Pornography for Astral Bodies: An Announcement
Discover Pornography for Astral Bodies, a curated list of surreal, provocative fiction. Featuring Thomas Bernhard's *Gargoyles*, Rhys Hughes, and André Breton's *Nadja*, explore transgressive literary masterpieces that bend reality and desire.
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Nadja
by André Breton
"Nadja, " originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in teh city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. "The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen, " Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.
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Motorman
by David Ohle
Motorman tells the story of Moldenke, who gets by in a world with two suns, a number of "government moons," man-made humanoids called jellyheads, and mock wars where soldiers volunteer for injury. Moldenke receives some menacing phone calls from a man named Bunce, who claims to have tapes of everything everyone's ever said about him. To escape from Bunce, he sets out to find his old mentor, Dr. Burnheart
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Gargoyles
by Thomas Bernhard
The playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard was one of the most widely translated and admired writers of his generation, winner of the three most coveted literary prizes in Germany. Gargoyles, one of his earliest novels, is a singular, surreal study of the nature of humanity. One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid prince, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.
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A High Wind in Jamaica
by Richard Hughes
Richard Hughes's celebrated short novel is a masterpiece of concentrated narrative. Its dreamlike action begins among the decayed plantation houses and overwhelming natural abundance of late nineteenth-century Jamaica, before moving out onto the high seas, as Hughes tells the story of a group of children thrown upon the mercy of a crew of down-at-the-heel pirates. A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.
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A New Universal History of Infamy
by Rhys Hughes
From 1933 to 1934, Jorge Luis Borges, the master of fiction whose work would change the literary world, published a series of "falsifications and distortions" in the Buenos Aires newspaper Critica. These "falsifications" used as their starting point the lives of real villains and desperados. Borges then elaborated using all of the anecdotes and myths about these historical characters, creating what amounted to "nonfictional fictions." The entire series was then published in book form as A Universal History of Infamy. Now Rhys Hughes, a Welshman of some infamy himself, has summoned his vast storytelling powers to create A New Universal History of Infamy, with all-new historical characters as the focus of his nonfiction fictions. Come along on a wild ride with unsavory types of every description. Entertaining and erudite at the same time, Hughes' book also includes some of the literary parodies Borges himself delighted in creating. With an introduction by noted critic John Clute and an afterword by Michael Simanoff. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
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The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories
by Horacio Quiroga
From the Publisher: Tales of horror, madness, and death, tales of fantasy and morality: these are the works of South American storyteller Horacio Quiroga. The first representative collection of his work in English, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories provides a valuable overview of the scope of Quiroga's fiction and the versatility and skill that have made him a classic Latin American writer.
