Bøger udgivet af Wakefield Press

Hitherto unavailable in English, Spells, by the Belgian dramatist Michel de Ghelderode, ranks among the 20th century's most noteworthy collections of fantastic tales. 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 Musée-Bibliothèque Michel de Ghelderode.

Netball nerd Grace Parker is navigating high school, trialling for the state netball team, a crush on the dreamy Sebastian, new friends, and new drama. It's going to be a big year.

Libby Lawrence is good at pretending, but she can't seem to drop the facade, even with her best friend. After snagging her dream role in a theatre production, things only get more complicated as Libby must decide who she is, and who she wants.

Mynona's self-styled "grotesques" inhabit an uncertain ground between fairy tale, fetishism and philosophy, satirizing everything from nationalism to philanthropyFirst published in German in 1916, Black-White-Red collects six bizarre tales by the "laughing philosopher" Salomo Friedlaender, who wrote his literary work under the pseudonym Mynona (the reversed German word for "anonymous"). In this collection, we encounter a tongue-in-cheek showdown between Goethe and Newton, whose theories of color clash in the form of a nationalistic flag; another story presents the inventor of the tactilestylus setting out to capture the residual sound waves of Goethe speaking in his study through a mechanical recreation of his vocal apparatus, with its amplification set to infinite. In "The Magic Egg," one of Mynona's most emblematic and curious tales, a man encounters an enormous bisecting mechanical egg in the middle of the desert that houses a mummy and a possible pathway to utopia on Earth.Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender (1871-1946), was a perfectly functioning split personality: a serious philosopher by day (author of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Intellectual Biography and Kant for Kids) and a literary absurdist by night, who composed black humored tales he called "grotesques." He inhabited the margins of German Expressionism and Dada, and his friends and fans included Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus.

A nonconformist satire of both bureaucracy and nonconformism from the French polymath and author of Foam of the DaysWritten at the age of 23 for his friends in the winter of 1943-44, Vercoquin and the Plankton was the first of Vian's novels to be published under his own name. Published in 1947, the book came out two months after his succès de scandale I Spit on Your Graves and two months before the publication of his beloved classic The Foam of the Days. At once social documentary, scathing satire and jazz manifesto, Vercoquin and the Plankton describes the collision of two worlds under the Vichy regime: that of the youthful dandyism of the ever-partying Zazous and the murderously maniacal bureaucracy of a governmental office for standardization. In this roman à clef drawn from Vian's own contradictory lives as a jazz musician on the Left Bank and an engineer at the French National Organization for Standardization, the reader is introduced to a handful of characters inhabiting a world lying somewhere between Occupied Paris and Looney Tunes.Boris Vian (1920-59) was a French polymath who in his short life managed to inhabit the roles of writer, poet, playwright, musician, singer/songwriter, translator, music critic, actor, inventor and engineer, before dying of a heart attack at the age of 39, after authoring ten novels, several volumes of short stories, plays, operas, articles and nearly 500 songs. Vian is remembered as one of the reigning spirits of the postwar Parisian Latin Quarter, a friend to everyone from Jean-Paul Sartre to Raymond Queneau and Miles Davis, playing trumpet with Claude Abadie and Claude Luter, and an influence on such future kindred spirits as Serge Gainsbourg.

A meticulously researched and tautly written story of the drowning death of Dr Duncan in SA's Torrens River in 1972.

The first English translation of the Cubist poet's most important collection of verse poems--a wild grab bag of contradictory stylesWhen Max Jacob published The Central Laboratory in 1921, Parisian Dada had just officially come to an end and Surrealism was yet to be born. The poetic scene in Paris was between definitions, and Jacob embodied that moment.The Central Laboratory is distinctly modern, yet utterly discordant with anything else that had been published before: a grab bag of popular genres, operettas, Breton folk song, nonsense poetry, nursery rhyme, doggerel, parody and puns in which sound often trumps sense and Jacob changes register on a dime. Employing Symbolist obscure reference, Cubist fracturing of perspective and Dadaist discontinuity, Jacob's art of mixed signals and mocked allegory formulates a camp sensibility, a "queering" of literary style as riddled with contradiction as Jacob himself had been in his lifetime.A century after its initial publication in French, the book remains utterly peculiar and lost for too long in the shadow of Jacob's more famous book of prose poems, The Dice Cup. Jacob himself said of The Central Laboratory: "it sums up 20 years and reflects 20 states of soul, often 20 styles either suffered or created by me."Max Jacob (1876-1944) was a French poet, painter, writer and critic. A key figure of bohemian Montmartre and the Cubist era, he rubbed shoulders with such figures as Apollinaire and Modigliani, and was a lifelong friend to Picasso, Gris and Cocteau. Jacob converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1915. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, he died in a deportation camp of pneumonia. Rosanna Warren's critically acclaimed biography of Jacob was published in 2020.

