On 10 January 1936, the poet, actor, and dramatic theorist, Antonin Artaud departed Europe on a journey to Mexico that would take him from the streets, cafés, and lecture halls of Mexico City to the remote mountains of the Sierra Tarahumara. The journey would last only ten months, culminating in some six to eight weeks spent among the Tarahumara (Rarámuri), but it was a profound turning point in his life.

Artaud didn't just leave Europe. He fled it. I came to Mexico to escape European civilization ... I hoped to find a vital form of culture. The vital form of culture that he sought was one wherein individual and communal behaviors were rooted in the soil of a place, wherein the rituals of religion, reinforced a connection in human lives between the earth and the sun.

But Artaud's search for a vital form of culture would not be a simple one. His appeal to indigenous culture would first require an intense and intricate effort at aesthetic, religious, political, and philosophical decolonization. And this intellectual work would not be without a psychological cost.

Journey to Mexico collects very nearly all of Artaud's writings related to his voyage to the land of the Tarahumara: the writings he prepared prior to this journey; the pieces he published in Mexico and the lectures he delivered there; the essays, letters, and poems that he wrote in the years after his journey, reflecting on and reframing his experiences. A selection of letters written before, during, and after the trip conveys the very personal - the physical, emotional, and financial - challenges of the journey.

Artaud's Journey to Mexico takes us far from home to the limits of art and anthropology, myth and religion, to confront the legacies of colonial conquest and the possibility of decolonization in a desperate search for a vital form of culture.

The crosscurrents between the classic Hollywood cinema and France's postwar cinema are rich in producing iconic imagery with philosophical resonance, and no filmmaker has immersed himself in this project more than Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973). Nurtured on American movies, and living through the turbulent years of the mid-20th century, Melville memorialized his wartime experiences in the Resistance with works like Le Silence de la mer and L'Armée des ombres while alternately presenting the stark glamor of his postwar film noir heroes in films like Bob le flambeur and Le Samouraï.

A filmmaker who redefined the rules of postwar independent filmmaking and influenced a generation of New Wave acolytes, Melville was also able to captivate the popular audience with stories of beleaguered existential outsiders-gangsters, thieves, and rogue cops-as they wend their way toward a greater definition of our modern human condition.

Honor Among Thieves profiles this filmmaker's eventful life and discusses his cinema as an essential body of work in our reckoning of postwar European cinema, and of Melville's own influence on the filmmakers who admire him.

Heir of symbolism, father of surrealism, extraordinary verbal inventor, Léon-Paul Fargue reveals himself to be a visionary in his prose poems. He calls High Solitude a diorama of states of the soul.

​

In this work, originally published in 1941, Fargue revives both the night of prehistoric times and that of the end of the world. And, between the two, this fantastic universe also: the Paris that he so loved and of which he was the unforgettable Piéton. Paris, whose secret geography he traces, in the company of the ghosts of those who were dear to him. The Paris of white nights, stations, and cafes.

​

But every road, every street, leads to this high, unique place: solitude. I work at my solitude, searching to guide it in the sea of insomnia where the long line of the dead has thrown us...

Gábor Schein is the highly acclaimed author of over nine volumes of poetry and five novels, as well as the recipient of many prizes, including the Attila József Prize, the Artisjus Prize, and the Prize of the Society of Hungarian Authors.

Beyond the Cordons is a selection of his poetic work over the past twenty-five years, but particularly drawing on his seminal collections Night, Travel [Éjszaka, utazás, 2011] and Greetings from the Interior of the Continent [Üdvözlet a kontinens belsejéből, 2017] both of which serve as poetic time capsules of the decades following Hungary's regime change of 1989.

Schein's urban sensibilities are palpably and keenly attuned to the grit and debris of Budapest streets - as well as the ever-present echoes of its sinister past, its buried histories - and yet allegorically, his poetry soars above place and time. He writes with the perspective of an insider navigating not only the immediate present of corruption and cynicism, but with a view to examining its affective residue on the people, and even the buildings.

It's Raining in Moscow is a novel that goes both beyond and stays this side of history -- the history of a family, of the post-1945 deportations, of a multiethnic region in Eastern Europe, Transylvania, in the 20th century, of the interactions of animals, plants, and humans, where for once the text inhabits non-human perspectives. A novel that repeatedly asks the question: what do we need to face our own lies and the lies of others; what do we accept as truth if we are dispossessed, left to our own means and entirely alone in the wasteland, or in the torture chamber?

