We now turn to a highly subjective selection from the phenomenal wealth of books translated into English that appeared throughout 2019, encompassing a narrower thematic range than our original English language list. This is worth emphasising, as I would hate you to think that this is in any way representative of anything but my own odd areas of interest. For one it’s an almost entirely European selection, and heavy on the French, whereas a lot of the most interesting work in literary translation of late has been in works from non-European languages. Look around and you will find far more wide-ranging year-end lists of books in translation.

Uniting many of the selections here is the idea of the alternative canon, or anti-tradition – concepts particularly applicable to many lesser-known works of French literature from the late 19th and much of the 20th century. Often they were too perverse, too singular to feature, say, in any official account of literary Modernism, or make their way onto curricula. Disruptive in form and language, transgressive in theme and intent, they could be caustic, macabre, ecstatic, obscene, oblique, unfathomable. To an overwhelming degree it is passionate small presses that have sustained interest in this disparate body of work, rediscovering, re-contextualising and often bringing them into English for the first time. It was certainly their example that inspired me to start Rixdorf Editions.

This anti-tradition is nothing if not fertile, with secret inheritances from one writer to another, as well as considerable overlap with sympathetic creative professionals in visual arts, performance and cinema. Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman with Marlene Dietrich and That Obscure Object of Desire, the last of Luis Buñuel’s films, took their narrative from The Woman and the Puppet by Pierre Louÿs, originally published at the end of the 19th century and now available in a new translation by Jeremy Moore through Dedalus. “The novel opens during the boisterous Seville Carnival of 1896, which Andre Stevenol, an amorously-inclined young Frenchman, succeeds in attracting the attention of the alluring young Concha Perez. A rendezvous is arranged, but before it can take place Andre meets Don Mateo, who, in a long monologue recounts his affair with Concha and seeks to dissuade the younger man from becoming embroiled with the ‘worst of women’…”

These fin-de-siècle tropes of erotic obsession, duplicitous womanhood and hapless masculinity are paraphrased by the cover image, by Félicien Rops. One of the Belgian artist’s most famous works – Pornokrates – adorns the cover of the first English translation of Mephistophela by Catulle Mendès, a key Decadent work originally published in 1889. Now, there are few combinations of words more likely to excite my interest than “thinly veiled fiction of the Belle Époque”, and this is just one of three examples of the form that Snuggly have presented this year, all translated by Brian Stableford.

Mendès poured into Mephistophela his entire era’s anxiety about women pursuing romantic and sexual fulfilment sans blokes, and the train of disgrace this would – inevitably! – trigger. Here this results in what a British tabloid might paraphrase as My Kinky Satan Lesbo Sex Drug Hell. But it is not the moralising of the novel, but the sheer bonkers intensity of the dissipation depicted therein that seems so modern. Or consider the point where our heroine Sophie thinks back to her First Communion, refashioning it in her mind as a same-sex wedding well over a century before this was actually an option. But Sophie is lost to heterosexuality by the trauma of her actual wedding night and once she embraces same-sex love she cannot! get! enough! She soon adopts the more masculine name Sophor and embarks on a chem-sex odyssey. “If a woman does not keep within the bounds of normality, she is condemned to the extremes,” claimed Mendès, “for her, there is no relief, not even for a moment, if she rejects everyday life and heads for the outer limits.” This kind of pathologising was typical of the author whose stand-in here is – what else? – a doctor.

But who is Sophie? Ah, that would be Sophie-Mathilde-Adèle-Denise de Morny, the Marquise de Belbeuf, better known as Mathilde de Morny, or “Missy” – butch fatale of the Belle Époque. Mendès was obsessed with the mannish marquise, and submitted her “case” to a psychologist for phoney-baloney “analysis”. Never mind that the real Morny was a clean-living individual with a healthy teint; apparently this was just “her system’s last instinctive defence before physical and moral collapse”. Well, of course. The key takeaway, the last slide in the “So, you want to be a female character in a fin-de-siècle novel?” PowerPoint presentation is: YOU CAN’T FUCKING WIN.

