The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology.

Illustrated by André Masson. Texts by Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, Pierre Klossowski, Jean Rollin, Patrick Waldberg et al. Edited and Introduced by Marina Galletti & Alastair Brotchie. Translated by Natasha Lehrer, John Harman and Meyer Barash.

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.) — having 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”.

German translation by Malcolm Green, introduced by Alastair Brotchie and Malcolm Green.

“Since my first reading I have been convinced that An Anecdoted Topography of Chance is one of the great books of the century, a comic masterpiece that touches significantly on many areas of human thought. It is a maquette for a realisation of the dream that human intelligence might take any fragment of the world and reconstruct the universe from the evidence it provides.” — Richard Hamilton in The Spectator

Edited and introduced by Ornella Volta, translated by Antony Melville.

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 Gymnopédies, the Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear and the Dadaist opera Relâche. 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 “indispensable”, and more recently certain of his pieces have been seen as prefiguring both minimalist and ambient music.

The appeal of his writings, however, goes far beyond their musical value. He is revealed as one of the most beguiling of absurdists, in the mode of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, but with a strong streak of Dadaism (a movement with which he collaborated to some extent). These poignant, sly and witty texts, often as short as his briefer musical pieces, embody all his contradictions. Included here are his “autobiographical” Memoirs of an Amnesic; the gnomic annotations to his musical scores (For the Shrivelled and the Dimwits, I have written a suitably ponderous chorale… I dedicate this chorale to those who do not like me); the publications of his private church; his absurdist play Medusa’s Snare; advertising copy for his local suburban newspaper; and the mysterious and elaborately calligraphed “private advertisements” found stuffed behind his piano after his death.

Satie referred to himself as “a man in the manner of Adam (he of Paradise)”, and added: “My humour is reminiscent of Cromwell’s. I am also indebted to Christopher Columbus, as the American spirit has sometimes tapped me on the shoulder, and I have joyfully felt its ironically icy bite.” He died as he lived: “without quite ceasing to smile.” This is the largest selection of the writings of Erik Satie yet to appear in English.

The smallest work by Satie is small the way a keyhole is small. Everything changes when you put your eye to it. — Jean Cocteau

Introductions by Paul Edwards and Alastair Brotchie. Translated by Paul Edwards, Alexis Lykiard & Simon Watson Taylor.

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. “All is in Faustroll,” pronounced Boris Vian.

Absolute Love, the strangest of Jarry’s novels, an autobiographical extrapolation in which he explores an entirely new dramatic scenario, “the discovery that one’s mother is a virgin.”

The drawings by Günter Brus were made especially for this edition. Translated and introduced by Malcolm Green.

Konrad Bayer and his fellow members of The Vienna Group took as their mission the reinvention of the post-war avant-garde in Austria after the destruction wrought by National Socialism. He — along with Friedrich Achleitner, H.C. Artmann, Gerhard Ruhm, and Oscar Wiener — developed a unique blend of philosophical speculation and poetic experimentation which incorporated bizarrely heterogeneous elements: the dark humour of Surrealism, the extravagances of German Romanticism, the fabulous conjunctions of alchemy, the linguistic precision of Wittgenstein.

One of the finest flowerings of this impassioned quest is the sixth sense, the novel Bayer had all but finished at the time of his suicide. In it he creates a metaphysical theatre of the word that wryly undermines the very language from which it is constructed. Time and identity are turned inside out in a series of elaborately interwoven episodes set against a backdrop of riots and cataclysms, labyrinths of stone or throbbing meat, and bucolic scenes populated by toyland figures… and not forgetting the inevitable bars of Vienna.

Atlas Eclectics & Heteroclites 6, limited to 999 numbered copies.

There is a special edition signed by Günter Brus.

Edited and introduced by Alastair Brotchie.

Circular Walks is a sort-of-novel-with-pictures that recounts the curious history of three characters: Vera, Mervyn and Walter Rowley; and of two locations: Rowley Hall and the Cornish town of St. Ives.

The human protagonists are three members of a family devoted to outlandish experimentation, mostly upon themselves or each other. Vera, the levitating psychoanalyst, explores the effects of geology on thought and language; Walter, a retired vivisectionist, preys on artists in the hope of forcibly curing them of their vile creative habits; meanwhile Mervyn, his father, is busy eradicating his son’s efforts by secretly creating strange cinematic extravaganzas and sculptures disguised as scientific apparatus. Or at least that’s what seems to be happening.

In fact this is an indefinable book in which both text and image are given equal weight. A state of play exists between them, words provoke images and images text, and a literal visualisation of a joyous creativity is brought into being. It’s a tour-de-force that is at once Gothic narrative, philosophical enquiry, comic novel, a eulogy of the tragic history of St. Ives and the Cornish landscape and an eloquent demonstration of the processes underlying its own creation.

Andrew Lanyon has been bringing out the Rowley books in beautiful limited editions for the past 20 years. This selection from the first 12 of them is the first time their remarkable content has been made more generally available. The author is the son of one of the foremost of the St. Ives artists, Peter Lanyon, who was the only one among them to actually come from the town. His son was thus brought up in the strange atmosphere of a fishing village overwhelmed by “high culture”, and his ambivalent feelings about this invasion underpin the narrative.

Wolfgang Bauer is best known in his native Austria as a playwright and director, and as the author of a single, oft-reprinted novel: The Feverhead, written in 1966.

The Feverhead is written in the form of letters between a couple of not-very-bright Austrians. Their correspondence is doomed to failure, nearly every letter crosses in the post and yet they succeed in their quest: the search for a perfect thermometer (and a serial murderer). In fact they both independently discover the secret of the universe in a remote spot thousands of miles from their intended (and different) destinations. Bauer’s comedy of errors is enacted by an unusual cast that includes microscopic schoolgirls, ambiguously sexed nuns, incompetent detectives, two ultimately bad poets, living steam engines and a venerable three-eyed sea-captain whose two bodies always remain exactly 3.5 metres apart, not to mention: ULF