Wakefield Press

07/02/2024

Cliff Sargent at Better than Food gives Pascal Quignard's A Terrace in Rome a read this week.

Today's video is sponsored by BetterHelpGet 10% off your first month by following this link:https://betterhelp.com/BTF BUY A TERRACE IN ROME HERE TO SUPPORT ...

05/02/2024

Our first two titles of the year are now in hand: love as science and an undefinable "syphilis of the ether."
https://wakefieldpress.com

08/01/2024

Happy birthday, Paul Scheerbart! You were a truly indefinable visionary, whose interplanetary star fables, scientific and architectural fantasies, and utopian strivings remain unique over a century after your passing.

31/10/2023

This halloween presentation of Remedios Varo is a good opportunity to address one of the most frequent queries we receive: we will finally be releasing a new, expanded edition of Varo's writings this coming spring, including stories that will be published for the first time in any language.

For Remedios Varo, painting itself had abundant parallels with alchemy, magic, and witchcraft. 

09/10/2023

Philippe Soupault's pre-Dada, pre-Surrealist Voyage of Horace Pirouelle is back from the printer. A celebration and deflation of wanderlust and the acte gratuit:
https://wakefieldpress.com/products/the-voyage-of-horace-pirouelle

01/10/2023

If you’re in Brooklyn, come see us at the book fest! Booth 335

16/09/2023

Robert Davidson at The Quietus on Jean Ray's The City of Unspeakable Fear.

Jean Ray never visited the UK, but the stories he set there, like *The City of Unspeakable Fear*, offer up an eerie glimpse of its future, finds Robert Davidson

03/08/2023

It isn't everyday we can say that the New York Times T Style Magazine has recommended Wakefield Press for a cerebral summer beach read. In fact, it is only today. A much appreciated plug from Erik Morse, who was one of the first to review our titles over a decade ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/t-magazine/isabella-rossellini-mama-farm-knitwear.html

26/04/2023

The Central LaboratoryMax JacobTranslated by Alexander DickowWakefield Press ($22.95) The Dice CupMax JacobTranslated by Ian SeedWakefield Press ($19.95)

23/02/2023

Ryan Ruby brings some attention to two tractatuses (one of them Hermann Burger's Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis), over at e-flux.

“All great works of literature,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “found a genre or dissolve one.” This is no more true of a novel like Proust’s

02/02/2023

“What I like about this work is the appetite it expresses for an unattainable purity, the faith it places in the untamed imagination, the horror it manifests with regard to any kind of fixity… in fact, the way almost every page of it refuses to accept that human condition against which some will never cease to rebel, however reasonably society may one day be ordered.”

“Aurora” by Michel Leiris published by Atlas Press.

Atlas Press, Malcolm Green, Anthony Melville, Chris Allen and Tanya Peixoto, bookartbookshop, are deeply saddened to announce the death of their brilliant colleague and dearest friend Alastair Brotchie, the driving force behind Atlas Press, publishers of the anti-tradition since 1983.

At some point there will be a space on the website or similar for tributes to Alastair and Atlas Press, as we know that many people’s lives have been changed by their books.

21/12/2022

Our Book of the Day is "Bruges-La-Morte" by Georges Rodenbach, translated by Will Stone (Wakefield Press). Georges Rodenbach (1855 – 1898) was a Belgian Symbolist poet and novelist, and "Bruges-la-Morte," first published in 1892, is regarded by many as the archetype of the symbolist novel. It is certainly Rodenbach’s most famous work—this carefully woven tapestry of death and melancholy has seen numerous cinematic and operatic adaptations, and is said to have inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s "Vertigo." It tells the story of Hugues Viane, a widower who takes refuge in the decay of Bruges, living among the relics of his dead wife, until his delirious mourning is interrupted by an encounter with his wife’s doppelganger. The Guardian declared this "one of the greatest novels ever written about grief, loneliness and isolation," while the Times Literary Supplement calls it "a brilliant tour de force ... [that] will give any reader a good idea of what the symbolists were after." If you're in the mood for an atmospheric and compelling read, stop by the store or call us on 512-322-2097.

08/12/2022

An engaging interview with Alex Andriesse, translator of our recent release of Marcel Schwob's Spicilege, and more in focus (and coincidentally released the same day), Paul Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy.