Eleven stories from the short 20th century -- the defining events in the life of a man, Istv n Becz ssy, the author's grandfather, from sexual initiation to interrogation and torture at the hands of the Securitate, the secret police of communist Romania, narrated mostly from animal perspectives. The familiar historical traumas are shown in a strikingly defamiliarizing light: deportation into forced domicile, when seen through the eyes of a dog, becomes at once more bearable and more gripping, for the dog doesn't perceive the loss of property but senses all the more acutely the absence of his masters, the ghostly silence of the empty house. The interrogation and torture at the Securitate headquarters, when told by a bedbug that voices self-help psychological clich s and Coelho-like fatuities, at once hinders our natural empathizing with the victim of torture, and starkly exposes dominant behavior patterns in the world of the humans.

Zsuzsa Selyem's books have been translated into German, French, and Romanian. Her stories have come out in English in World Literature Today, the anthology Best European Fiction 2017 (Dalkey Archive) and elsewhere. This is her first volume in English.

Walter Jackson Bate's canonical 1939 study of Keats's concept of negative capability is a genealogical treatise that unearths the socio-political, aesthetic, and intellectual composition of Keats's most famous poetic idea. He discloses its relation to Hazlitt's idea of gusto and to Shakespearean notions of impersonality and intensity while also demonstrating how negative capability presages Bergson's conceptual interpretation of intellect and intuition. Bate reveals how the key elements of Keats's poetic concept are disinterestedness, sympathy, impersonality, and dramatic poetry, defining negative capability as the ability to negate or lose one's identity in something larger than oneself - a sympathetic openness to the concrete reality without, an imaginative identification, a relishing and understanding of it. With 'negative capability, ' Keats railed against the rampant egotism of his epoch and challenged the certainty of its claims to knowledge. While embracing reality, Keats urged the necessity of abiding in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. This new edition brings back into print Bate's indispensable work and features an introduction by the distinguished Italian poet, playwright, and literary critic Maura Del Serra. With its republication, Eliot's proclamation on Keats is given new force: that there is hardly one statement of Keats about poetry which ... will not be found to be true...

Robert Musil's Thought Flights vividly evokes the secrets, challenges, and mundanities of interwar life in cosmopolitan Vienna and Berlin. The texts presented here have been selected by translator Genese Grill from Musil's Nachlass and collected for the first time under the title Thought Flights. They include material originally published in journals, newspapers, and magazines - but not included in Musil's Posthumous Papers of a Living Author - as well as literary fragments and heretofore unpublished texts. Despite the temporal, geographical, and cultural distance between Musil's world and ours, our own time and troubles are all too recognizable in Musil's portrayals of the age of money, of simulation, and of standardization. Thought Flights is a lament of contemporary complacency, optimism, and homogenization as well as a celebration of living words and original thought by one of the great Modernists of the 20th century. As an astonishing master of metaphor and self-described Monsieur le Vivisecteur, Musil explores the psyches and lives of himself and his contemporaries with illuminating insight. The lucid, striking prose of his stories and vignettes, and the wise and witty commentary of his glosses, show Musil's response to innovations in technology, art, and politics, and his efforts to enact a strategy for both illuminating and ameliorating the crisis of language that haunted his contemporaries. Moving effortlessly from discussion of fashion to Kant's categorical imperative, le vivisecteur writes with humor, lyricism, and fervor in an open genre availing itself of poetic prose, philosophical essay, fictional narrative, and feuilletonistic lightness. Through unlikely combinations and metaphoric syntheses, Musil brings beauty and excitement into the world, and when things that are usually separate unite, thoughts fly. With this publication, the now growing English-language corpus of the author of The Confusions of Young Torless, Five Women, and The Man without Qualities is expanded further. Other volumes of Musil's writings will be forthcoming from Contra Mundum Press over the next decade.

In 1911, following his 1906 debut, The Confusions of Young T rless, Robert Musil published the two experimental stories that make up Unions. The Completion of Love and The Temptation of Quiet Veronica were some of Musil's earliest forays into what would become a life-long exploration of the life, adventures, and psychological processes of his fianc , Martha Marcovaldi -- the future Martha Musil.

When Musil later wrote of the two authors of his great unfinished work, The Man without Qualities, the co-author referred to was no other than Martha. The stories in Unions, drawn from Martha's life, explode conventional morality; explore questions of self, union, and dissolution of self; and approximate exceptional sensations of erotic and intellectual perception in a shimmering and exceedingly dense proliferation of metaphors.

