A Thousand Dreams Within Me Softly Burn

Caution: Strong philosophical language. Not for the faint hearted. Will literarily blow your mind. A philosophical and art historical novel. Zurich 1916. Amidst the chaos of WWI a young man from provincial Poland arrives to study art. Good natured and unsophisticated, Anton has an enquiring nature and a strong desire to engage with modern culture. His lodgings are in Spiegelgasse, the same street as the neonatal dada movement’s Cabaret Voltaire. The narrative takes place over about six months during which Anton attends the cabaret performances and meets the artists. He is thus able to observe at first hand the development of dada in Zurich from its beginnings while attempting to understand the underlying forces and impetus. He also encounters Vladimir Lenin and his wife who take a room at the same lodging house. Lenin acquaints Anton with the naked truth about society and reveals his views on art. Anton forms a friendship with Karl, an art student his own age from an old Zurich family. Anton is impressed with Karl's sophisticated manner and erudition, which Anton attempts to absorb through discussion and voracious reading, immersing himself in avant-garde art and philosophy. Although Anton had by this time begun to liberate himself from the dogma of his native Catholicism and was inclined towards a scientific and atheistic view, the impact of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, the Cabaret Voltaire, the war, etc., drove him further into nihilism and he struggled to achieve a positive reconstruction of the world. He both relished and dreaded the ideas he encountered. Anton's avowed aim was to achieve full self-consciousness and a clear understanding of the nature of his being, so intrepid and honest inquiry into reality was essential. This is a coming of age story processed through Anton’s mind, with all its struggles, naiveté and imperfection. When Anton achieves his goal of self-consciousness through a profound subjective experience he discovers that it’s not what he hoped for.

Truth is, everybody’s going to hurt you: you just got to find the ones worth suffering for.—Bob Marley When Nina’s boyfriend Ray, uses her as collateral in a drug deal she realizes that you don’t know what love is until you’ve experienced what it isn’t. Bobby Lee, a gutsy boxer, is told by his corrupt manager to throw a big fight or pay a heavy price, with his life. Nina finds only one chance to get out of the situation her boyfriend Ray has put her into. And when the guy who holds her until Ray returns, rapes her then makes the fatal mistake of dozing off, well, she sees the gun and puts him to sleep forever. Bobby Lee’s pride won’t let him go out the way his manager wants him to. Instead he’ll take his chances and knocks his opponent out and goes on the run because he knows the price he’ll have to pay for the “betrayal.” It is a dark fate that brings together the boxer and the girl with a gun, a bag of cash and drugs as they race across the country just one jump ahead of men who would see them dead and buried. Jim Thompson fans will love this book

Before punk, before the Beats, before existentialism, and beyond surrealism, there were two visionaries, two rebels, two friends…and two tragic heroes, Antonin Artaud and Robert Desnos. Only one could save the other's life.

The 1870s in France - Rimbaud's moment, and the subject of this book - is a decade virtually ignored in most standard histories in France. Yet it was the moment of two significant spatial events: France's expansion on a global scale, and, in the spring of 1871, the brief existence on the Paris Commune - the construction of the revolutionary urban space. Arguing that space, as a social fact, is always political and strategic, Kristin Ross has written a book that is at once a history and geography of the Commune's anarchist culture - its political language and social relations, its values, strategies, and stances. Central to her analysis of the Commune as a social space and oppositional culture is a close textual reading of Arthur Rimabaud's poetry. His poems - a common thread running through the book - are one set of documents among many in Ross's recreation of the Communard experience. Rimbaud, Paul Lafargue, and the social geographer lise Reclus serve as emblematic figures moving within and on the periphery of the Commune; in their resistance to the logic and economy of the capitalist conception of work, in their challenge to work itself as a term of identity, all three posed a threat to the existing order. Ross looks at these and other emancipatory notions as aspects of Communard life, each with an analogous strategy in Rimbaud's poetry. Applying contemporary theory, to a wealth of little-known archival material, she has written a fresh, persuasive, and original book.

Enduring icon of creativity, authenticity, and rebellion, and the subject of numerous new biographies, Arthur Rimbaud is one of the most repeatedly scrutinized literary figures of the last half-century. Yet almost thirty years have elapsed without a major new translation of his writings. Remedying this state of affairs is Rimbaud Complete, the first and only truly complete edition of Rimbaud’s work in English, translated, edited, and introduced by Wyatt Mason. Mason draws on a century of Rimbaud scholarship to choreograph a superbly clear-eyed presentation of the poet’s works. He arranges Rimbaud’s writing chronologically, based on the latest manuscript evidence, so readers can experience the famously teenaged poet’s rapid evolution, from the lyricism of “Sensation” to the groundbreaking early modernism of A Season in Hell. In fifty pages of previously untranslated material, including award-winning early verses, all the fragmentary poems, a fascinating early draft of A Season in Hell, a school notebook, and multiple manuscript versions of the important poem “O saisons, ô chateaux,” Rimbaud Complete displays facets of the poet unknown to American readers. And in his Introduction, Mason revisits the Rimbaud myth, addresses the state of disarray in which the poet left his work, and illuminates the intricacies of the translator’s art. Mason has harnessed the precision and power of the poet’s rapidly changing voice: from the delicate music of a poem such as “Crows” to the mature dissonance of the Illuminations, Rimbaud Complete unveils this essential poet for a new generation of readers.

Presents a new translation and a revised chronology along with a sketch of the poet's life.

A compelling mystery, a poignant bildungsroman, and a work of great nostalgia for times just past, COLLECTED WORKS is a novel about love, power and art—and what leads us to make the pivotal decisions that change the course of our lives. Martin Berg's wife, Cecilia, disappeared years ago. His memories of their carefree college days seem ever out-of-reach, and the intellectual curiosities that once made him the object of her desire have given way to mid-life uncertainty. The methodical and quiet life he’s made for himself and his adult children couldn’t be further from the one he dreamed of in his youth, when the manuscripts lying around his apartment were flush with promise and the ailing publishing house he runs was still new. Perhaps nothing reminds Martin of these failures more than his friend Gustav Becker, a wildly successful painter who’s returned to Gothenburg on the eve of his career-defining retrospective. Gustav, meanwhile, is hurting too. His obsession with Cecilia’s inexplicable disappearance had made his art hagiographic, fixated on her image. When posters for Gustav’s retrospective plaster Cecilia’s face on major billboards across the city, Martin’s daughter Rakel learns a haunting fact that points toward her mother’s whereabouts. She and her brother chase this clue across time, memory, and Europe, to discover why their beloved mother abandoned her family, with the imagined hope that the question of what makes a person can ever be answered. COLLECTED WORKS, a major hit in Sweden, sold over 100,000 copies in its first year in print, instantly making Lydia Sandgren a literary sensation. Winner of the 2020 August Prize for Fiction, the novel is set to publish in 17 territories.