Pop artist David Shrigley's work is immediate, sometimes rude, and very funny, "like a psychotic version of Matt Groening's 'Life in Hell' cartoons" (The Guardian). His darkly brilliant, addictively hilarious scrawls from the subconscious have already mad
Andre Breton described Maldoror as -the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential.- Little is known about its pseudonymous author, aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846) and early death in Paris
First published anonymously in France in 1928, Le Con d'Irene, is the last 'lost' masterpiece of Surrealist erotica. Likes Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye (published the same year), Irene's Cunt is an intensely poetic account, the story of a man's tor
'A book full of richness, unexpected enticements, short sharp shocks and breathtaking writing' Guardian Welcome to the real, unauthorised London: the disappeared, the unapproved, the unvoiced, the mythical and the all-but forgotten. The perfect companion
An anthology of previously untranslated texts by Alfred Jarry beginning with his first work, Black Minutes of Memorial Sand. Included are theoretical texts, aberrant journalism, and highly-wrought Symbolist poems; a practical guide to building a time mach
A literary group founded in 1960 by leading French writers and mathematicians, the Oulipo's original aim was to inquire into the possibilities of combining literature and mathematics, and later expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictiv
Translated into English for the first time, this novelized biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously Artaud's most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his le
What do Marcel Duchamp and Italo Calvino have in common? The Oulipo, or Ouvroir de litterature potentielle. Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais founded their "Workshop for Potential Literature" in 1960 to find out how abstract restrictions could be c
When Alfred Jarry died in 1907 at the age of thirty-four, he was a legendary figure in Parisbut this had more to do with his bohemian lifestyle and scandalous behavior than his literary achievements. A century later, Jarry is firmly established as one o