The images, Musil tells us in a note, are the bone, not just the skin, of these carefully crafted stories. Each word is as motivated as the internal and external moments it attempts to embody in language. Although Musil did not continue to work in this experimental style in his later writing, in a late note he affirmed that Unions, the fruit of much artistic struggle and deep personal engagement, was the only one of his books that he sometimes still read from.

This is a new English-language translation of the two stories and the first one to appear -- in the form of Musil's original publication -- as Unions. A scholarly introduction by the translator, Genese Grill, explains the provenance of the stories and the need for a new approach to this book so central to his oeuvre.

This is a book of poems that cycles and repeats, it is an enigmatic road. Footsteps, paths, a vacuous sky, an elusive destiny. It could be the anomie of modern life, or even a post-apocalypse. To live, to keep walking, is the quiet exhortation: Here begins the very hesitation / that obliges them to live.

A body separated from its soul. Blankly denotative images, especially this one, nonetheless elicit a sound, a type of call. They posit a space, an emptiness - and this void is analogous to the emptiness this poetry fills. That is, in the bleakness, the hollowness, something rings. Walking the Earth is the various resonances of that most distilled, human, and enduring sound.

Literature and Politics presents Robert Musil's writings on the relationship between literature and politics from World War I through World War II and elucidates his personal struggle to bear witness during the Age of Totalitarianism. In essays, addresses, aphorisms, and unpublished notes on contemporary events, Musil charts the increasing dangers to artists and ethical thinkers of extreme ideological conscription, the subtle and not so subtle changes in public and political discourse, the epoch-making events and dire existential threats of his times. Musil acts as a cultural seismographer, interrogating causes and symptoms in himself and his world, as he moves between Nazi Germany and pre- and post-Anschlu Austria, ultimately escaping to Switzerland where he and his Jewish wife, Martha, lived in exile until his death in 1942. The writings question concepts of race, identity, and nation, and untangle the complex relationship between nation and artist and between the individual and the collective, celebrating the rich and irreducible nature of individual creative work as the bulwark of a free, ethical, and pluralistic society.

Klaus Amann provides an invaluable introduction to Musil's political thought and his struggle, during the war years, to come to terms, to survive, and to find some way to bear witness. Amann recounts Musil's political trajectory, from fairly indifferent aesthete to socially-engaged supporter of the Weimar Republic and its liberal reforms, to critic of Nazi and Communist Totalitarianisms, and as prescient sceptic about the cultural optimism of the Soviet experiment. Musil's ultimate stance - as a thinker who radically resists taking final stances - is that politics endangers culture and humanity by dictating to artists how they should write, think, paint, compose, and by instrumentalizing art in the interest of ideology. This is not merely an aesthetic position, but a committed belief in the essential ethical nature of art and in art's fundamental role as a timeless, supra-national force.

Translated with an introduction by Genese Grill. This is the fourth Musil publication presented by Contra Mundum Press.

With a starting point on July 14, 2021, when the Centre national de littérature hosted Pierre Joris' 75th birthday celebration, Always the Many, Never the One builds upon the initial interview by Florent Toniello that took place that day to go deeper into a major Luxembourg-American poet's reflections on literature, philosophy, and life. Throughout this book Joris develops a core concept of his thinking and writing, in-betweenness, using both literary examples and life anecdotes, some never shared in Joris's vast bibliography so far.

The form is representative of the in-between concept: while it comprises the initial oral interview at the CNL plus seven subsequent interviews conducted virtually, the whole text was reworked in order to complete the thoughts and add necessary or relevant references, thus transforming it also into a literary essay; but the interview-tone remains, making for lively and stimulating reading. Beyond discussing the in-betweenness concept, Joris shares his views on a range of subjects related to poetry, translation, music and the arts while linking his work to the theoretical thinking and craft of leading past and present philosophers and writers/poets, in a dazzling literary world tour-de-force.

To complement this first (and major) part of the book, two bonuses follow: a reprint of the interview Joris gave for a recent book by Florent Toniello, Mélusine au gasoil (in line with Contra Mundum's multilingual ethos, this is provided in the original French version), and the speech Joris gave at the award ceremony for the Batty Weber prize, to also make this talk-essay available to a wider audience.

Written in his Bastille cell in the years between 120 Days of Sodom and Justine, this is the first English translation of Marquis de Sade's collection of short works, Stories, Tales, and Fables.

