Books published by Twisted Spoon Press

In the vein of the well-known drug writings of De Quincey and Baudelaire from a century earlier and those of his contemporaries Walter Benjamin and Jean Cocteau - and foreshadowing the later writings of Aldous Huxley and Carlos Castaneda on psychoactive drugs - Witkacy composed Narcotics in 1930 to discuss and document not only his own experimentation with different substances but the nature of addiction itself and the prevailing social attitude toward drugs, particularly those that were considered "acceptable." As life became increasingly mechanized, Witkacy felt that a sense of the metaphysical could only be achieved by artificial means, and like Henri Michaux, he produced an extensive oeuvre of singular visual art while under the influence of a variety of substances. Meandering, acerbic, and burlesque, rife with neologisms and expressions from German, French, English, and Russian, Witkacy dissects Polish society and the art world as well as himself via the hypocrisy surrounding drug use. Since it was first published in the 1930s, Narcotics has achieved a cult status in Poland where it is considered both a modernist classic and a paragon of Witkiewiczian madness. This edition, the first complete translation in English, includes a second appendix written later, passages from the novel Farewell to Autumn, and 34 color reproductions of a cross section of portraits to show how various substances impacted Witkacy's art.

Unable to publish in communist Czechoslovakia, Jiří Kolař saw Responses first appear in 1984 with the exile publishing house Index based in Cologne, Germany. The text discusses his influences and wide variety of collage techniques as well as art and literature in general. He pairs it with "Kafka's Prague," a series of color crumplages of Prague's buildings, streets, squares, and gardens accompanied by short extracts from Franz Kafka's work, which was also banned by the regime, as a sort of homage to the city whose artistic vitality was being snuffed out by communist repression. The result is a fascinating document akin to an artist's book that captures Kolař's creative flux at a particular moment in time. Crumplage is a technique developed by Kolař in which a sheet of paper or reproduction is crumpled at random and then flattened out and pasted onto a backing, creating a deformation of the original image or a new image.

In the summer of 1935, Vitezslav Nezval, already one of the most celebrated Czech poets of his generation, embarked on a period of manic creativity that would result in three volumes of poetry written and published in a two-year span (1935-37), mirrored by three volumes of memoir-like poetic prose. These collections would not only reshape Czech poetry, blending approaches developed by the French Surrealists with national cultural sensibilities and political concerns, taken together they are among the highest achievements of the interwar avant-garde. Each of the three volumes adopted a different principle of Surrealism as its general modus operandi. For Woman in the Plural (1936), the first volume in this loose trilogy, it was objective chance (while the third and final volume, The Absolute Gravedigger (1937), adopted the paranoiac-critical method). Appearing in English translation for the first time, Woman in the Plural displays Nezval's prodigious talents in a variety of forms, styles, and genres as he spins images of the female form like a zoetrope to create novel and hallucinatory ways of conceiving woman's mythical, divine, and creative power. It is an eclectic collection that mixes profound free verse, at times reading like a cascade of automatic writing, with pages from Nezval's dream journal, an exuberant set of Surrealist exercises, and a full-length play of chance encounters with "a woman like any other," all the while addressing the social and political uncertainties of the 1930s. Led off by Karel Teige's original collages from the first edition, Woman in the Plural is a vibrant and volatile tour de force from one of the greatest European writers of the 20th century.

A cofounder of Dada and its enfant terrible, Walter Serner, whose demeanor has been called "a dance on the rim of a volcano," was a brilliant observer of society. His Last Loosening: A Dada Manifesto was penned in 1918 and published in 1920. Slightly revised later as he became disgusted with Dada, it forms the first part of this volume, its philosophical foundation. It presents a playful "moral codex" to subvert the illusions and stereotypes underpinning society's views on morality and decency, attacking the contradictions between appearance and reality. The volume's second part, "The Handbook of Practices," was written in Geneva in 1927 and offers a practical guide in gnomic prose for the modern amoralist, the con man. A cynical vision to be sure, Serner has set out a list of precepts to arm us in a world where boredom prevails and nothing but self-interest is a motivator, in his view a shameless, bigoted world wallowing in an orgy of narcissism, where it is either fool or be fooled. His smugness and indifference, his "Jesuit snobbery" as one critic called it, gave his work an explosive force that was unsurpassed by his contemporaries.

Launched in 1931 by Jindřich Styrský, Edition 69 consisted of six volumes of erotic literature and illustration that followed the path marked out by Louis Aragon's Irene's Cunt and Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye. Including the first Czech translation of Marquis de Sade's Justine and Pietro Aretino (both illustrated by Toyen), three volumes were from contemporary Czech avant-garde artists, and these were all illustrated by Styrský himself, who also contributed the text for the last volume of the series. Bringing together original English translations of the three Czech contributions to the Edition 69 series, this volume comprises Nezval's "Sexual Nocturne"; Halas's erotic poetry collection "Thyrsos"; and Styrský's "Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream," including the original essay from psychoanalyst and fellow Surrealist Bohuslav Brouk, all complemented by Styrský's artwork, ranging from pen and ink drawings to graphic collages to pornographic photomontages. Influenced by Max Ernst's collage-novels, Andre Masson's illustrations, and the book as object, Styrský's overall conception for the Edition 69 series rank it among the notable achievements of European Surrealism, representing as well a sustained attempt by the interwar Czech avant-garde to investigate the taboos of bourgeois culture.