"Originally published in French as Bruges-la-Morte (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1892)"--Title page verso.

The first English translation of Miyakatsu Koike's wartime diary, which documents his arrest and internment in South Australia's Loveday Camp, and his return to a war-ravaged Japan.

A daring, irreverent short-story collection that dissects and explores the conundrums of contemporary life and what it is to be human, through a world very like our own.

Roaming Freely Throughout the Universe offers fresh perspectives on Baudin's scientific voyagers, their work and its legacy.

Black Tom Birch, once the most feared person in Van Diemen's Land, terrorised colonisers until he was captured and turned against his people. But history is wrong. Here, for the first time, is the truth about this Aboriginal patriot.

The GPO clock nearby chimed and then slowly struck eleven times. And all of us anonymous people reached out and held hands, sharing the time through the solemn striking. I felt a surge of strength and optimism go right through me.In 1983, Mary Cassini attended a Silent Vigil for Peace. It gave her an idea that changed her life. She decided that at 11 am local time around the world people should stop and share three minutes of silence to be mindful of the future and wish for peace. Doing the Impossible is the remarkable story of how she achieved this, travelling the world meeting ordinary citizens and global leaders, in the East and the West, Russia and the Middle East, spreading awareness of her message and making her dream a reality. Her initiative, 3 Minutes World Silence, was accepted around the world and is helping us all to understand that we, as fellow human beings, can share this planet peacefully.

1977, Kerry Packer announced he'd bought the cream of Australia's cricket crop to play in his own private competition. This is the story of those men, known as the Establishment Boys.

A YA rom-com about home and family, about breaking apart and fusing together, and, of course, about love.

Poetical biographies of six radical thinkers from Cagliostro to Restif de la Bretonne, by the leading figure of French RomanticismFirst published in French in 1852, The Illuminated was the first of a string of Gérard de Nerval's late works that would culminate in his posthumous fantastical autobiography Aurélia in 1855. The Illuminated collects six portraits of men whom Nerval mysteriously dubbed "precursors of socialism"--visionaries who together formed an alternative history of France and a backdrop to a mystical form of madness that Nerval ultimately claimed for himself.Nerval here presents the reader with Raoul Spifame, a mad lawyer who imagined himself to be Henry II; the Abbé de Bucquoy, a man who opposed the monarchy and whose amazing escapes suggested the possession of magical powers; Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, the 18th-century theosophist who defined God in human terms rather than spiritual; the Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, the famous magus and alchemist; Jacques Cazotte, author of The Devil in Love, who created a synthesis between hermetic ideas and Catholic thought; and Quintus Aucler, a lawyer who sought to revive paganism in the unstable world of French society in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1789.An overlooked work by Nerval, The Illuminated brings together the picturesque and pathos, a peculiar gallery of portraits that blur the boundaries between mysticism and mystification.Gérard de Nerval (1808-55) was a writer, poet and translator who wedded French and German Romanticism and transformed his research into mystic thought and his bouts of mental illness into such visionary works as Aurélia.

A comprehensive biography of Marjorie Lawrence, one of Australia's most renowned opera stars.

A biography of the divisive, problematic and fascinating 'mission girl' Annie Lock.

The hallucinatory English-language debut of an overlooked German Expressionist poetBess Brenck Kalischer's only work of prose was first published in German in 1922. Narrated by a woman being held in a sanitarium after a mental breakdown, The Mill is less a novel than a rhythmic, hallucinatory and fractured sequence of prose poems. On its publication, the German author Mynona described it as "more a mill, a cosmos flower, a lyricism and romantic spell than it is a 'novel.'" Shifting from pedestrian concerns to cosmic visions, from the setting of a basement mushroom farm to scenes on Sirius, Kalischer's narrator weaves together literary satire, anguished dream states and shifting subjectivities. As much Maldoror as Munchausen, The Mill describes an unstable journey to psychic restoration that is as radically experimental today as when it was first published a century ago.Bess Brenck Kalischer (1878-1933) was born Betty Levy in Rostock. Although she began publishing her first poems in 1905, she began to make a name for herself as part of the second generation of German Expressionists in Dresden, cofounding the Expesstionistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dresden (Expressionist Working Group of Dresden) alongside such members as Conrad Felixmüller. Later relocating to Berlin, she was a friend of Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona, who used her as a model in several stories and novels. She died of a "nervous disease" in 1933, her grave left without a headstone until 2014.