Essential reading for all Sade devotees, Stories, Tales, and Fables is an introduction for those who are not yet familiar with the work of this controversial French literary innovator. The short works in this collection range from the dramatic novella, Dorci, to comic tales such as The Duped Judge. Whether he is writing bawdy, exuberant comedies, supernatural tales, or human tragedies, Sade is essentially a moralist, and his exploration of the darker side of human nature remains as relevant to our society as it was to his own.

Psychologically perceptive and defiantly unconventional, Stories, Tales, and Fables reveals the compelling force of Sade's narrative powers. An accomplished and artful fiction writer, Sade, like all great writers, asks penetrating questions about society, life, and humanity. This collection also includes a selection of Sade's non-fiction, ranging from his insightful survey of the novelist's art, Some Thoughts on the Novel, to his Last Will and Testament, as well as several essays about Sade's work by renowned authors including Apollinaire, Heinrich Heine, André Masson, Anatole France, and Paul Eluard.

All thought is driven out of sight, and before long unpleasant things start to happen right in front of us...

Kari Hukkila's One Thousand & One is a philosophical, essayistic novel about catastrophes, both natural and man-made, about humans' ability to respond to catastrophes by thinking or, at the very least, simply managing to survive.

Hukkila's novel is a cornucopia of micro-histories, digressions, and a broad gallery of characters ranging from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to an Ethiopian refugee in Rome.

One Thousand & One begins when a large birch tree falls on a cabin near the Russian border in eastern Finland, leaving the narrator unable to concentrate on a writing project he has been at work on. He decides then to take up an invitation to Rome, where his lifelong friend has lived since abandoning a life in philosophy. In Hukkila's novel, Scheherazade's survival by continuing to tell stories is reimagined as survival by continuing to think, a continued thought activity, often taken to extremes, the preservation of humanity in an inhumane world. In David Hackston's eloquent translation, Hukkila's musical, meandering, thought-provoking prose is full of savage, ironic, and luminous humor, remaining uncompromisingly alive until the final sentence.

One Thousand & One is the first in a projected series of five novels. Upon its release in Finland in 2016 it was said to bear all the hallmarks of a classic.

Thought no longer had a place in the world, and of course if you're an illegal it's all but impossible.

As the digitization of every aspect of existence grows more pervasive and absolute, from the monitoring of thought to the tracking even of genitals, the central nervous system of the human body has been completely rewired. In the mapping of space-time, the species has moved into a state of total possession, of the enslavement of its drives, imagination, and will. Through this virtualization of life, the society of the spectacle has reached a point of unparalleled monstrosity, with the simulacrum usurping reality itself. The species is divided between the digitalists who see the technologization of the human as its natural evolutionary development, and those who stand against them.

​

At this epochal crux, an enigmatic faction of anonymous figures engages in coordinated global poetic acts of destruction and creation, ludic and radical capers, dismantling machines of control and surveillance. The society of the spectacle is thereby short-circuited, scrambled, cut-up via skirmishes, détournements, and other subversive acts of havoc wreaking, interruption, and sabotage. Can these dice throws overturn all the mediums of control and enslavement? As time grows more and more constricted, the serendipities and transfigurations of human life suffer swift evisceration. In the midst of this, the anonymous clowns of revolt seek to resurrect the moments and marvels when great forces open up the boundless and the limitless, creating combustion engines of play so as to generate new hemispheres of possibility.

​

Written as a burst of epigrammatic sequences, like Molotov cocktails arriving from elsewhere, Dionysos Speed is a series of erupting geysers, comets flashing thru space and dispersing new forces. Akin to a Heraclitean fire machine, this book is an act meant to give birth once again to dissonant desire through the powers of the dice throw, a machine forged to release by way of its ludic freedom the vital forces of the cosmos.

The Winter 2023 issue of Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics features a new music column, Off Minor, with an essay by Ran Blake on legendary composer and pianist Thelonious Monk.

Other material herein spans Central and Eastern Europe and beyond and includes an essay by Will Scarlett on Max Blecher and translations of Oğuz Atay, Robert Aron & Arnaud Dandieu, Zsuzsa Selyem, Linda Lê, Stanislawa Przybyszewska, Felicia Fuster, Anna Dodas-Noguer, and Léon-Paul Fargue, as well as Maura Del Serra & Gerardo Paoletti's Symbolic Scenes of Death and the paintings of Jes Scarlett.

Translators include Marialena Carr, Soren Gauger, Rainer J. Hanshe, Chris Holdway, Erika Mihálycsa, Fulya Peker, and Tobias Ryan.