Chômu Press

09/02/2023

From April 1897 until April 1903, Jane de La Vaudère (1857-1908) published in the Parisian newspapers La Presse and La Lanterne a series of over one hundred vignettes, mostly under the heading Contes Rapides. These brief stories, of beauty, horror, humor, love, and cruelty, carry strategies of narrative minimalism to a new level, and show the work of a masterful female author who was able to polish gems of decadence to sparkling perfection in the highly misogynistic environment of fin-de-siècle journalism dominated by her male counterparts.

This collection, assembled and translated into English by Brian Stableford, offers the first opportunity that anyone has ever had to read the series of rapid tales as a series and to asses it as a collage; as a bird’s eye view of contemporary Parisian society it is highly selective and idiosyncratic, but that only serves to make it more interesting, and as a pioneering adventure in narrative minimalization it offers a significant exemplar to modern writers’ workshops.

12/01/2023

“Klabund” was the pseudonym employed by Alfred Henschke (1890-1928), who wrote, from January to April 1921, “during the fever of an illness,” the novel Spook, which is here presented for the first time in English, in a translation by Jonah Lubin.

This hectic, creepy autobiographical story about a young man who suffers a hemorrhage in Berlin and is haunted by bizarre figures and delusions in his twilight state can be seen as both a late entry into the Decadent pantheon and a striking example of Expressionist fiction. A haunting and harrowing tale, which seems to have been composed at least in part under the effects of morphine, Spook is, in its own troubled way, a glorious book, and a gorgeous poem of madness.

22/12/2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dthWXSjSUo

Here's a countdown of my top reads for 2022 -- Enjoy!0:00 Intro0:30 Criteria1:06 #8 City of Words5:31 #7 Pixelated Future8:52 #6 Fungal Horror13:18 #5 Astral...

17/12/2022

https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=13906

Sad news of the passing of 'Druidic'.

15/12/2022

Armand Charpentier (1864-1949), though all but forgotten today, was one of a number of journalists who, around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, contributed Decadent and Naturalist fiction to the French press. The present volume brings together four pieces of such fiction, all translated into English for the first time by Shawn Garrett. From the psychological horror story “Claustrophobic Madness” to the humorous “The Adventure de Jacques Pétromé,” this offering, which sheds new light on a forgotten fin-de-siècle personality, is an important addition to all libraries of Decadence and French literature.

12/12/2022

The fifty-eight extraordinary pieces which make up "Spells," though brief, most being just a page or two in length, are grandiose in their ambition. These miniatures, which are bathed in the light of violet suns and wrapped in the beams of the old moons, take up the themes of strange magics and poisons, curious births and lost theologies, and are like extracts of abbreviated drama, the sum-total of which might or might not be a visionary guide.

08/12/2022

René Crevel (1900-1935), a bisexual communist who suffered from tuberculosis, was one of the most important surrealist authors, a true genius, and possibly the best writer of surrealist fiction, and no other of his works of fiction is more surreal than "Are You All Crazy?"—originally published in 1929 and here presented for the first time in English in a superb translation by Sue Boswell. In this feverish, full-speed-ahead novel of out-and-out madness, we meet a redhead who gives birth to a blue child, hear the naughty song of the pigtail-pullers, visit the Sexual Institute of Dr Optimus Cerf-Mayer, attend an eonism séance, and witness a fifty-kilo rat disembowelling a fakir.

"Are You All crazy?" is a subversive masterpiece and a work of deep psychological interest, which, although puzzling in the utmost in its excesses of satirical bravado, certainly must be acknowledged to be one of the great European novels.

06/12/2022

https://amouthfulofair.fm/9th-december-quentin-s-crisp/

Quentin S. Crisp on the poetry podcast, A Mouthful of Air.

9th December (Sunday) by Quentin S. Crisp by Mark McGuinness | Dec 6, 2022 | Uncategorized | 0 comments Podcast: Play in new window | Download Episode 41 9th December (Sunday) by Quentin S. Crisp Quentin S. Crisp reads ‘9th December (Sunday)’ and discusses the poems with Mark McGuinness. https:/...

29/11/2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk1YZHt3dpM

How does a world of speed and information impact our brains, our culture, and the architecture that supports learning?Want to be a part of producing these vi...

