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"Originally published in French as Bruges-la-Morte (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1892)"--Title page verso.

The first English translation of Miyakatsu Koike's wartime diary, which documents his arrest and internment in South Australia's Loveday Camp, and his return to a war-ravaged Japan.

A daring, irreverent short-story collection that dissects and explores the conundrums of contemporary life and what it is to be human, through a world very like our own.

Roaming Freely Throughout the Universe offers fresh perspectives on Baudin's scientific voyagers, their work and its legacy.

The GPO clock nearby chimed and then slowly struck eleven times. And all of us anonymous people reached out and held hands, sharing the time through the solemn striking. I felt a surge of strength and optimism go right through me.In 1983, Mary Cassini attended a Silent Vigil for Peace. It gave her an idea that changed her life. She decided that at 11 am local time around the world people should stop and share three minutes of silence to be mindful of the future and wish for peace. Doing the Impossible is the remarkable story of how she achieved this, travelling the world meeting ordinary citizens and global leaders, in the East and the West, Russia and the Middle East, spreading awareness of her message and making her dream a reality. Her initiative, 3 Minutes World Silence, was accepted around the world and is helping us all to understand that we, as fellow human beings, can share this planet peacefully.

Black Tom Birch, once the most feared person in Van Diemen's Land, terrorised colonisers until he was captured and turned against his people. But history is wrong. Here, for the first time, is the truth about this Aboriginal patriot.

1977, Kerry Packer announced he'd bought the cream of Australia's cricket crop to play in his own private competition. This is the story of those men, known as the Establishment Boys.

A YA rom-com about home and family, about breaking apart and fusing together, and, of course, about love.

Poetical biographies of six radical thinkers from Cagliostro to Restif de la Bretonne, by the leading figure of French RomanticismFirst published in French in 1852, The Illuminated was the first of a string of Gérard de Nerval's late works that would culminate in his posthumous fantastical autobiography Aurélia in 1855. The Illuminated collects six portraits of men whom Nerval mysteriously dubbed "precursors of socialism"--visionaries who together formed an alternative history of France and a backdrop to a mystical form of madness that Nerval ultimately claimed for himself.Nerval here presents the reader with Raoul Spifame, a mad lawyer who imagined himself to be Henry II; the Abbé de Bucquoy, a man who opposed the monarchy and whose amazing escapes suggested the possession of magical powers; Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, the 18th-century theosophist who defined God in human terms rather than spiritual; the Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, the famous magus and alchemist; Jacques Cazotte, author of The Devil in Love, who created a synthesis between hermetic ideas and Catholic thought; and Quintus Aucler, a lawyer who sought to revive paganism in the unstable world of French society in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1789.An overlooked work by Nerval, The Illuminated brings together the picturesque and pathos, a peculiar gallery of portraits that blur the boundaries between mysticism and mystification.Gérard de Nerval (1808-55) was a writer, poet and translator who wedded French and German Romanticism and transformed his research into mystic thought and his bouts of mental illness into such visionary works as Aurélia.

A comprehensive biography of Marjorie Lawrence, one of Australia's most renowned opera stars.

A biography of the divisive, problematic and fascinating 'mission girl' Annie Lock.

The hallucinatory English-language debut of an overlooked German Expressionist poetBess Brenck Kalischer's only work of prose was first published in German in 1922. Narrated by a woman being held in a sanitarium after a mental breakdown, The Mill is less a novel than a rhythmic, hallucinatory and fractured sequence of prose poems. On its publication, the German author Mynona described it as "more a mill, a cosmos flower, a lyricism and romantic spell than it is a 'novel.'" Shifting from pedestrian concerns to cosmic visions, from the setting of a basement mushroom farm to scenes on Sirius, Kalischer's narrator weaves together literary satire, anguished dream states and shifting subjectivities. As much Maldoror as Munchausen, The Mill describes an unstable journey to psychic restoration that is as radically experimental today as when it was first published a century ago.Bess Brenck Kalischer (1878-1933) was born Betty Levy in Rostock. Although she began publishing her first poems in 1905, she began to make a name for herself as part of the second generation of German Expressionists in Dresden, cofounding the Expesstionistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Dresden (Expressionist Working Group of Dresden) alongside such members as Conrad Felixmüller. Later relocating to Berlin, she was a friend of Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona, who used her as a model in several stories and novels. She died of a "nervous disease" in 1933, her grave left without a headstone until 2014.