Mendès was not alone in his Morny mania; Rachilde and the marquise’s most famous lover Colette also drew literary inspiration from Missy, so too Jean Lorrain. His articles of the early 1890s were studded with “blind items” about Missy (although calling her “Mizy” and referring to the Mendès book kinda cut out the guesswork). Morny wanted to take him on in a duel – she had priors on that count – but was dissuaded by a friend who shared what appears to be the first recorded variation on the advice that “it doesn’t matter what people say, as long as they’re talking about you.” And that friend? Only Sarah goddam Bernhardt. But Missy decided to sue Lorrain instead. And won.

Lorrain and his poison plume were rarely out of trouble; in 1903 a story entitled “Victim” landed him in court again; the painter Jeanne Jacquemin – a patient of Dr Pozzi whom you may remember from our other book list – surmised that it was about her and drew Lorrain into a protracted legal battle; he lost and had to knock out the book La Maison Philibert to pay the legal fees. Here “Victim” joins “gossipy character sketches, of actresses and mystics, gigolos and dowagers, of an entire rogues gallery of fin-de-siècle types” in Fards and Poisons, originally published in 1903; three years later Lorrain was dead – on Dr Pozzi’s operating table.

The third romp à clef is a new translation of A Woman Appeared to Me by Renée Vivien, in which the author turns the tables on Mendès and his ilk by claiming in fact that heterosexual sex is a “crime against nature” and “abominable”. Vivien (born Pauline Tarn) appears as San Giovanni, her lover “Vally” is none other than Natalie Clifford Barney, who rivalled Missy as the most clef’d figure of the Belle Époque (srsly). Both women cultivated a cultish allure, and A Woman Appeared to Me is filled with religious allusions; when Vivien died at just 32 Barney claimed she was a “priestess of death, and death was her last masterpiece”.

Before we move on, I am also grateful to Snuggly for the introduction to Jane de La Vaudère (actually Jeanne Scrive), one of the few French female Decadent writers of note, of whom Rachilde is the most prominent example. While some of La Vaudère’s works are squarely located within familiar Decadent territory of drugs, androgyny and the occult, in this selection she branches out into the exotic, erotic East in a dual edition of Three Flowers and the King of Siam’s Amazon, also translated by Brian Stableford.

We find more Francophone exotica with the extraordinary polymath Victor Segalen, who died 100 years ago. This Chinese-speaking naval doctor idolised Huysmans and wrote a paper on “neurosis in contemporary literature” while studying medicine, and would later pen a libretto for Debussy. Joining the navy as a doctor allowed him to pursue traces of the Frenchmen who had ventured out into the wider world before him; in the South Pacific he arrived on Tahiti three months too late to see his idol Paul Gauguin alive; in Djibouti he found living witnesses to the later life of Arthur Rimbaud, who died over a decade earlier. The imminent publication In a Sound World by Victor Segalen combines the novel of that name, “a work of fantasy concerning an inventor lost in his own immersive harmonic space”, along with the libretto for Debussy’s Orpheus Rex and an essay on synesthetics and Symbolism (the collection is edited by Marie Roux and Rod Hunt; it is unclear if either or both also translated).

Arguably the most emblematic figure in this anti-tradition is Alfred Jarry, partly because he transcended the modish, perfumed perversities of the Belle Époque to create work that was crude, provocative, incendiary in a way that found recurrent favour with the radical creators of the 20th century. The Pope’s Mustard-Maker (translated by Doug Skinner) is the last work Alfred Jarry finished before his death in 1907, a “bawdy three-act farce loosely based on the medieval legend of Pope Joan, with a huge cast and lively songs bubbling with rhymes and wordplay”. The cast includes “cardinals, tourists, salvationists, muleteers, bull carriers, porters, gondoliers, pontifical Zouaves, Scots Guards, Swiss Guards, little mustard-makers of the Sistine Chapel, the faithful, ballets of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, shameful apothecaries …”

Meanwhile, the purest exponent of the anti-tradition was Raymond Roussel, who exerted an enormous influence on avant-garde practice long after his death in 1933. So the rediscovery of a lost Roussel novel is a big ol’ deal. L’allée aux Lucioles, which would have been the author’s third novel, was part of a trove of Roussel papers found in a furniture warehouse in 1989. I’m not sure why it has taken 30 years for this to make it to English, but here we are: The Alley of Fireflies and Other Stories, translated by Mark Ford. Abandoned shortly before the start of World War One, the novel finds the author reflecting on European civilisation reaching back to the Enlightenment, but in a typically elliptical Rousselian way. In his biography Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, Ford describes the book thus:

Lavoisier … has developed a kind of non-melting ice that proves perfect for keeping wine cool in hot weather without the risk of diluting it. Since Voltaire is among the guests staying with Frederick, by way of compliment Lavoisier models this ice into little figurines that allude to a new chapter of Candide in which the adolescent Pangloss, then a chorister, is seduced by a ravishing Marquise. She prosecutes the affair under the watchful eyes of her jealous husband by dressing the fresh-faced philosopher in women’s clothes and claiming he is Amanda, the daughter of a poor relation…

And then things get weird.

There have been recent welcome stirrings from two presses who have done more than just about anyone to honour this alternative canon/anti-tradition, particularly of late 19th/early 20th century French works – Exact Change and Atlas. Both have, for example, published editions of Jarry and Roussel in the past.

Exact Change emerge after a long absence with Mount Analogue by René Daumal, translated by Roger Shattuck. “A touchstone of Surrealism, Pataphysics, and Gurdjieffian mysticism, Mount Analogue tells the story of an expedition to a mountain whose existence can only be deduced, not observed. Left unfinished (mid-sentence) at the author’s early death from tuberculosis in 1944 and first published posthumously in French in 1952, the book has inspired seekers of art and wisdom ever since – Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain is a loose adaptation”.

Meanwhile Atlas Press return with To Those Gods Beyond (translated by John Walker) by Giorgio Manganelli, part of the post-war Italian avant-garde along with Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino. “In Manganelli’s innumerable universes, beyond the gods we know or suspect we know is an endless array of other gods. Everything that is seemingly finite or known in our world becomes infinite and unknown. We die, we find ourselves among the other dead, and we die again, only to find ourselves somewhere even more unknown and with death still awaiting. We are both monarch and victim in a gothic simulation illuminated by sombre flashes of sardonic rhetoric that reveal only an astounding desolate wreck.” Yikes.

Anti-tradition in its drier, more cerebral mode is represented by The Penguin Book of Oulipo, edited by Philip Terry (who perhaps also partly translated it? Apologies, I’m not getting a very strong signal on that). Even among adherents of experimental literature, the post-war works issued under the banner of Oulipo aren’t for everyone. The movement’s stylistic work-outs and self-imposed restraints (e.g. Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style, or Georges Perec’s La disparition, famously written without the letter “e”) can seem like smug, bloodless parlour games. This edition combines the (largely French) works of Oulipo itself with earlier texts that work with similar restrictions.

This selection has already been far more Francophone than I had anticipated, so before we expand our linguistic horizons I will just mention Exposition by Nathalie Léger, which has just been issued by Les Fugitives in Amanda DeMarco’s translation. My interest was particularly piqued by its depiction of 19th century Italian-born courtesan Countess de Castiglione, who inspired the fantasies of aesthetes like Robert de Montesquiou, the Marchesa Casati and Ganna Walska, and has strayed into performance, film and contemporary art but has rarely been captured in fiction. Unless I am missing something there is nothing between a disguised appearance in Émile Zola’s His Excellency Eugène Rougon in 1876 and Léger’s novel, originally published in 2008 (Alexander Chee later enrolled the countess into a huge cast of Second Empire figures in The Queen of the Night, 2016). Castiglione’s notoriety begins with machinations at the Savoy court before moving on to France, where she became mistress to Napoleon III and intrigued for the cause of Italian unification; interesting enough in itself but of course it is the extraordinary photographs that the countess confected with Pierre-Louis Pierson up to and during her morbid, reclusive, half-mad decline that ensure her immortality. “Mysterious yet over-exposed, adored and despised in equal measure, Castiglione was a flamboyant aristocrat, the mistress of Napoleon III and a rumoured spy. Examining the myths around icons past and present, Léger meditates on the half-truths of portrait photography, reframing her own family history in the process.”

