ATLAS PRESS

(H/B) A MAMMAL'S NOTEBOOK
This is the largest selection of the writings of Erik Satie yet to appear in English. Dismissed as an eccentric by many, Satie has come to be seen as a key influence on 20th- and 21st-century music. His compositions include, among other works, the ubiquitous Gymnopedies, the Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear and the Dadaist opera Rel?che. In later life he gathered about him Les Six, the cream of the new generation of French composers, and his influence has since continued to widen; John Cage and the New York School composers hailed him as...
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(H/B) THE SACRED CONSPIRACY
This book recounts what must be one of the most unusual intellectual journeys of modern times, in which Georges Bataille - still best known outside of France as a highly wrought pornographer (The Story of the Eye etc.) - have spent the early Thirties in far-left groups opposing the rise of Fascism, abandoned that approach in order to transfer the struggle on to "the mythological plane". In 1937, he founded two groups in order to explore the combinations of power and the "sacred" at work in society (Bataille associated the sacred with expe...
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(P/B) THE WAY HOME
This selection of Harry Mathews's longer prose writings attests his innovative genius in seven radically differing works: Country Cooking in Central France is perhaps the longest, most demanding and surely the most extravagant recipe ever concocted. (Mathews's best piece - The Guardian). Singular Pleasures: 61 pungent demonstrations of masturbation by both sexes, from Almaty to Zizanga. The Orchard is the author's memorial of his close friend Georges Perec, composed in startlingly succinct and revealing glimpses. Armenian Papers, a sequenc...
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(P/B) THREE EARLY NOVELS
This second volume of the Collected Works presents three early novels: Days and Nights, a semi-autobiographical novel whose protagonist deserts everyday life by all means available - dream, drugs, hallucination and a strange erotic quest: the pursuit of "The Double". Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician, Jarry's masterpiece, in which 'Pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions, is presented and applied. Absolute Love, the strangest of Jarry's novels, in which he explores an entirely new dramatic scenario, "the disc...
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(P/B) SEMMELWEIS
Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961) is best known for his early novels Journey to the End of the Night (1932), which Charles Bukowski described as the greatest novel of the last 2,000 years, and Death on the Instalment Plan (1936), but this delirious, fanatical and unreasonable biography predates them both. Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865), now regarded as the father of antisepsis, was the first to diagnose correctly the cause of the staggering mortality rates in the maternity hospital in Vienna; his colleagues, however, rejected both his reaso...
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(H/B) LIBERTY OR LOVE!
Mystery, the marvellous, the city of Paris transmuted by love, and Sanglot the Corsair's pursuit of the siren Louise Lame: these are the essential ingredients of this masterpiece of early Surrealism. It was originally published in 1924 to immediate and lasting acclaim - except from the public authorities who immediately censored whole sections (here restored). How describe a novel of such virtuosity and bravura, which never behaves as one would expect? Characters appear and vanish according to whim and desire, they walk underwater, nonch...
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(P/B) DADA ALMANAC
"Dada Means Nothing!" So proclaimed Tristan Tzara, the movement's tireless publicist. Yet this did not prevent the most fanatical and talented artists and writers across Europe from rushing to join its ranks. Anti-war, anti-art, anti-dada, from its beginnings in Zurich during the first World War the dadas swept aside the cultural, philosophical and political norms of their time. Utter disgust with a society that had created the war (and then expected to survive the peace) spurred them to ever greater demonstrations of revulsion and derisio...
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(H/B) AN ANECDOTED TOPOGRAPHY OF CHANCE
An Anecdoted Topography of Chance is now acknowledged as the most important, and most entertaining "Artists' Book" of the post-war period, and this edition is the definitive appearance of a unique collaborative work by four artists associated with various avant-garde art movements, including Fluxus and Nouveau Realisme. What is the Topography? Hard to explain an idea so simple yet so brilliantly executed. Following a rambling conversation with his dear friend Robert Filliou, Daniel Spoerri one day mapped the objects lying at random on a ta...
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(H/B) ANICET OR THE PANORAMA
This novel, much of it written amidst the horror of the trenches when Louis Aragon was a medical orderly during the First World War, demonstrates the chasm that separates the works of the artists and writers of what would become Dadaism and those, say, of the English war poets. In a world of moral destitution beyond any rational forbearance, what can remain? How can one write at all, let alone something as absurd as a novel? Anicet or the Panorama is both a roman a clef (Aragon's friends, including Andr? Breton, are recognisable) and a nov...
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(P/B) 4 DADA SUICIDES
This book, originally published by Atlas Press in 1995, has become one of our most sought-after out-of-print titles. This new edition is a corrected reprint in a new cover and slipcase. These four took the nihilism of the movement to its ultimate conclusion, their works are the remnants of lives lived to the limit and then cast aside with nonchalance and disdain: Vache died of a drug overdose, Rigaut shot himself, Cravan and Torma simply vanished, their fates still a mystery. Yet their fragmentary works - to which they attached so little i...
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(H/B) THE TUTU
Had The Tutu appeared when it was written in 1891 it would have been one of the defining works of late nineteenth-century French literature. Juan Goytisolo is among its admirers, and noted that: "The Tutu has been described as the most mysterious novel of the nineteenth century, it is probably one of the strangest, and certainly one of the most fascinating... We find in it a clear presentiment (one cannot say influence, since no one read this book) of the audacities of Jarry, Roussel, Breton, Ionesco and Queneau..." Its author, the publish...
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(H/B) THEORY OF THE GREAT GAME
Between 1928 and 1930 the Paris magazine Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game) ran to three issues before collapsing because of its editors' infighting, their over-indulgence in chemical stimulants, and vehemently unreasonable aspirations for both art and life. The group is often associated with Surrealism (they were invited to join the group), but the ideas of the Grand Jeu were far more extreme. The magazine was the public face of a tightly bound group of artists and writers who since adolescence had systematically attacked their perceptions of ...
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(H/B) 3 NEW YORK DADAS
Collects together a novel and a memoir of a triangular relationship during the early days of the Dada movement in New York along with its creative progeny, two magazines: The Blindman and Rongwrong. Henri-Pierre Roche is best known for his novel Jules et Jim, based on the three-sided relationship between himself, the artist Marcel Duchamp and the actress Beatrice Wood. A unique first-hand evocation of the three friends and lovers within their milieu, which included extraordinary characters such as Francis Picabia, Isadora Duncan, Arthur Cr...
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(P/B) OULIPO COMPENDIUM
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