Twisted Spoon Press

28/10/2025

Now available: The Folded Clock by Gerhard Rühm, trans. by Alexander Booth, artwork by G. Rühm

Like Kurt Schwitters before him, Gerhard Rühm has incorporated numerals and digits into his visual and aural poetry since the early days of Wiener Gruppe in the 1950s. The Folded Clock brings together these number poems, comprising typewriter ideograms, typed concrete poetry, collages of everyday paper ephemera and scraps, and a wide variety of literary forms where the visual pattern created on the page underpins the thematic meaning. Blurring the distinction between “counting” and “recounting,” his "recitations" imaginatively translate arithmetic vocabulary into the mundane, the existential, or the cosmic, such as a history of the universe narrated as a solar year, from the Big Bang on January 1 to the moon landing in the last seconds of New Year’s Eve. Rühm's images and texts unleash the sensual qualities of numerals to subvert our digit-filled environment with its pervasive intensification of seamless control.

Ordering info here:
https://www.twistedspoon.com/folded-clock.html

Interview with translator:
https://www.scribd.com/document/929958324/Interview-with-Alexander-Booth

30/09/2025

Apropos of "Banned Book Week," The Tigress, the only novel by Walter Serner, is now available and on the way to the distributors for publication in November in the U.K. and December in the U.S.

When Bichette, the eponymous Tigress and uncrowned queen of Paris prostitutes, meets the grifter Fec, the unbelievable seems to happen: she is “tamed” and falls head over heels for him — and he for her. This sets off a dangerous game that spirals toward wild escalation in the luxury hotels and casinos of the French Riviera before reaching its grotesque culmination in Montmartre. The nihilism and invented personas recall Serner’s engagement with Dada as nothing anyone says or does can be taken at face value. Everything becomes a con, and love the greatest con of all.

More info here:
https://www.twistedspoon.com/the-tigress.html

24/08/2025

"Tereza Veverka Novická, who also translated Brabcová’s English debut, Aviaries, has bravely and fluently rendered Brabcová’s work, and her talents are most evident when she captures the author’s dark humor."

Zuzana Brabcová’s Ceilings dwells in a place where play and terror occur simultaneously.

Toggling between the perspectives of two siblings, in malleable hospital spaces, the novel refuses to let illness be finalized into something easily digestible:
https://tinyurl.com/29m7h3mh

14/08/2025

Marek Šindelka, Nathan Fields (transl.), Petr Nikl (artwotk), ‘Aberrant’, Twisted Spoon Press, 2017

12/08/2025

James Dyer writes on V. Nezval's A Prague Flaneur for Full Stop:

"Despite its lack of fixed direction or definite purpose, A Prague Flâneur (originally Pražský chodec) is rooted in the parks, streets, bars, and cafes of Prague in a surprisingly concrete way. From the street level, as the author Vítězslav Nezval sees it, Prague surpasses its “practical necessity” and expands into a dynamic host for memories, a rouser of imagination, and a stage peopled with extraordinary characters. This “peripatetic book” sketches a Prague that is uniquely personal to Nezval."

Prague surpasses its “practical necessity” and expands into a dynamic host for memories

25/07/2025

M.A. Orthofer has posted a review of Gerhard Rühm's Cake & Prostheses (tr. Alex Booth):
"It's a fun collection, especially in the creative stage-experiments. Rühm is not unserious, but there is a humorous edge to many of the pieces -- and quite a few are quite erotically charged as well. There's nice variety here, too, making for a good sampler of Rühm's work and language-play (with music often playing a prominent role in both)."

This is well-times since we will have The Folded Clock, a collection of Rühm's number poems – images and text – also translated by Alex Booth back from the printer in September.

Full text on The Complete Review here:
https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/austria/ruhmg.htm

More info on the books here:
https://www.twistedspoon.com/cake-and-prostheses.html
https://www.twistedspoon.com/folded-clock.html

23/07/2025

In this past weekend's The Irish Times, Declan O'Driscoll reviewed The Arsonist as part of his roundup of translated fiction (much appreciated).
Here's the link:
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/review/2025/07/20/translated-fiction-convincing-first-person-narration-personal-stories-through-political-turmoil-and-sharp-but-subtle-humour/

But since it's behind a paywall, the full bit about The Arsonist is below.

Thanks again to Declan.

There is uncertainty too in The Arsonist (Twisted Spoon, 180pp, £ 11.50) by Egon Hostovský, translated from the Czech by Christopher Morris, regarding the identity of the person setting fire to buildings in a small Bohemian village called Zbečnov. Central to the novel is the family who live above the Silver Pigeon pub, run by the mercurial Josef Simon. "Here is home, beyond them, the world." His teenage children, Kamil and Eliška, are suffused with burgeoning desire in search of an object. Eliška spent three years in a convent because of their mother: "She's always been bad." But she too is adrift and unhappy. Outside the confines of their home, the suspicion and distrust of outsiders - already a feature of the village - is heightened when buildings begin to go up in flames. But, as always, the truth is more complex and less convenient than the locals would wish. This sense of an outsider threatening a small community, initiated by their collective paranoia, is like a precursor to the novels of László Krasznahorkai. First published in 1935, the novel is beautifully written, with a narrative style that whispers confidences to the reader. The lyricism of Hostovský's superbly translated descriptions is a pleasure to read, capturing both the delight and ennui in village life: "The rooftops gleam in the sun, two small clouds sail over the church, the sparrows make a commotion on the fence, somnolent warmth, Sunday outfits and tedium."

And here's the link to the book on our site:
https://www.twistedspoon.com/arsonist.html