Wakefield Press - October 2018

ART
Remedios Varo - Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings

Wakefield Press 2018 ISBN 9781939663399 Acqn 28701
Pb 12x18cm 128pp 3ills 1col £12.75
While the reputation of Remedios Varo (1908-63) the surrealist painter is now well established,
Remedios Varo the writer has yet to be fully discovered. Her writings, which were never published
during her life let alone translated into English, present something of a missing chapter and offer
the same qualities to be found in her visual work: an engagement with mysticism and magic, a
breakdown of the border between the everyday and the marvelous, a love of mischief and an
ongoing meditation on the need for (and the trauma of) escape in all its forms.
This volume brings together the painter's collected writings and includes an unpublished
interview, letters to friends and acquaintances (as well as to people unknown), dream accounts,
notes for unrealized projects, a project for a theater piece, whimsical recipes for controlled
dreaming, exercises in surrealist automatic writing and prose poem commentaries on her
paintings. It also includes her longest manuscript, the pseudoscientific, De Homo Rodans, an
absurdist study of the wheeled predecessor to Homo sapiens (the skeleton of which Varo had
built out of chicken bones). Ostensibly written by the invented anthropologist Halikcio von
Fuhrangschmidt, Varo's text utilizes eccentric Latin and a tongue-in-cheek pompous discourse to
explain the origins of the first umbrella and in what ways Myths are merely corrupted Myrtles.
[email protected]
www.artdata.co.uk
ART
Honore de Balzac - Treatise on Modern Stimulants

Pb 12x19cm 80pp 15ills £11
Honore de Balzac's Treatise on Modern Stimulants is a meditation on five stimulants-tea, sugar,

coffee, alcohol and tobacco-by an author very conscious of the fact that his gargantuan output of
work was driven by an excessive intake (his bouts of writing typically required 10 to 15 cups of
coffee a day) that would ultimately shorten his life. First published in French in 1839 as an
appendix to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste, this Treatise was at once
Balzac's effort at addressing what he perceived to be an oversight in that cornerstone of
gastronomic literature; a chapter toward his never-completed body of analytic studies (alongside
such essays as Treatise on Elegant Living) that were to form an overarching "pathology of social
life"; and a meditation on the impact of pleasure and excess on the body and the role they play in
shaping society.
Balzac here describes his "terrible and cruel method" for brewing a coffee that can help the artist
and author find inspiration; explains why tobacco can be credited with having brought peace to
Germany; and describes his first experience of alcoholic intoxication (which required seventeen
bottles of wine and two cigars). Beyond its braggadocio and whimsy, though, this treatise
ultimately speaks to Balzac's obsession with death and decline, and attempts to confront in
capsule form the broader implications of dissipating one's vital forces. This edition includes
illustrations to an earlier French edition by Pierre Alechinsky.
[email protected]
www.artdata.co.uk
ART
Jean Ray - Whiskey Tales

Pb 14x21cm 240pp £13.50
Originally published in French in 1925, Whiskey Tales immediately established the reputation of
the Belgian master of the weird, Jean Ray (1887-1964), whose writings in the coming years
would come to chart out a literary meeting ground between H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Dickens.
A commercial success, the collection earned Ray the appellation of the "Belgian Poe." A year
later, however, the author would be arrested on charges of embezzlement and serve two years in
prison, where he would write some of his best stories.
Something of a prequel to later collections such as Cruise of Shadows or Circles of Terror (both
forthcoming from Wakefield Press), Whiskey Tales finds Ray embracing the modes of adventure
and horror fiction adopted by such contemporaries as Pierre Mac Orlan and Maurice Renard.
Taking us from ship's prow to port, from tavern to dead-end lane, these early tales are ruled by
the spirits of whiskey and fog, each element blurring the borders between humor and horror, the
sentimental and the sinister, the real and the imagined.
A handful of these stories first appeared in English in Weird Tales in the 1930s, but the majority of
this collection has never been translated. This first complete English-language edition is the first
in many volumes of Jean Ray's books that Wakefield Press will be bringing out over the coming
seasons.
[email protected]
www.artdata.co.uk

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ART

Remedios Varo - Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings

Honore de Balzac - Treatise on Modern Stimulants

Honore de Balzac's Treatise on Modern Stimulants is a meditation on five stimulants-tea, sugar,

Jean Ray - Whiskey Tales

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