A miniature Borgesian portrait in misanthropy In a sequence of anecdotes imbued with haughty melancholy and nihilistic irony, Alain-Paul Mallard assembles a puzzle of an Austrian writer who despises both the world he lives in and the work he himself has produced, whose fragmented life crosses paths with fictional and nonfictional protagonists from Hans Magnus Enzensberger to Paul Celan, and whose concise first-person reflections describe a complicated and sympathetic monster. A masterpiece of the miniature in the tradition of Robert Walser and Fleur Jaeggy, and a tribute to the legacy of Thomas Bernhard, Mallard's "imaginary life" offers a celebration of sterility and silence in its appropriately distilled essence. Writer and filmmaker Alain-Paul Mallardwas born in 1970 and raised in Mexico City. He studied Hispanic literature in his native city, and then studied European intellectual history in Toronto. Tempted by silence, he is the author of a short, highly concentrated body of work. His films include L'origine de la tendresse, Évidencesand L'adoption.

A frenzied German Expressionist tale of orgy as salvation in Weimar Berlin Originally published in German in 1919, Postdamer Platzwas Curt Corrinth's first novel to employ an expressionistic, frenetic prose and presented his excessive vision of free love. Inspired by the sex theories of Freud's controversial disciple Otto Gross, Corrinth preached the sexual orgy as a means to salvation and universal copulation as a new world religion. The book's provincial protagonist, Hans Termaden, arrives in Berlin, where he quickly evolves from city rube to sexual messiah as he converts prostitutes and virgins into sensual warriors and frees men of sexual inhibitions. As word of his exploits spreads, people flock to his headquarters in Potsdamer Platz, turning all buildings into brothels. Police and army attempt to bring order but themselves defect to take part in the spreading copulation as Corrinth's prose itself begins to fragment and melt on the page. Decried in its time, Postdamer Platzcan be read today as a portal into the cultural excesses of Weimar Berlin. This first English translation includes the original illustrations done by Paul Klee for the book's 1920 deluxe edition. Curt Corrinth(1894-1960) studied law until serving in the military in World War I, which resulted in his embracing an antiwar and anti-bourgeois stance through his poetry and then through a series of novels, three of which would be banned by the Nazis in 1933. In 1955, he moved to the GDR in East Berlin, where he died five years later.

Poetry. Ida Vitale writes poetry that stimulates the mind, the heart and the soul. REASON ENOUGH was originally published in Montevideo in 1972. Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Pollack, this bilingual edition of the poems collected in REASON ENOUGH address many of Vitale's vital concerns: the process of literary creation, the place of poetry in the contemporary world, and humanity's ethical response to nature and history.

Lust, religious zeal, and heartache come together in this provocative novel about two infatuations, one between a man and his young lover in the late 20th century and another between a 15th-century woman and Jesus Christ. First published in 1994, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe is one of the most provocative, poignant, and inventive American novels of the last quarter century. The book tells two stories of romantic obsession. One, based on the first autobiography in English, the medieval Book of Margery Kempe, is about a fifteenth-century woman from East Anglia, a visionary, a troublemaker, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and an aspiring saint, and her love affair with Jesus. It is complicated. The other is about the author’s own love for an alluring and elusive young American, L. It is complicated. Between these two Margery Kempe, the novel, emerges as an unprecedented exploration of desire, devotion, abjection, and sexual obsession in the form of a novel like no other novel. Robert Glück’s masterpiece bears comparison with the finest work of such writers as Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. This edition includes an essay by Glück about the creation of the book titled "My Margery, Margery's Bob."

Twenty-five years after Jesus’ Son, a haunting new collection of short stories on mortality and transcendence, from National Book Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Dwight Garner, The New York Times • Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air • Chicago Tribune • Newsday • New York • AV Club • Publishers Weekly “Ranks with the best fiction published by any American writer during this short century.”—New York “A posthumous masterpiece.”—Entertainment Weekly NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • NPR • The Boston Globe • New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Bloomberg The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the long-awaited new story collection from Denis Johnson. Written in the luminous prose that made him one of the most beloved and important writers of his generation, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating the ghosts of the past and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves. Finished shortly before Johnson’s death, this collection is the last word from a writer whose work will live on for many years to come. Praise for The Largesse of the Sea Maiden “An instant classic.”—Newsday “Exceptional luminosity . . . hits a powerful vein.”—The New York Times Book Review “Grace and oblivion are inextricably yoked in these transcendent stories. . . . [Johnson’s] gift is to extract the beauty in all that brokenness.”—The Wall Street Journal “Nobody ever wrote like Denis Johnson. Nobody ever came close. . . . We’re just left with this miraculous book, these perfect stories, the last words from one of the world’s greatest writers.”—NPR

For forty years Charles Alavoine has sleepwalked through his life. Growing up as a good boy in the grip of a domineering mother, he trains as a doctor, marries, opens a medical practice in a quiet country town, and settles into an existence of impeccable bourgeois conformity. And yet at unguarded moments this model family man is haunted by a sense of emptiness and futility. Then, one night, laden with Christmas presents, he meets Martine. It is time for the sleeper to awake.

Jean de La Ville de Mirmont left behind one undisputed classic, self-published a few months before he would meet his fate on the front lines of World War I: an understated, almost humorous tale of urban solitude and alienation that outlines the mediocrity of bureaucratic existence. Jean Dézert is an office worker employed by the ministry, who rounds out his regimented life with snippets of Eastern philosophy, strolls through the city and consumerist efforts at injecting content into his life by structuring his Sundays through a rigorous use of advertising flyers that take him from saunas to vegetarian restaurants to lectures on sexual hygiene. In his mortal boredom, his modernist engagement with the banality of the everyday and his almost heroic resignation to mediocrity, Jean Dézert emerges as something of a French counterpart to Herman Melville's own rebel bureaucrat, Bartleby the Scrivener--save that when it comes to being an existential rebel, Jean Dézert goes even further in his will to prefer not to. "Jean Dézert is like a brother to me," wrote Michel Houellebecq, "because of his ability to escape despair by means of emptiness." Jean de La Ville de Mirmont(1886-1914) was killed by a shell explosion on the World War I battlefront. He left behind a collection of poetry that would be published posthumously, a collection of short stories and the novella for which he is remembered, The Sundays of Jean Dézert.