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Leon Bloy - Sweating Blood

Wakefield Press 2016 ISBN 9781939663177 Acqn 25913
Pb 15x23cm 232pp 14.50
First published in French in 1893, Sweating Blood describes the atrocities of war in 30 tales of
horror and inhumanity from the pen of the "Pilgrim of the Absolute," Lon Bloy. Writing with blood,
sweat, tears and moral outrage, Bloy drew from anecdotes, news reports and his own
experiences as a guerrilla fighter to compose a fragmented depiction of the 1870 FrancoPrussian War, told with equal measures of hatred and pathos, and alternating between cutting
detail and muted anguish. From heaps of corpses, monstrous butchers, cowardly bourgeois,
bloody massacres, seas of mud, drunken desperation, frightful disfigurement, grotesque
hallucinations and ghoulish means of personal revenge, a generalized portrait of suffering is
revealed that ultimately requires a religious lens: for through Bloys maniacal nationalism and
frenetic Catholicism, it is a hell that emerges here, a 19th-century apocalypse that tore a country
apart and set the stage for a century of atrocities that were yet to come. Lon Bloy (18461917)
was born to a freethinking yet stern father and a pious SpanishCatholic mother in south-western
France. Nourishing anti-religious sentiments in his youth, his outlook changed radically when he
moved to Paris and came under the influence of Jules-Amde Barbey dAurevilly. In his
subsequent years of writing pamphlets, novels, essays, poetry and a multi volume diary, Bloy
earned his dual nicknames of "The Pilgrim of the Absolute" through his unorthodox devotion to
the Catholic Church and "The Ungrateful Beggar" through his endless reliance on the charity of
friends to support him and his family.
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Oskar Panizza - The Pig

Wakefield Press 2016 ISBN 9781939663153 Acqn 25915
Pb 12x18cm 120pp 2ills 11.25
"The Pig is the Sun...." So begins Oskar Panizzas outrageously heretical and massively erudite
essay on the pig, originally published in 1900 in his journal Zurich Discussions. Moving from the
Rig Veda to the Edda to Ovid, from the story of Tristan and Isolde to Nordic celebrations of
Christmas, from Grimms fairytales to Swedish folklore to Judeo-Egyptian dietary restrictions, the
author contends, through painstakingly philological argumentation, that the miraculous swine
occupies a central, celestial position as the life-giving force animating the entire universe,
usurping the place of God as the beginning and end of all things.
Oskar Panizza (18531921) was a German psychiatrist turned avant-garde author. In 1894 he
published his notorious play The Love Council: "A Heavenly Tragedy in Five Acts" that depicted
the spread of syphilis among humanity in 1492 through a senile god, an idiot Christ, a
promiscuous Mary and a depraved Pope Alexander VI. Charged with 93 counts of blasphemy,
Panizza found his instantaneous literary fame accompanied by a 12-month prison sentence.
Moving to Zurich, he published a journal, Zurich Discussions, the majority of which he wrote
himself under a series of pen names. After being expelled from Switzerland, he relocated to Paris
until his 1899 publication of anti-Germanic verse led to his finances being seized. He spent the
last 16 years of his life in a Bavarian mental institution.

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Paul Willems - The Cathedral of Mist

Wakefield Press 2016 ISBN 9781939663184 Acqn 25912
Pb 12x18cm 112pp 6ills 10.50
First published in French in 1983, The Cathedral of Mist is a collection of stories from the last of
the great Francophone Belgian fantasists: distilled tales of distant journeys, buried memories and
impossible architecture. Described here are the emotionally disturbed architectural plan for a
palace of emptiness; the experience of snowfall in a bed in the middle of a Finnish forest; the
memory chambers that fuel the marvellous futility of the endeavour to write; the beautiful
woodland church, built of warm air currents and fog, scattering in storms and taking renewed
shape at dusk, that gives this book its title. The Cathedral of Mist offers the sort of ethereal
narratives that might have come from the pen of a sorrowful, distinctly Belgian Italo Calvino. It is
accompanied by two meditative essays on reading and writing that fall in the tradition of Marcel
Proust and Julien Gracq.
Paul Willems (191297) published his first novel, Everything Here Is Real, in 1941. Three more
novels and, toward the end of his life, two collections of short stories bracketed his career as a
playwright.

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Pascal Quiqnard - A Terrace in Rome

Wakefield Press 2016 ISBN 9781939663160 Acqn 25914
Pb 12x18cm 128pp 1ills 11.25
A Terrace in Rome describes the tormented life of Geoffroy Meaume, a 17th-century engraver of
encrypted shadows and erotic prints. After a passionate affair in his youth concludes with his face
being burned by acid thrown by his lovers jealous fianc, Meaume undertakes a lifetime of
wandering, his psyche forever engraved by the memory of the woman who spurned him. With a
face of boiled leather and a mind haunted by a nightmare of desire, he devotes himself to the
black-and-white world of etchings and mezzotints, forsaking the paradise of color to engage in a
science of shadows. This fragmented narrative of a man attacked by images is related in 47 short
chapters which themselves act as engravings; a tale told by an antiquarian, full of fragmented
vision and sexual hell. First published in French in 2000, A Terrace in Rome received the Grand
Prix du Roman de lAcadmie Franaise that same year, and went on to be translated into 19
languages. This is its first appearance in English.
Pascal Quignard (born 1948) has written over 60 books of fiction, essays, and his own particular
genre of philosophical reflection that straddles the personal journal, historical narrative and poetic
theory. His books in English include Albucius, All the Worlds Mornings, The Sexual Night, Sex
and Terror, On Wooden Tablets: Apronenia Avitia, and The Salon in Wurttemberg, as well as the
multiple volumes of his ongoing book project The Last Kingdom, which, to date, includes The
Roving Shadows, The Silent Crossing and Abysses.

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