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By spring 1938, Prague is a city increasingly on tenterhooks in expectation of an attack by Nazi Germany. Earlier that year the pressure of the situation produced a schism in the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia between Vítězslav Nezval, who wanted to continue to support the Soviet Union, and those who condemned Stalin's show trials, purges, and executions. Nezval chronicles this tumultuous period by embedding it in a paean to Prague, wondering if the city, and everything about the city he loves, will survive the horrors that are about to be visited upon her. With Apollinaire serving as his guide, he introduces us to the cafés and pubs he would frequent, many of which no longer exist, the various neighborhoods he lived in as a destitute student, the parks where he sought solace, and the people he would meet on the street, musing on some of the figures central to his poetics, such as André Breton and Lautréamont. While at times lamenting the changing face of Prague and that Hitler might reduce it to rubble, Nezval takes us into the places that spontaneously spur him to reflect on the issues facing artists of the day and the precarious sociopolitical situation. This translation is of the rare unexpurgated first edition and includes Nezval's photographs and illustrations as well as an appendix that maps out the significant revisions made later, providing additional translations of the longer passages that were inserted as replacement for what was expunged from the original edition.

Phoebe Hicks owes her unexpected career as a spiritualist to a photograph taken of her through her bedroom window after having eaten spoiled clams. What comes out of her mouth is taken to be ectoplasm, and word spreads that she is able to commune with the dead. As the prototype for the medium, she establishes the standard for how a séance should be conducted during the sessions held in her Providence, Rhode Island, home where a growing number of curious participants witness materializations of such figures as Ivan the Terrible, Harry Houdini, Catherine the Great, Hatshepsut, Elizabeth Báthory, and a host of others. Told as a compilation of episodes conjoined with Selena Kimball's haunting collages, The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks is a feminist surrealist exploration of the rise of Spiritualism and the role of the medium in 19th-century America alongside the expectations, and constraints, imposed on women.

Transparent Body & Other Texts brings together Blecher's entire output of poetry and short prose, from the earliest texts published during his lifetime to those appearing for the first time only recently. They range from stories in the vein of his fantastical, hallucinatory longer work to aphorisms, reportage, and notebook fragments. The volume also includes a selection of his correspondence with such major figures of Romanian interwar modernism as Geo Bogza, Ilarie Voronca, and Saşa Pană to give a fuller picture of Blecher's engagement with the avant-garde and literary life even as his health was progressively deteriorating over the course of the 1930s.

An inveterate experimenter with image and text and music whose work bears the clear influences of Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, and absurdism, Gerhard Ruhm is truly one of the major figures of the postwar European avant-garde. Yet reprehensibly little of his work has appeared in English. This edition brings together a selection of his work spanning the past seven decades, displaying a wide thematic range (as he has remarked, "there is nothing that cannot become part of one's poetic universe") and ingenious combinations of motifs such as music, pornography, banality, humor, and mythology. The first section comprises "mini dramas," the text often combined with images and musical notation to create sensorial episodes, the expression of a singularly sensual aesthetic perception. The second section is a wry deconstruction of Grillparzer's play Hero and Leander that juxtaposes original passages with images from a swimming manual and a more contemporary erotic take on the mythological tale. The final section presents 24 short prose pieces: 12 from the early 1950s and 12 from the past few years.

The novel Baradla Cave has lost none of the force of its social critique and trenchant humor since it originally appeared in samizdat in the 1980s and officially published in 1995 by Edice Analogon. A living organism, Baradla is both place (Prague) and person (a woman), an exploration of maternity and femininity as well as a satirical look at the overweening mother-state and consumer society. The language collage comprising pseudo-scientific jargon, the diction of interwar magazines for women and girls, the demotic, and metaphoric stream is complemented by Jan Svankmajer's erotic collages, as scenes of episodic sexual violence alternate with humorous reflections on various ingrained habits and customs. With a seemingly boundless sense of the absurd, Svankmajerová fingers here practically everything having to do with modern existence: substance abuse, violent sex crimes, rampant consumerism, pervasive corruption, and dysfunctional family relationships.

Written in 1935 at the height of Czech Surrealism but not published until 1945, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a bizarre erotic fantasy of a young girl's maturation into womanhood on the night of her first menstruation. Referencing Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Marquis de Sade's Justine, K. H. Macha's May, F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu, Nezval employs the language of the pulp serial novel to fashion a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involving a vampire with an insatiable appetite for chicken blood, changelings, lecherous priests, a malicious grandmother desiring her lost youth. In his Foreword Nezval states: "I wrote this novel out of a love of the mystique in those ancient tales, superstitions and romances, printed in Gothic script, which used to flit before my eyes and declined to convey to me their content." Part fairy tale, part Gothic horror, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a meditation on youth and age, sexuality and death, an androgynous merging of brother with sister, an exploration of the grotesque with the shifting registers of language, mood, and genre that were a hallmark of the Czech avant-garde. The 1970 film version is considered one of the outstanding achievements of Czech new-wave cinema. This edition includes Kamil Lhota¡k's original illustrations.

A novella from the classic Czech novelist, set in the Tyrol.

Fiction. Soren A. Gauger's first collection of short stories was entirely written in Krakow, Poland, where he moved four years ago. Taking as his raw materials the treatment of the fantastic found in Borges and Kis, the misanthropic musings of Gombrowicz and Bernhard, and a literary understanding of philosophy, Gauger's stories are formally challenging yet evasive of post-structuralist clichA[a¬As. They often deal with the chaotic fragmentation of the individual, who is mindful of both society and literature, while exploring the blank spaces implicit somewhere behind the narrative.