ART

Louis Levy - Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah
Wakefield Press 2017 ISBN 9781939663283 Acqn 27040
Pb 12x18cm 152pp 12
Originally published in Danish in 1910, Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh
Methuselah is a fevered pulp novel that reads like nothing else of its time: an anomaly within the
tradition of the Danish novel, and one that makes for a startlingly modern read to this day.
Combining elements of the serial film, detective story and gothic horror novel, Kzradock is a
surreal foray into psychoanalytic mysticism.
Opening in a Parisian insane asylum where Dr. Renard de Montpensier is conducting hypnotic
sances with the titular Onion Man, the novel escalates quickly with the introduction of battling
detectives, murders and a puma in a hallucinating movie theater before shifting to the chalk cliffs
of Brighton. It is there that the narrator must confront a ghost child, a scalped detective, a
skeleton, a deaf-mute dog and a manipulative tapeworm in order to properly confront his own
sanity and learn the spiritual lesson of the human onion.
When Gershom Scholem read the novel in its 1912 German translation on the recommendation
of Walter Benjamin, he concluded: This is a great book, and it speaks a formidable language
This book lays out the metaphysics of doubt.
Louis Levy (18751940) was a Danish author, playwright, foreign correspondent and theatre critic
who experimented with a wide variety of literary genres, from prose poetry to nursery rhymes to
philosophical novels, and was a central literary figure and screenwriter in Copenhagen in the
early 20th century.
orders@artdata.co.uk
www.artdata.co.uk

ART

Mynona - My Papa and the Maid of Orleans and Other Grotesques

Wakefield Press 2017 ISBN 9781939663276 Acqn 27036
Pb 12x18cm 96pp 11.50
Mynonas other 1921 collection of grotesques is no less provocative and just as indefinable in
natureeven close to a century after its original publication. These twelve off-kilter parabolic
tales include items such as The Chamber Pot as Lifesaver, The Art of Self-Embalming, The
Maiden as Toothpowder, Your Panties Are Beautiful! and The Amorous Corpse. E.T.A.
Hoffmann meets Immanuel Kant through the unlikeliest of looking glasses as Mynona spins out
quasi-mystical meetings between cosmic entities and drawing-room romantics: a starry-eyed
Buster Keaton skirting along the philosophical and literary borders of topics such as cuckoldry,
necrophilia, schizophrenia, the end of history and the love lives of objects. With its companion
volume of grotesques, The Unruly Bridal Bed, these twelve tales poke more holes in the material
world and further demonstrate Mynonas predilection for the philosophical pratfall.
Mentioned in his day in the same breath as Kafka, Mynona, a.k.a. Salomo Friedlaender (1871
1946), was a perfectly functioning split personality: a philosopher by day (author of Friedrich
Nietzsche: An Intellectual Biography and Kant for Kids) and a literary absurdist by night, who
composed black-humoured tales he called Grotesken. His friends and fans included Martin
Buber, Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus. He died in Paris, ill and in poverty, after Thomas Mann
refused to help him emigrate to the United States.

orders@artdata.co.uk
www.artdata.co.uk

ART

Myona - The Unruly Bridal Bed and Other Grotesques

Wakefield Press 2017 ISBN 9781939663269 Acqn 27037
Pb 12x18cm 96pp 11.50
Originally published in 1921, The Unruly Bridal Bed brings together ten indefinable tales that
include Tobias and the Prune, Plant Paternity, The Dissolute Nose, Fried Sphinx Meat and
The Great Gold-Plated Flea. Under his literary pseudonym Mynona (a palindrome for the
German Anonym, or Anonymous), Salomo Friedlaender here displays his unique brand of
philosophical slapstick that blends fairytale technology with proto-metafiction and at times
unsettling meditations on fornicating plants, aristocratic eugenics, spiritual and physical
hermaphroditism, and our excremental sun. With its companion volume of grotesques, My Papa
and the Maid of Orlans, this collection offers a perfect introduction to the great German
humorists work.
Mentioned in his day in the same breath as Kafka, Mynona, a.k.a. Salomo Friedlaender (1871
1946), was a perfectly functioning split personality: a philosopher by day (author of Friedrich
Nietzsche: An Intellectual Biography and Kant for Kids) and a literary absurdist by night, who
composed black-humoured tales he called Grotesken. His friends and fans included Martin
Buber, Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus. He died in Paris, ill and in poverty, after Thomas Mann
refused to help him emigrate to the United States.

orders@artdata.co.uk
www.artdata.co.uk

ART

Francis Ponge - The Table

Wakefield Press 2017 ISBN 9781939663245 Acqn 27038
Pb 12x18cm 104pp 11.50
Written from 1967 to 1973 over a series of early mornings in seclusion in his country home, The
Table offers a final chapter in Francis Ponges interrogation of the unassuming objects in his life:
in this case, the table upon which he wrote. In his effort to get at the presence lying beneath his
elbow, Ponge charts out a space of silent consolation that lies beyond (and challenges) scientific
objectivity and poetic transport. This is one of Ponges most personal, overlooked, andbecause
it was the project he was working on when he diedhis least processed works. It reveals the
personal struggle Ponge engaged in throughout all of his writing, a hesitant uncertainty he usually
pared away from his published texts that is at touching opposition to the manufactured, durable
mother of the table on and of which he here writes.
Francis Ponge (18991988) was both a giant of French 20th-century poetry and one of its
humblest practitioners. The poet of things, he practiced a poetic contemplationusually in the
form of his own unique brand of hesitant, searching prose poemof the everyday objects that
share our existence. He did not so much reinvent the shell, cigarette, soap, pebble, sun, oyster or
asparagus, as forge and share with them a new language.

orders@artdata.co.uk
www.artdata.co.uk

ART

Marcel Schwob - The King in the Golden Mask

Wakefield Press 2017 ISBN 9781939663238 Acqn 27039
Pb 12x18cm 176pp 11.50
First published in French in 1892 and never before translated fully into English, The King in the
Golden Mask gathers 21 of Marcel Schwobs cruelest and most erudite tales. Melding the
fantastic with historical fiction, these stories describe moments of unexplained violence both
historical and imaginary, often blending the two through Schwobs collaging of primary source
documents into fiction. Brimming with murder, suicide, royal leprosy and medieval witchcraft,
Schwobs stories portray clergymen furtively attending medieval sabbaths, Protestant galley
slaves labouring under the persecution of Louis XIV and dice-tumbling sons of Florentine
noblemen wandering Europe at the height of the 1374 plague. These writings are of such
hallucinatory detail and linguistic specificity that the reader is left wondering whether they arent
newly unearthed historical documents. To read Schwob is to encounter human history in its most
scintillating form as it comes into contact with this unparalleled imagination.
The secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges
to Roberto Bolao and J. Rodolfo Wilcock, Marcel Schwob (18671905) was as versed in the
street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Whitman (whom he translated into
French). Paul Valry and Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and in doing so paid
tribute to the man who could evoke both the intellect of Leonardo da Vinci and the anarchy of Ubu
Roi.

orders@artdata.co.uk
www.artdata.co.uk