Alex Andriesse and I met some time in the mid-aughts in New Paltz, New York. He was an undergraduate at SUNY New Paltz but living in Manhattan, and I’d just recently completed my M.A. there and was…

28/11/2022

The only seasonal best-of round-up we need at Wakefield: James J. Conway has posted his annual "Secret Satan" report for 2022, written with enough aplomb to make for a good morning read even if you should inhabit the unlikely role of already being aware of all the books he includes here.

You know what to expect by now, surely? Well, expect even more of it: this is our biggest year-end book selection yet.

24/11/2022

Last week we visited the most elegantly curated bookshop we’ve seen, the Katherine Small Gallery, tucked away right in our own backyard of Somerville. Anyone in the Boston area with an interest in design and/or typography should pay a visit (the books we acquired in our visit shown, as I can't get the images from their website to show here). In addition to the bookshelves are some cabinet-drawer exhibitions (one if which is currently devoted to the jacket designs of George Bernard Shaw books). A lovely set-up! They’re only open Fridays and Saturdays, so plan accordingly.
https://ksmallgallery.com

23/11/2022

An excerpt from Marcel Béalu's The Impersonal Adventure is now up at LitHub.

At the Café du Printemps, whose facade splits the darkness like a green pustule, it’s only over dessert, with the last of the fellow diners gone, that I decide to raise my nose from my plate. The r…

10/11/2022

We're saddened to read (though understanding, of course) that Rixdorf Editions is coming to a close after 5 years. Wakefield makes a brief appearance in this narrative, and not just because we've viewed Rixdorf as a direct colleague and comrade since they started (and not just because the man behind Rixdorf, James J. Conway, provided an illuminating afterword to our publication of Oscar Schmitz's Hashish)--and hopefully we weren't the origin of the question that provides the title to this narrative--but anyone wanting a taste of the trials and tribulations (and, of course, small pleasures) of starting and running a small press are encouraged to read Conway's account here.

Publisher James J. Conway on five years of Rixdorf Editions There is a tree in Berlin. Well, in truth there are lots of trees in Berlin (‘it’s so green!’ marvelled my father on the ride from the airport when he visited Berlin for the first time, finding it to be nothing like the grim, grey cit...

08/11/2022

We are excited to announce that copies of Ian Seed's translation of Max Jacob's Dice Cup are now in hand! A key work of prose poetry, and an almost indefinable classic: a cubist dream journal of sorts, though laced through with a melancholy humor that was too often foreign to the surrealists.

31/10/2022

Allan Graubard writes on Nerval's Illuminated over at the LA Review of Books!

Allan Graubard reviews a new English translation, by Peter Valente, of Gérard de Nerval’s “The Illuminated; or, The Precursors of Socialism: Tales and Portraits.”...

31/10/2022

Two almond-hued items now in hand: our latest Marcel Schwob title, his hand-selected essay collection Spicilege, and Hermann Burger's end-of-life guidebook, Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis: On Killing Oneself.
https://www.wakefieldpress.com

29/10/2022

Come check us out at Boston Book Festival! 📚📖🍭

28/10/2022

The new issue of Triple Canopy is out, "True to Life": featuring an excerpt from our about-to-be-released Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis by Hermann Burger. Check it out! (But don't check out, we love you.)

“Suicidology is the science of self-murder.” A fiction and series of aphorisms regarding the predominance of death over life. With artworks by Lisa Oppenheim.

28/10/2022

We'll be at the Boston Book Festival tomorrow with a handful of new titles back from the printer, t-shirts, a heap of backlist titles (including a number that may be a bit hard to find right now in the outside world), and possibly some Halloween treats. Looking forward to seeing local book lovers.

28/10/2022

👀 IT’S HERE. Head to bostonbookfest.org/festival-schedule for your complete list of 2022 BBF sessions — nonfiction, fiction, poetry, YA, kids — as we return live in Copley Square on Friday, Oct. 28 and Saturday, Oct. 29! All events are free and open to the public (so no tickets needed). We’ll see you there! 👋

22/10/2022

Marcel Béalu's The Impersonal Adventure is now in hand: our first publication by this under-translated author of the fantastique: admired by Jean Paulhan and Antonin Artaud, encouraged by Max Jacob, and a legendary bookseller (from whom one of his customers, Jacques Lacan, purchased a complete Shakespeare and never paid for it). An early short novel, originally published in French by the equally legendary Eric Losfeld, that combines a dreamlike amnesia with postwar trauma and chaotic bric-a-brac worthy of Giorgio de Chirico: https://www.wakefieldpress.com/bealu_impersonaa.html