Philosopher, novelist, essayist, eccentric, no other Czech author has had a greater impact on underground culture than Ladislav Klima (1878-1928). Mentor to artists as varied as Bohumil Hrabal and the Plastic People of the Universe, Klima's philosophy was radically subjectivist, and he felt it should be lived rather than merely spoken or written about. With Nietzsche as his paragon, he embarked upon a lifelong pursuit to become God, or Absolute Will, elucidating this quest in many letters, aphorisms, and essays. Yet among Klima's fictional texts, the apotheosis of his philosophy is The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, his most acclaimed novel. Ostensibly a series of journal entries, the tale chronicles the descent into madness of Prince Sternenhoch, the German Empire's foremost aristocrat and favorite of Kaiser "Willy." Having become the "lowliest worm" at the hands of his estranged wife, Helga, the Queen of Hells, Sternenhoch eventually attains an ultimate state of bliss and salvation through the most grotesque perversions. Klima explores here the paradoxical nature of pure spirituality with a humor that is as darkly comical as it is obscene. This volume also includes his notorious text "My Autobiography."

Written in the 1950s and '60s, the "action poems" comprising a A User's Manual were published in their complete form in 1969 when they were paired with the 52 collages of Weekly 1967, the first of Kolař's celebrated series in which he commented visually on a major event for each week of the year. Taking the form of directives, largely absurd, the poems mock communist society's officialese while offering readers an opportunity to create their own poetics by performing the given directions. The collages on the facing pages to the poems are composed of layered documents, image cutouts, newspaper clippings, announcements, letter fragments, reports, or decontextualized words, oftentimes forming concrete patterns or the outlines of figures, to create a sort of "evidential" report on the year. Text and image taken together, the volume displays Kolař's enduring interest in extracting poetry from the mundane to demolish the barrier separating art from reality, or even to elevate reality itself through this dual poetics to the level of art. What art historian Arsen Pohribný wrote about Weekly 1968 equally applies to Weekly 1967: it "shocks with its abrupt stylistic twists" and is "a Babylonian, hybrid parable of multi-reality." The volume also includes the complete Czech text as an appendix.

A village in the Carpathian Mountains, one of the last outposts of pre-modernity, an elderly man, sensing his time is short, tells his young grandchildren tales that weave a family saga covering the real history from the 1870s to the time of the telling. One of the children, now grown, is the re-teller of these tales, while the other, Miruna, perhaps has the gift of second sight. Incorporating elements of fantasy common to the storytelling traditions of the Balkans, historical characters mix with imaginary beings in a landscape that recreates the world of an isolated village bearing an unusual name: Evil Vale. Ancestors are talked about as if ancient heroes, and the novel shifts focus between telling about their lives and the storyteller's own experiences through the prism of the village during both world wars. As past tragedies are presented in a way that the grandchildren might picture and remember them, the novel has been called a kind of meta-fairy tale, a story about the lost tradition of oral storytelling itself, the conveyance of a family history from one generation to the next via the spoken word. With the death of the grandfather, the children realize that confronted with the ubiquitous hand of modernity, which the village has managed to frustrate over a succession of regimes, a whole world of stories and the entire memory of a family and of its idiosyncratic way of life in the village might have been irrevocably lost. Blending the autobiographical and historical with the marvelous, Miruna, a Tale is a novel whose core is the exploration of the imaginary themes and motives that informed traditional society in the mountainous regions of Romania, a world that was radically transformed into virtual extinction over the course of the 20th century. Described by one critic as a "literary jewel whose strange and singular spell holds the reader in its thrall," Miruna, a Tale received the Bucharest Writers Association Fiction Award in 2007.

Written in 1935 at the height of Czech Surrealism but not published until 1945, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a bizarre erotic fantasy of a young girl's maturation into womanhood on the night of her first menstruation. Referencing Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Marquis de Sade's Justine, K. H. Macha's May, F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu, Nezval employs the language of the pulp serial novel to fashion a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involving a vampire with an insatiable appetite for chicken blood, changelings, lecherous priests, a malicious grandmother desiring her lost youth. In his Foreword Nezval states: "I wrote this novel out of a love of the mystique in those ancient tales, superstitions and romances, printed in Gothic script, which used to flit before my eyes and declined to convey to me their content." Part fairy tale, part Gothic horror, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a meditation on youth and age, sexuality and death, an androgynous merging of brother with sister, an exploration of the grotesque with the shifting registers of language, mood, and genre that were a hallmark of the Czech avant-garde. The 1970 film version is considered one of the outstanding achievements of Czech new-wave cinema. This edition includes Kamil Lhota¡k's original illustrations.