A visionary treatise on perception from the extraordinary polymath Charles Cros--poet, friend to Rimbaud and Verlaine, and inventor of color photography and the phonographEstablishing the author's standing as the inventeur maudit of his time, Principles of Cerebral Mechanics was first presented to the Academy of Sciences in 1872, but was not published until 1879, and then only in fragmentary form. Setting out to understand the mechanics of perception--the organs of which at the time were too small and inaccessible to be studied directly--Cros instead attempted to reverse-engineer the sensory organs. Whereas his previous inventions in the realms of audio recording and color photography had focused on technology for the senses, with this ambitious essay Cros turned to conceptualizing the technology of the senses themselves: rather than the transmission of color to the retina, here he instead attempted to conceive of how color was transmitted from the retina to the brain. By approaching the human brain as a "mechanism of registration," Cros' essay can be set alongside the groundbreaking work of such revolutionary figures who transformed modern vision as Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge.Charles Cros (1842-88) was as much Renaissance man as he was poète maudit. A bohemian poet who drank with Verlaine and provided housing to Rimbaud, he also developed the comic monologue as a theatrical genre, and invented both the phonograph (which he named the "paléophone") and color photography (though he failed to patent either before Thomas Edison or Louis Ducos du Hauron), among other such inventions as a nonmetallic battery and a musical stenographer.

A miniature Borgesian portrait in misanthropyIn a sequence of anecdotes imbued with haughty melancholy and nihilistic irony, Alain-Paul Mallard assembles a puzzle of an Austrian writer who despises both the world he lives in and the work he himself has produced, whose fragmented life crosses paths with fictional and nonfictional protagonists from Hans Magnus Enzensberger to Paul Celan, and whose concise first-person reflections describe a complicated and sympathetic monster.A masterpiece of the miniature in the tradition of Robert Walser and Fleur Jaeggy, and a tribute to the legacy of Thomas Bernhard, Mallard's "imaginary life" offers a celebration of sterility and silence in its appropriately distilled essence.Writer and filmmaker Alain-Paul Mallard was born in 1970 and raised in Mexico City. He studied Hispanic literature in his native city, and then studied European intellectual history in Toronto. Tempted by silence, he is the author of a short, highly concentrated body of work. His films include L'origine de la tendresse, Évidences and L'adoption.

A disorienting, de Chirico-esque detective tale of curio shops and eerie antiquities, penned in France's postwar traumaA traveling businessman decides to tarry in an unnamed city, dons a new name and profession on a whim, and rents a room in a hotel on an island at the city's edge. As he wanders through the streets of unvisited storefronts and offices, he encounters a strange constellation of characters: a sinister night watchman; his spiritual half-brother, the "professor"; and a mute beauty who quickly obsesses him. They in turn lead the narrator into labyrinths of crowded curio shops and secondhand furnishers where the secrets of the island lie buried behind armoires and delirium. As the narrator pieces together the drama at the heart of the abandoned quarter, he discovers missing elements to his own biography and the role he is to play as witness to tragedy.Marcel Béalu's novella, written in the 1940s but not published until 1954, peels away an oneiric banality to reveal doubled lives and secret stories. The Impersonal Adventure utilizes a dreamlike logic to translate postwar trauma, urban devastation and anxiety into a tale that unfolds in the empty streets and bric-a-brac shops of a de Chirico painting.Marcel Béalu (1908-93) was a French poet and novelist who drew inspiration from German Romanticism and French Surrealism, but avoided schools of thought and autobiography. His work was distinct for its dreamlike qualities and has established him as a master of the French fantastique. He made his living as a hat maker (when he first met the poet Max Jacob, who took him under his wing), an antiques dealer, and then as a bookseller.

A coming-of-age novel set in the Adelaide Hills during the height of the Second World War.

Victor Marra Newland OBE MC DCM - hunter, soldier and entrepreneur - was descended from Australian pioneers. In 1838 his English grandfather the Rev'd Ridgway Newland landed in the new colony of South Australia. His father Simpson Newland opened up the New South Wales outback with sheep stations on the Darling and Paroo rivers. At the dawn of the 20th century, with Australia's unknown frontiers already claimed, Marra looked to Africa to make his fortune. In 1904 he started British East Africa's first safari company in partnership with another Australian, Leslie Tarlton. Along the way he fought in the Boer War and later in the East Africa campaign in World War One.Marra settled in Nairobi when it was a railway staging post where drunks who staggered home in the dark were liable to be eaten by a lion. There were no rules, no safety nets and tantalising possibilities. Newland, Tarlton and Co. acted as land, stock and auctioneering agents as well as outfitting and guiding visiting sportsmen. British aristocrats, European royalty and American moguls set out on foot and horseback into the wilds in pursuit of big game trophies. The American president Teddy Roosevelt was accompanied by an entourage of 200 porters, gunbearers, camp staff and grooms.Marra's tales of shipwrecks, charging rhino, hunting elephant for their ivory and the settlers' increasingly frustrated attempts to stake land claims make for fascinating and well-paced tales. This book vividly sketches a portrait of a country in the making and the man who embraced and was transformed by his adopted land.

This wee book is a bittersweet account of growing up in Scotland in the strange and brutal kingdom we call home. But Poking Seaweed with a Stick is anything but a tale of childhood suffering; it is an enchanted Scottish tale that will have you smiling through your tears and laughing till you cry.

Based on Australia's greatest literary hoax, Sincerely, Ethel Malley explores the Ern Malley affair.