28/11/2022

The Zaffre Book of Occult Fiction, the third volume of the books of occult fiction of many colours, brings together twenty-one tales, dating from 1908-1937, from the occult revival of the British Isles. Including both well-known figures, such as Dion Fortune and Algernon Blackwood, and lesser-known practitioners, such as Ethel Archer and the eccentric Prince Immanuel of Jerusalem, the present instalment is sure to fall within the sphere of beatific approval of not only seekers, adherents and occult enthusiasts, but also Masters and Ascendants.

Containing a varied and luxuriant array of stories, about visions and hauntings, mystical agencies and seers, The Zaffre Book of Occult Fiction, edited by Brendan Connell, is an indispensable addition to any library of the supernatural and occult.

27/10/2022

The Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles, here presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the most unusual works of Charles Nodier, and can readily be seen as a remote precursor of Alfred Jarry’s “pataphysics,” Guillaume Apollinaire’s “surrealism” and Dadaism. Originally published in 1830, more than a hundred years before the publication of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Nodier’s novel, like the latter, is a highly avant-garde work of dream fiction. It is deliberately incoherent, and in places deliberately incomprehensible, but its incoherence is never without an underlying purpose and an underlying schema, partly because it takes for granted the thesis that the apparent incoherence, inconsequentiality and incomprehensibility of real dreams must have an underlying purpose, however arcane, and an underlying schema, however bizarre—and that expeditions in literary surrealism are valuable processes of exploration, capable of offering valuable and unique rewards. It is, in its own peculiar fashion, a masterpiece of intelligence, wit and literary artistry.

21/10/2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcXlltxjXnY

I talk about the sky as a vehicle for literary meaning:0:00 Intro 2:16 Phallus4:18 Clay6:34 Abyss9:23 Toy11:10 Wound_________________________________________...

13/10/2022

The Vermilion Book of Occult Fiction   Edited by Brian Stableford     The Vermilion Book of Occult Fiction, the second in a series of books of occult fiction of many colors, brings together eighteen tales from the French occult revival of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth...

12/10/2022

Quentin S. Crisp, a writer of timeless stature, lays his heart bare in a book that is at once haunting and enriching and which, while indicting the filth of the sublunary world, surges with unexpected happinesses and unmistakable life.

06/10/2022

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/forgotten-books-worth-rediscovering

R.B. Russell bookends his list of neglected works to track down with two entitled The Outsider – by Colin Wilson and Richard Wright

18/09/2022

Who is he? What is his real name? Is he a reincarnation, a time-traveller, or someone made from chopped up DNA on a USB stick?

In Surrender to a Stranger, British cult author Jeremy Reed offers a Burroughsesque Elizabethan drama in the super-exposure of contemporary London streets, in which our mysterious hero, Mr. W.H., along with a q***r coterie of characters, soak up the ambience of sexy story telling.

A daring and provocative novel that’s also a bit degenerate, Surrender to a Stranger is a glitter-worded Marlovian comedo-tragedy in which every sentence is written as if it has been lived.

08/09/2022

Six years in six months, or six months in six years—Autumn and Spring Annals is a diary in verse, each day crystalized—in beauty, worry, dread and profundity. Quentin S. Crisp, a writer of timeless stature, lays his heart bare in a book that is at once haunting and enriching and which, while indicting the filth of the sublunary world, surges with unexpected happinesses and unmistakable life.

07/09/2022

Snuggly Books special offer.

17/08/2022

New SherdsTube episode out today - 'Three Greek Novels About Women': https://youtu.be/8jiPba0hymQ

12/08/2022

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/12/rushdie-attack-book-festival-scene-chautauqua-ny

Arts event interrupted by screams as people rushed to render aid to the novelist and subdue his assailant

18/07/2022

Snuggly Tales of Femmes Fatales   edited and translated by Brian Stableford     “And me, what have I done? I had the age of their illusions and their desires made me young. Beautiful in their amour, I smiled at their dream and my smile protected them against death by smiling at them. Today, the...

08/07/2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygH3UCx6454

I answer your questions:0:00 Intro0:47 Favourite evocations of cities in literature?7:57 Why Sherds?9:39 Is the podcast coming back?11:33 Who are your favour...

07/06/2022

https://xraylitmag.com/justin-isis-on-film-with-rebecca-gransden/

Writers who seem to want to write a commercial screenplay in prose strike me as the least interesting sort. The same goes for all attempts at translating cinematic terminology to prose.