Published posthumously as Dreams, Styrský's dream journal spanning the interwar years comprises prose, sketches, collages, and paintings. The present volume includes the complete series based on Styrský's layout for its publication, his sole volume of poetry (also published posthumously), as well as a selection of his essays, lectures, manifestos, and other text fragments. This edition presents in English for the first time the broad range of Styrský's contribution to the interwar avant-garde and Surrealism.

Toward the end of his life Leppin wrote: "Prague remains my deepest experience. Its conflict, its mystery, its rat-catcher's beauty have ever provided my poetic efforts with new inspiration and meaning." Others' Paradise represents one of the most intense expressions of this experience. Beginning with the highly imagistic "The Doors of Life," the eight stories contained in this volume detail the contours of the lives and visions of a collection of Prague inhabitants, from a prostitute bound to the decay of the old Jewish quarter, to a man caught in the memory of a lost love, and a shoemaker whose knowledge of the world has been constricted to the view from the window of his cellar workroom. Amidst their differing circumstances what these characters share is an intense desire for lasting human contact and the fated disappointment of all such aspirations. Binding their personal histories, woven into their most intimate details, is Prague itself, the city whose nature, mythical and yet all-too-real, gives shape and force to their desires while simultaneously determining their frustrations.

The Absolute Gravedigger, published in 1937, is in many ways the culmination of Va-tÄ>zslav Nezval's work as an avant-garde poet, combining the Poetism of his earlier work and his turn to Surrealism in the 1930s with his political concerns in the years leading up to World War II. It is above all a collection of startling verbal and visual inventiveness. And while a number of salient political issues emerge from the Surrealist ommatidia, Nezval's imagination here is completely free-wheeling and untethered to any specific locale as he displays mastery of a variety of forms, from long-limbed imaginative free verse narratives to short, formally rhymed meditations in quatrains, to prose and even visual art (the volume includes six of his decalcomania images). Together with his previous two collections, The Absolute Gravedigger forms one of the most important corpora of interwar Surrealist poetry. Yet here Nezval's wild albeit restrained mix of absolute freedom and formal perfection has shifted its focus to explore the darker imagery of putrefaction and entropy, the line breaks in the shorter lyric poems slicing the language into fragments that float in the mind with open-ended meaning and a multiplicity of readings. Inspired by Salvador Dala-'s paranoiac-critical method, the poems go in directions that are at first unimaginable but continue to evolve unexpectedly until they resolve or dissolve -- like electron clouds, they have a form within which a seemingly chaotic energy reigns. Nezval's language, however, is under absolute control, allowing him to reach into the polychromatic clouds of Surrealist uncertainty to form shapes we recognize, though never expected to see, to meld images and concepts into a constantly developing and dazzling kaleidoscope.

A novella from the classic Czech novelist, set in the Tyrol.

Fiction. Soren A. Gauger's first collection of short stories was entirely written in Krakow, Poland, where he moved four years ago. Taking as his raw materials the treatment of the fantastic found in Borges and Kis, the misanthropic musings of Gombrowicz and Bernhard, and a literary understanding of philosophy, Gauger's stories are formally challenging yet evasive of post-structuralist clichA[a¬As. They often deal with the chaotic fragmentation of the individual, who is mindful of both society and literature, while exploring the blank spaces implicit somewhere behind the narrative.

Often compared to Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Poe, called Lautreamont's ""elder brother"" by the Czech Surrealists, Karel Hynek Macha (1810-1836) was the greatest Czech Romantic poet, and arguably the most influential of any poet in the language. May, his epic masterpiece, was published in April 1836, just seven months before his death. Considered the "pearl" of Czech poetry, it is a tale of seduction, revenge, and patricide. A paean as well to nature, the beauty of its music and its innovative use of language, expertly captured in this new translation by Marcela Sulak, has ensured the poem's lasting popularity. Scorned at first by the national revivalists of the 19th century for being ""un-Czech,"" Macha was held up as a ""national"" poet by later generations, a fate which the interwar Czech avant-garde, who considered him a precursor, took it upon themselves to reverse. Unlike other seminal 19th-century European poets, Macha's work has been largely ignored in English translation. The present volume provides the original Czech text in parallel and includes a series of illustrations by Jindřich Styrský specifically created for the poem.

A communal apartment in late Soviet-era Moscow. An elderly tenant - the daughter of the apartment's original owner - has disappeared after seeing a ghost. Over the course of a weekend the other occupants meet in the kitchen to argue over who is more deserving of the room she has apparently vacated. If the old woman was murdered, each tenant is a suspect since each would have a motive: the "augmentation of living space." As two of the tenants engage in an extended debate over the nature of evil, they take it upon themselves to solve the mystery and nail the culprit, and it becomes clear that the entire tableau is a reprise of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Displaying a sharp wit and a Gogolian sense of the absurd, Pyetsukh visits anew the age-old debate over the relationship between life and art, arguing that in Russia life imitating literature is as true as literature reflecting life, and the novel strikes a perfect balance between the presentation of philosophical arguments and their discussion in humorous dialogue. A vital work of contemporary Russian prose, The New Moscow Philosophy was immediately translated into many European languages upon its publication in 1989. This is its first English translation.