writer, and translator Vincent Balmer moves to Lisbon to escape from a failing affair. During his first assignment there, he teams up with Antonio—a photographer who has just returned to the city after a ten-year absence—to report for a French newspaper on an infamous serial killer’s trial. While walking around the city together to take notes and photos for the article, they visit the places of Antonio’s childhood, swap stories from their pasts, and confide in each other. But the more they learn about each other, the more their lives become inextricably intertwined. With a structure that parallels Homer’s Odyssey, Eléctrico W recounts their nine days together and the adventures that proliferate to form a constellation of successive ephemeral connections and relationships.

    While Jeremy can’t remember the previous year, he savors the miracle of waking up alongside the woman he loves.The next time he wakes, another year has passed and he finds himself a spectator of his own life. Victoria now carries his child, but the man alongside her is a disturbingly different person—a cruel, egotistical, seemingly unknowable Jeremy. Is it amnesia? Insanity? Or has the God Jeremy defied with his selfish act now cursed him?This strange and beautiful novel tells the tale of a man lost between life and death, but connected by the love—as friend, lover, son, and father—given and taken over the course of a lifetime, a love that simply won’t let go.

    Music.This is the one and only novel by the 20th century provocateur of French pop music and film - the legendary Serge Gainsbourg. Evguenie Sokolov is a novel about an artist who uses his intestinal gases as the medium for his scandalous artwork. Gainsbourg is both the best and the worst, yin and yang, white and black. This Jewish little Prince from Russia whose dreams were probably fueled by Anderssen, Perrault and Grimm, became, when confronted by the tragic reality of life, a moving or repugnant Quasimodo, depending on his and your state of mind. Hidden deep within this fragile, shy and aggressive man lies the soul of a poet craving tenderness, truth and integrity. -- Brigitte Bardot. Serge Gainsbourg is one of the world's great eccentrics. His kinky obsessions, smothering fashion with tastelessness, have catapulted him into super-stardom in France. - John Zorn. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman.

    On Christmas Eve, at the clocks strike midnight, Marie watches as the Nutcracker and her entire cabinet of playthings come to life and boldly do battle against the malevolent Mouse King and his armies. But this is only the start: read on for a tale of enchantment and transformation, enter a world by turns fantastical and sinister, a kindom of dolls and spun-sugar palaces, and learn the true history of the brave little Nutcracker. Adapted from a dark fairy-tale by ETA Hoffmann, Alexandre Dumas' romance of childhood imagination inspired Tchaikovsky's world-famous ballet. Brilliantly adapted by translator Sarah Ardrizzone and illuminated by Kitty Arden, this is the perfect Christmas gift for readers of all ages.

    In My Fantoms Richard Holmes, the celebrated biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, has found a brilliantly effective new way to bring this great but too-little-known writer into English. My Fantoms assembles seven stories spanning the whole of Gautier’s career into a unified work that captures the essence of his adventurous life and subtle art. From the erotic awakening of “The Adolescent” through “The Poet,” a piercing recollection of the mad genius Gérard de Nerval, the great friend of Gautier’s youth, My Fantoms celebrates the senses and illuminates the strange disguises of the spirit, while taking readers on a tour of modernity at its most mysterious. ”What ever would the Devil find to do in Paris?” Gautier wonders. “He would meet people just as diabolical as he, and find himself taken for some naïve provincial…”Tapestries, statues, and corpses come to life; young men dream their way into ruin; and Gautier keeps his faith in the power of imagination: “No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved.”