Death Mort Tod – A European Book of the Dead by Steve Finbow and Karolina Urbaniak is an odd and profoundly unsettling scrapbook of mortal reflections from throughout the continent, a kind of Eurovision replacing power ballads with free-form ruminations on death (read more about it here). With bureaucratic doggedness it covers every country in Europe, so here’s Liechtenstein with an enigmatic collage of decline and demise, there’s San Marino with cut-up reports of the deaths of race car drivers. The United Kingdom is represented by selections from the Moors Murders tapes, a transcript of evil so extreme as to be utterly unendurable.

The book’s entry for Poland is a dense Mitteleuropa network of references that begins with Ludwig Wittgenstein setting out, and failing, to save the moody, maudit poet Georg Trakl when he was stationed in Poland during the First World War. Issued in Poland before the war, A Death: Notes of a Suicide by Zalman Shneour (translated by Daniel Kennedy) operates in a similar atmosphere. Originally written in Yiddish, this “dark, expressionist love affair develops in a large, unnamed Eastern European city between the young, impoverished, and violently self-loathing teacher, Shloyme—and a hungry, spiteful, and unsettlingly sensual revolver…” It appears to express a particularly Eastern European Jewish mode of Nietzschean nihilism I recognise in another writer I have only recently come into contact with, Jacob Elias Poritzky.

From the same period and also from Wakefield – themselves great champions of the alternative canon – comes Samalio Pardulus by Otto Julius Bierbaum (translated by W. C. Bamberger). “Buried in an isolated castle on the outskirts of a city in the Albanian mountains, the wildly ugly painter of blasphemies, Samalio Pardulus, executes works too monstrous to bear viewing, and espouses a philosophy that posits a grotesque world that reflects the ravings of a dead, grotesque god. […] Samalio Pardulus describes the simultaneous descent and ascent of the titular anti-hero into a passionate perversion of Catholicism in which love and madness become one, as a dark, incestuous incubus settles into a doomed family.” So that sounds fun. And who do you get to illustrate such a “grotesque world”? Duh, it could only be Alfred Kubin.

Continuing our Austrian theme, we discover a missing link in Robert Musil’s early output, a publication that followed his first novel The Confusions of Young Törless in which he processed his traumatic boarding school experience. Originally published in 1911, Vereinigungen is a double edition of stories that deals extensively with Musil’s own double, his future wife Martha Marcovaldi. Perhaps appropriately this is available in double translations (this, as I have found, is the hazard with public domain works – if they are free for you to translate, they are free for anyone else to translate; it’s a double-edged sword). Genese Grill has translated the two stories as “The Completion of Love” and “The Temptation of Quiet Veronica” and the collection as Unions; Peter Wortsman offers us Intimate Ties comprising “The Culmination of Love” and “The Temptation of Silent Veronica”.

From the same incredibly fertile pre-World War One period, I make no apology for including my translation of Else Lasker-Schüler’s The Nights of Tino of Baghdad in this company. And I’m not even charging for it. Available free as a PDF with the Rixdorf Editions newsletter, according to some fragrant genius this is “an episodic fantasia, a heady journey through landscapes that author Else Lasker-Schüler had only explored in her mind.” I translated this short, intoxicating work of fiction in part as response to the long, sobering work of non-fiction which was my other Rixdorf contribution for this year, Antisemitism by Hermann Bahr. Originally published in 1894, it is a collection of interviews with Bahr’s contemporaries – everyone from Annie Besant to August Bebel – on the scourge of anti-Jewish hatred then taking on specifically racial and political form to replace the older, almost folk religious prejudice. Sadly, much of it reads like it could have been written last week.

In 1909 both Bierbaum and Bahr were included in Der Roman der XII, an “exquisite corpse” exercise in which a dozen authors successively contributed chapters to a novel, the gimmick being that the names weren’t attached to the chapters, and readers were encouraged to enter a competition to guess who wrote what. One of the other authors was Hanns Heinz Ewers, whose early life is an irresistible combination of drugs, polysexual escapades, travel to exotic locales and themes of horror and compulsion (and he is also credited as the first auteur film director). But he was almost 40 before he produced his first novel, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which also appeared in 1909. This and Vampire were the book ends of a trilogy that included the phenomenally successful Alraune. Here Side Real Press complete the trio with Ludwig Lewisohn’s translation which was issued in censored form in 1927, with the excised parts restored by Joe E. Bandel. This is a handsome edition compiled with evident passion, and includes source material as well as a stage play drawn from the same material. Like many of Ewers’s works, the first edition of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice came with a cover illustration by his brilliant artist wife, Ilna Ewers-Wunderwald. Her intensely intricate Jugendstil works were the subject of an exhibition in Berlin earlier this year; the original catalogue with text by Sven Brömsel is published in my translation by Zagava in a beautiful edition, The Art of Ilna Ewers-Wunderwald. Yes I am mentioning another project I worked on. I’m drunk on power! Somebody stop me!