The Diary of Emily Caroline Creaghe is one of the most remarkable documents of Australian exploration, written by one of the rarest of explorers - a woman.

A startlingly contemporary portrait of drug addiction in prewar Paris Published in 1943 (just a year before its author was arrested by the Gestapo for his Resistance activities), The Die Is Cast was a departure for Robert Desnos: a shift from his earlier, frenetic Surrealist prose to a social realism that borrowed as much from his life experience as his career as a journalist. Drawing on his own use of drugs in the 1920s and his doomed relationship with the chanteuse Yvonne George, Desnos here portrays a band of opium, cocaine and heroin users from all walks of life in Paris. It is a startlingly contemporary portrayal of overdoses, arrests, suicides and the flattened solitude of the addict, yet published in occupied Paris, years before "junkie literature" established itself with the Beat Generation. An anomaly both in his career and for having been published under the Occupation by an active member of the Resistance, The Die Is Cast now stands as timely a piece of work as it had been untimely when it first appeared. Robert Desnos (1900-45) was Surrealism's most accomplished practitioner of automatic writing and dictation before his break with André Breton in 1929. His career in journalism and radio culminated in an active role in the French Resistance. Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, and passed through several concentration camps until finally dying of typhoid in Terezín in 1945, a few days after the camp he was in was liberated.

"Sens-Plastique has now been a companion of mine for nearly 20 years, and so far as I am concerned, Malcolm de Chazal is much the most original and interesting French writer to emerge since the war." -W.H. AudenAfter seeing an azalea looking at him in the Curepipe Botanic Gardens (and realizing that he himself was becoming a flower), Malcolm de Chazal began composing what would eventually become his unclassifiable masterpiece, Sens-Plastique, which would take its final form in 1948. Containing over 2,000 aphorisms, axioms and allegories, the book was immediately hailed as a work of genius by André Breton, Francis Ponge, Jean Dubuffet and Georges Braque. Embraced by the Surrealists as one of their own, Chazal chose to avoid all literary factions and steadfastly anchored himself in his solitary life as a bachelor mystic on the island nation of Mauritius, where he would proceed to write books and paint for the rest of his life. Sens-Plastique employs a strange humor and an alchemical sensibility to offer up an utterly original world vision that unifies neo-science, philosophy and poetry into a new form of writing. Mapping every human body part, facial expression and emotion onto the natural kingdom through subconscious thinking, Chazal presents a world in which humankind is not just made in the image of God, but Nature is made in the image of humankind: a sensual, synesthetic world in which everything in the universe, be it animal, vegetable, mineral or human, employs a spiritual copula. Malcolm de Chazal (1902-81) was a Mauritian writer and painter. Forsaking a career in the sugar industry, he spent the majority of his life in a solitary, mystical pursuit of the continuity between man and nature.

The dinner menu at the Aspara had the usual interesting items such as 'Soap' and 'A Fried Monk' not to mention 'Chicken Amok'. The waiter couldn't tell me what amok meant, but I tried it and it turned out to be, not a crazy chicken running around with a cleaver, but chicken pieces in a soup made with coconut milk and lots of spices and coloured a kind of caterpillar-innards green that was very tasty.Deciphering the menu is half the fun in this mysterious land only just now opening to tourists and travellers. Despite its horrific history, Lydia Laube finds that Cambodia is an ancient, beautiful country populated by friendly, generous people who like to ride motorbikes very fast around corners. Join Lydia, squashed into a taxi with nine or so others, for an unforgettable adventure in Asia.

Catherine Piron is in Noumea, searching for traces of the father she barely remembers. She meets journalist Henri Boulez, her only lead in a foreign country. Their journey into the remote regions of New Caledonia uncovers an extraordinary story ...

A frenzied German Expressionist tale of orgy as salvation in Weimar BerlinOriginally published in German in 1919, Potsdamer Platz was Curt Corrinth's first novel to employ an expressionistic, frenetic prose and presented his excessive vision of free love. Inspired by the sex theories of Freud's controversial disciple Otto Gross, Corrinth preached the sexual orgy as a means to salvation and universal copulation as a new world religion. The book's provincial protagonist, Hans Termaden, arrives in Berlin, where he quickly evolves from city rube to sexual messiah as he converts prostitutes and virgins into sensual warriors and frees men of sexual inhibitions. As word of his exploits spreads, people flock to his headquarters in Potsdamer Platz, turning all buildings into brothels. Police and army attempt to bring order but themselves defect to take part in the spreading copulation as Corrinth's prose itself begins to fragment and melt on the page. Decried in its time, Postdamer Platz can be read today as a portal into the cultural excesses of Weimar Berlin. This first English translation includes the original illustrations done by Paul Klee for the book's 1920 deluxe edition. Curt Corrinth (1894-1960) studied law until serving in the military in World War I, which resulted in his embracing an antiwar and anti-bourgeois stance through his poetry and then through a series of novels, three of which would be banned by the Nazis in 1933. In 1955, he moved to the GDR in East Berlin, where he died five years later.