Books published by Wakefield Press

"In the tunnel-village of Gèoschenen, a man named Hermann Burger has vanished without a trace from his hotel room, suspected of suicide. What is found in his room is not a note, but a 124-page manuscript entitled Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis: an exhaustive manifesto comprising 1,046 "thanatological" aphorisms (or "mortologisms") advocating suicide."--

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.

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.

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 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.

Based on Australia's greatest literary hoax, Sincerely, Ethel Malley explores the Ern Malley affair.

The Diary of Emily Caroline Creaghe is one of the most remarkable documents of Australian exploration, written by one of the rarest of explorers - a woman.

The dinner menu at the Aspara had the usual interesting items such as 'Soap' and 'A Fried Monk' not to mention 'Chicken Amok'. The waiter couldn't tell me what amok meant, but I tried it and it turned out to be, not a crazy chicken running around with a cleaver, but chicken pieces in a soup made with coconut milk and lots of spices and coloured a kind of caterpillar-innards green that was very tasty.Deciphering the menu is half the fun in this mysterious land only just now opening to tourists and travellers. Despite its horrific history, Lydia Laube finds that Cambodia is an ancient, beautiful country populated by friendly, generous people who like to ride motorbikes very fast around corners. Join Lydia, squashed into a taxi with nine or so others, for an unforgettable adventure in Asia.

Catherine Piron is in Noumea, searching for traces of the father she barely remembers. She meets journalist Henri Boulez, her only lead in a foreign country. Their journey into the remote regions of New Caledonia uncovers an extraordinary story ...

Barossa Food is a marvellous combination of recipes, history and stories, all coming from the place in Australia that can best lay claim to a distinctive regional food culture; the Barossa Valley. Angela Heuzenroeder draws on the memories, recipe notebooks