One of the original self-styled -bohemians, - Nerval was best known in his own day for parading a lobster on a pale blue ribbon through the gardens of the Palais-Royal, and was posthumously notorious for his suicide in 1855, hanging from an apron string he called the garter of the Queen of Sheba. This hallucinatory document of dreams, obsession, and insanity has fascinated artists such as Joseph Cornell, who cited passages from it to explain his own work; Antonin Artaud, who saw his own madness mirrored by Nerval's; and Andre Breton, who placed Nerval in the highest echelon of Surrealist heroes. Geoffrey Wagner's translation of Aurelia was first published by Grove Press in 1959, but has remained out of print for nearly 20 years. Also included in this volume are previously untranslated stories by Marc Lowenthal, and poet Robert Duncan's version of the sonnet cycle Chimeras, making this the most complete collection of Nerval's influential oeuvre ever published in English.

    He is the one who sent her on the mission that led to her death, and before morning, he must ultimately decide how many others to send to a similar fate.

    He was soon running her life, arranging her romances, and teaching her to laugh again."Dogs don't talk," he told her, and he sounded exactly like the star of whatever movie she had watched the night before.

    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

    At the unemployment office, there are few job opportunities for poets going around. So the poet reads accounts of life under the Third Reich and in Nazi language, smokes cannabis, walks through the streets, and eats bananas, drawn by an overbearing father into a hilarious and often cynical exploration of the push to be employed and the pull to write. In this Oulipean experiment written without gender markers for its narrator, Noémi Lefebvre presents us with a comic and irreverent reckoning with the rise of nationalism and the hegemony capitalism has on our language, actions, and identities.

    Here long-suffering Telumee tells her life story and tells us about the proud line of Lougandor women she continues to draw strength from. Time flows unevenly during the long hot blue days as the madness of the island swirls around the villages, and Telumee, raised in the shelter of wide skirts, must learn how to navigate the adversities of a peasant community, the ecstasies of love, and domestic realities while arriving at her own precious happiness. In the words of Toussine, the wise, tender grandmother who raises her, “Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn’t ride you, you must ride it.” A masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond relates the triumph of a generous and hopeful spirit, while offering a gorgeously lush, imaginative depiction of the flora, landscape, and customs of Gua­deloupe. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s incantatory prose, interwoven with Creole proverbs and lore, appears here in a remarkable translation by Barbara Bray.

    It's a time of year that brings bittersweet memories for this young man, reminders of all the things he's lost. But tonight he'll strike back against the bad luck that's slowly claimed his family. Tonight he's determined he'll kill the drug dealer, Mohr. Tonight, also, Karsten Groll knows that he will die himself.

    a poet of eternal disillusionment, he was at once a servant of the devil and an adorer of the Madonna.– Max BrodLeppin once wrote: “Prague remains my deepest experience. Its conflicts, its mystery, its ratcatcher’s beauty have ever provided my poetic efforts with new inspiration and meaning.” It is this city of darkened walls and strange decay that forms the backdrop of Severin’s erotic adventures and fateful encounters as he enters a world of femmes fatales, Russian anarchists, dabblers in the occult, and denizens of decadent salons. First published in 1914, Leppin seeks to unlock the mysterious erotic nature of his native city buried deep in the subconscious of its inhabitants. His depiction of this world, in a Prague straddling the border between the ancient and the modern, has brought Severin’s Journey into the Dark deserved international acclaim. As Max Brod so aptly remarked: "Leppin was the truly chosen bard of the painfully disappearing old Prague..."

    Cripure, as his students call him—the name a mocking contraction of Critique of Pure Reason—despises his colleagues, despairs of his charges, and is at odds with his family. The year is 1917, and the slaughter of the First World War goes on and on, with French soldiers not only dying in droves but also beginning to rise up in protest. Still haunted by the memory of the wife who left him long ago, Cripure turns his fury and scathing wit on everyone around him. Before he knows it, a trivial dispute with a complacently patriotic colleague has embroiled him in a duel.