A visionary treatise on perception from the extraordinary polymath Charles Cros--poet, friend to Rimbaud and Verlaine, and inventor of color photography and the phonographEstablishing the author's standing as the inventeur maudit of his time, Principles of Cerebral Mechanics was first presented to the Academy of Sciences in 1872, but was not published until 1879, and then only in fragmentary form. Setting out to understand the mechanics of perception--the organs of which at the time were too small and inaccessible to be studied directly--Cros instead attempted to reverse-engineer the sensory organs. Whereas his previous inventions in the realms of audio recording and color photography had focused on technology for the senses, with this ambitious essay Cros turned to conceptualizing the technology of the senses themselves: rather than the transmission of color to the retina, here he instead attempted to conceive of how color was transmitted from the retina to the brain. By approaching the human brain as a "mechanism of registration," Cros' essay can be set alongside the groundbreaking work of such revolutionary figures who transformed modern vision as Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge.Charles Cros (1842-88) was as much Renaissance man as he was poète maudit. A bohemian poet who drank with Verlaine and provided housing to Rimbaud, he also developed the comic monologue as a theatrical genre, and invented both the phonograph (which he named the "paléophone") and color photography (though he failed to patent either before Thomas Edison or Louis Ducos du Hauron), among other such inventions as a nonmetallic battery and a musical stenographer.

A miniature Borgesian portrait in misanthropyIn 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 Mallard was 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, Évidences and L'adoption.

A disorienting, de Chirico-esque detective tale of curio shops and eerie antiquities, penned in France's postwar traumaA traveling businessman decides to tarry in an unnamed city, dons a new name and profession on a whim, and rents a room in a hotel on an island at the city's edge. As he wanders through the streets of unvisited storefronts and offices, he encounters a strange constellation of characters: a sinister night watchman; his spiritual half-brother, the "professor"; and a mute beauty who quickly obsesses him. They in turn lead the narrator into labyrinths of crowded curio shops and secondhand furnishers where the secrets of the island lie buried behind armoires and delirium. As the narrator pieces together the drama at the heart of the abandoned quarter, he discovers missing elements to his own biography and the role he is to play as witness to tragedy.Marcel Béalu's novella, written in the 1940s but not published until 1954, peels away an oneiric banality to reveal doubled lives and secret stories. The Impersonal Adventure utilizes a dreamlike logic to translate postwar trauma, urban devastation and anxiety into a tale that unfolds in the empty streets and bric-a-brac shops of a de Chirico painting.Marcel Béalu (1908-93) was a French poet and novelist who drew inspiration from German Romanticism and French Surrealism, but avoided schools of thought and autobiography. His work was distinct for its dreamlike qualities and has established him as a master of the French fantastique. He made his living as a hat maker (when he first met the poet Max Jacob, who took him under his wing), an antiques dealer, and then as a bookseller.

A coming-of-age novel set in the Adelaide Hills during the height of the Second World War.

Victor Marra Newland OBE MC DCM - hunter, soldier and entrepreneur - was descended from Australian pioneers. In 1838 his English grandfather the Rev'd Ridgway Newland landed in the new colony of South Australia. His father Simpson Newland opened up the New South Wales outback with sheep stations on the Darling and Paroo rivers. At the dawn of the 20th century, with Australia's unknown frontiers already claimed, Marra looked to Africa to make his fortune. In 1904 he started British East Africa's first safari company in partnership with another Australian, Leslie Tarlton. Along the way he fought in the Boer War and later in the East Africa campaign in World War One.Marra settled in Nairobi when it was a railway staging post where drunks who staggered home in the dark were liable to be eaten by a lion. There were no rules, no safety nets and tantalising possibilities. Newland, Tarlton and Co. acted as land, stock and auctioneering agents as well as outfitting and guiding visiting sportsmen. British aristocrats, European royalty and American moguls set out on foot and horseback into the wilds in pursuit of big game trophies. The American president Teddy Roosevelt was accompanied by an entourage of 200 porters, gunbearers, camp staff and grooms.Marra's tales of shipwrecks, charging rhino, hunting elephant for their ivory and the settlers' increasingly frustrated attempts to stake land claims make for fascinating and well-paced tales. This book vividly sketches a portrait of a country in the making and the man who embraced and was transformed by his adopted land.

This wee book is a bittersweet account of growing up in Scotland in the strange and brutal kingdom we call home. But Poking Seaweed with a Stick is anything but a tale of childhood suffering; it is an enchanted Scottish tale that will have you smiling through your tears and laughing till you cry.