Author: Blaise Cendrars Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1590170636 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe—just in time for World War I, when "the whole world was doing a Moravagine." This new edition of Cendrars's underground classic is the first in English to include the author's afterword, "How I Wrote Moravagine."
Author: Blaise Cendrars Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520065808 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 426
Book Description
"At last! A superb translation of one of the great and greatly neglected Modernist poets! The map of Modernist poetry will never be quite the same."—Marjorie Perloff "Padgett's sparkling translations do marvelous justice to the eccentric and exciting poetry of Blaise Cendrars."—John Ashbery
Author: Maria Dermout Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1590178823 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
Set between Holland and a remote Indonesian island, this intimate magical realism novel offers “an offbeat narrative that has the timeless tone of a legend” (Time). “Dermoût’s sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love.” —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild The Ten Thousand Things is at once novel of shimmering strangeness—and familiarity. It is the story of Felicia, who returns with her baby son from Holland to the Spice Islands of Indonesia, to the house and garden that were her birthplace, over which her powerful grandmother still presides. There Felicia finds herself wedded to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the present. First published in Holland in 1955, Maria Dermoût's novel was immediately recognized as a magical work, like nothing else Dutch—or European—literature had seen before. The Ten Thousand Things is an entranced vision of a far-off place that is as convincingly real and intimate as it is exotic, a book that is at once a lament and an ecstatic ode to nature and life.
Author: Blaise Cendrars Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 282
Book Description
The extraordinary and much-requested first volume of Cendrars' autobiography, this account chronicles the author's exploits in the Foreign Legion--including the loss of his arm--before the narrative sets off across continents. From Africa to South America, Cendrars encounters everyone from Gallic gipsies to Piquita, the Mexican millionairess. And to all his encounters he brings the vitality, savage humor, and vivid observation that characterize his dazzling writing.
Author: Blaise Cendrars Publisher: Peter Owen Modern Classic ISBN: 9780720611571 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Centering on eccentric English millionaire shipowner, notorious hell-raiser, and the envy of all St Petersburg, Dan Yack, this strange travel yarn begins with the protagonist finding out that he is no longer wanted by his lover, Hedwiga. Rejection letter in hand, he eventually wanders into a nightclub to impulsively invite a handful of artists to accompany him on a world voyage via the Antarctic. As their journey progresses, the weather worsens and they enter pack-ice. Impatient, Dan orders the crew to land him and his three companions while they wait for a clear passage. They have enough provisions for a long, dark polar winter, but things do not run smoothly. The musician destroys their watches, the poet drifts off into serious daydreams, and the sculptor starts making statues of Dan Yack in ice. And Dan himself is worried--about time, about breaking his monocle, and about having no-one to love. But when the sun finally returns after the polar winter, no one could predict the surreal disaster that is about to unfold--a scenario involving a plum pudding, whales, women, and World War I.
Author: Ladislav Klíma Publisher: ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
Kl'ma believed that philosophy cannot be limited to speaking or writing; it must be lived. This led him to embark on a lifelong pursuit of becoming God, which he equated with Absolute Will. Drawing his greatest inspiration from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, he developed his conceps of will and radical subjectivism in numerous essays, aphorisms, prose works and plays. In Kl'ma's only full-length work of fiction, and his only work translated into English, a series of journal entries chronicles Prince Sternenhoch's descent into madness. The German empire's top aristocrat and the Kaiser's favorite, Sternenhoch become the "lowliest worm" at the hands of his wife, Helga, the Queen of Hells, yet eventually attains an ultimate state of bliss and salvation. Kl'ma explores here the paradoxical nature of pure spirituality with dark absurdist humor and comically grotesque, often obscene episodes.
Author: Blaise Cendrars Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers ISBN: Category : Actresses Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
A Parisian actress in her late 70s, with an active stage and sex life, is held for questioning after the murder of a barkeeper. What follows is a superbly imaginative, often hilarious vivification of Paris in the late 1940s. "Without Cendrars, neither Miller nor Burroughs would have existed.
Author: Blaise Cendrars Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers ISBN: 9780720611755 Category : California Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
In January 1848, John Augustus Sutter, "the first American millionaire," was ruined by one blow of a pickaxe. That blow revealed gold in one of the streams in Sutter's Californian estate, triggering the Gold Rush that brought hordes of greedy miners from every corner of the world to Sutter's vast domain. This is the story of this bankrupt Swiss paper maker who abandoned his family and made his way to America to seek his fortune. From New York he pushed westward, eventually acquiring a huge tract of land of which he was virtually an independent ruler and which was on the point of making him "the richest man in the world" when the Gold Rush brought disaster. For the last 30 years of his life, Sutter tried vainly to get compensation from the U.S. government. He died in 1880, a broken old man. This is a work of breathless pace, fantastic humor, and soaring invention: an extraordinary story extraordinarily told.
Author: Ramon del Valle-Inclan Publisher: National Geographic Books ISBN: 1590174984 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
An NYRB Classics Original The first great twentieth-century novel of dictatorship, and the avowed inspiration for García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch and Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme, Tyrant Banderas is a dark and dazzling portrayal of a mythical Latin American republic in the grip of a monster. Ramón del Valle-Inclán, one of the masters of Spanish modernism, combines the splintered points of view of a cubist painting with the campy excesses of 19th-century serial fiction to paint an astonishing picture of a ruthless tyrant facing armed revolt. It is the Day of the Dead, and revolution has broken out, creating mayhem from Baby Roach’s Cathouse to the Harris Circus to the deep jungle of Tico Maipú. Tyrant Banderas steps forth, assuring all that he is in favor of freedom of assembly and democratic opposition. Meanwhile, his secret police lock up, torture, and execute students and Indian peasants in a sinister castle by the sea where even the sharks have tired of a diet of revolutionary flesh. Then the opposition strikes back. They besiege the dictator’s citadel, hoping to bring justice to a downtrodden, starving populace. Peter Bush’s new translation of Valle-Inclán’s seminal novel, the first into English since 1929, reveals a writer whose tragic sense of humor is as memorably grotesque and disturbing as Goya’s in his The Disasters of War.
Author: Blaise Cendrars
Author: Blaise Cendrars
Author: Maria Dermout
Author: Blaise Cendrars
Author: Blaise Cendrars
Author: Blaise Cendrars
Author: Ladislav Klíma
Author: Blaise Cendrars
Author: Blaise Cendrars
Author: Ramon del Valle-Inclan