    It is sure to capture the hearts of book lovers everywhere. Guylain Vignolles lives on the edge of existence. Working at a job he hates, he has but one pleasure in life ...Sitting on the 6.27 train each day, Guylain reads aloud. And it's this release of words into the world that starts our hero on a journey that will finally bring meaning into his life. For one morning, Guylain discovers the diary of a lonely young woman: Julie. A woman who feels as lost in the world as he does. As he reads from these pages to a rapt audience, Guylain finds himself falling hopelessly in love with their enchanting author ...The Reader on the 6.27 is a tale bursting with larger-than-life characters, each of whom touches Guylain's life for the better. This captivating novel is a warm, funny fable about literature's power to uplift even the most downtrodden of lives. 'The humanity of the characters ...the re-enchantment of everyday life, the power of words and literature, tenderness and humour ...

    First published on the eve of war in 1939, the essay has often been read as a pacifist manifesto. Rachel Bespaloff was a French contemporary of Weil’s whose work similarly explored the complex relations between literature, religion, and philosophy. She composed her own distinctive discussion of the Iliad in the midst of World War II—calling it “her method of facing the war”—and, as Christopher Benfey argues in his introduction, the essay was very probably written in response to Weil. Bespaloff’s account of the Iliad brings out Homer’s novelistic approach to character and the existential drama of his characters’ choices; it is marked, too, by a tragic awareness of how the Iliad speaks to times and places where there is no hope apart from war.This edition brings together these two influential essays for the first time, accompanied by Benfey’s scholarly introduction and an afterword by the great Austrian novelist Hermann Broch.

    The oldest secret order on earth has just woken up... They want nothing less than the world... They are the Hidden Hand... The race is on to find an ancient power and stop the greatest sacrifice in history… With the same high-octane pace and thrills of the Joe Hawke series, Raiders is an archaeological and historical action-adventure featuring a great new team and a terrible new enemy. Former soldier Jed Mason is working as an asset recovery specialist – retrieving kidnapped people and stolen goods in a dog-eat-dog world of international crime, violence and ransoms. Nearly killed on a dangerous mission, he must deal with a terrible personal tragedy, but when a mysterious private consortium briefs him on a violent kidnapping he quickly discovers when one door shuts, another opens. Why was the head of the Vatican’s secret archive murdered in Rome? Why was a leading American archaeologist snatched? Mason must lead his old team on a new adventure to stop a truly terrifying enemy intent on the sacrifice of millions. Drawing on the same fast-paced action as the world of Joe Hawke, Raiders introduces a new series with an exciting and compelling band of brothers – and sisters – who must stand together in the face of adversity or die one by one.

    All she wants to do is make her mark in the world to make her family proud. But when she has an unexpected encounter with a sexy stranger, everything in her life is bound to change. Is he the perfect man that he appears to be? Or is there more to him than what meets the eye?Find out what happens in part one of His Obsession!

    

    I cross the Seine, I walk with men and women who are anonymous and yet who are my reflection. We make up a single heart, a single cell. We are alive...'In All Men Naturally Want to Know the author traces her blissful childhood in Algeria, a sun-soaked paradise, recalling long trips across the desert with her mother and sister and hazy summer afternoons spent on the beach with her friend Ali. But Nina's mother is French - moving to Algeria for love at a time when most Europeans were desperate to leave - and as civil war approaches, their sunny idyll gives way to increasingly hostile and violent outbreaks. When something unspeakable happens to her mother, the family flee to Paris.In Paris, Nina lives alone. She is eighteen years old. It's the 1980s. Four nights a week she walks across Paris to a legendary women-only nightclub, the Katmandou. She sits alone at the bar, afraid of her own desires, of her sudden and intoxicating freedom. There she meets the glamorous, deeply troubled Ely, her volatile friends Lizz and Laurence, and the beautiful Julia, with whom she falls desperately in love. And, most importantly, she starts to write.