Hanns Heinz Ewers’s later accommodation with the Nazis is a morality tale too complex to fully explore here, but the next three authors are also instructive of the ways in which Weimar vitality was abruptly stilled. Kurt Tucholsky was an implacable enemy of fascism and had already moved to Sweden in 1929, which inspired his best-loved work, Castle Gripsholm, here in a reissued translation. While it is great to see Tucholsky’s works available in English, and even better to have them translated by Michael Hofmann, what particularly commends this to our hearts is its satirical portrayal of Elisàr von Kupffer, the gay mystic who founded a two-man homoerotic order with partner Eduard von Mayer, building a temple thereto in Minusio, Switzerland – “Elisarion” – adorned with Kupffer’s paintings of naked, androgynous figures in idyllic settings. Here Kupffer becomes Polysander von Kuckers zu Tiesenhausen and Elisarion “Polysadrion”, transported to Copenhagen.

Tucholsky was a frenemy of Irmgard Keun, initially a champion, later a critic, accusing her of plagiarism for her most popular work, The Artificial Silk Girl, now reissued in Kathie von Ankum’s translation (although not credited; Jesus, c’mon Penguin). Like Gilgi, One of Us, also reissued this year (translated by Geoff Wilkes), it explores the elusive highs and habitual lows of liberated Weimar womanhood. Both were popular on first publication, but were unsurprisingly banned by the Nazis; Keun eventually went into exile, although she returned to Germany in mysterious circumstances after faking her suicide in 1940, and lived in generally perilous circumstances until 1982.

Friedo Lampe never left. Born in 1899, he was a little older than Keun but tragically his literary star was ascending just as the lights went out. Rediscovered and translated by Simon Beattie, his 1933 debut At the Edge of the Night is a stunningly evocative nocturne, an ambitiously digressive, vividly cinematic journey through a summer’s night in Bremen whose frank depictions of sexual difference are just part of its expansive embrace of life as it is actually lived. While it didn’t have the mass appeal of Keun, Lampe’s book didn’t have a chance to find the acclaim it deserved; conceived at the end of the Weimar Republic, the fact that it was published after the Nazis took power is remarkable enough in itself, its prohibition shortly thereafter hardly surprising. Lampe was gay, and like Ewers he stayed in Germany despite the evident danger. And like Ewers he didn’t make it out of the Third Reich alive; tragically Lampe was shot at the very end of the war in an apparent case of mistaken identity.

As always I am grateful to Twisted Spoon whose fine editions open up a whole half-continent of literature. Their translations of Eastern European works encompass both newly discovered titles reaching back to around the beginning of the 20th century, and contemporary works; they were one of the first English-language presses to issue the work of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, for example. Their output this year includes a new edition of the inter-war The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch (“Having become the ‘lowliest worm’ at the hands of his estranged wife, Helga, the Queen of Hells, Sternenhoch eventually attains an ultimate state of bliss and salvation through the most grotesque perversions”) by Ladislav Klíma, translated by Carleton Bulking and A User’s Manual by Jiří Kolář (translated by Ryan Scott) which combines collages with text that parodies the imperatives of communist rule.

Our last selection is not strictly speaking a work of translation but it is a vital linguistic study all the same. Paul Baker’s Fabulosa! concerns the rich heritage of the gay dialect Polari, which was subversively beamed into homes across Britain on the late 1960s radio show Around the Horne. I bow to no man in my love for Kenneth Williams and I can think of few more thrilling introductions than the words “Hello I’m Julian and this is my friend Sandy” with which Hugh Paddick would preface whatever enterprise he and Williams were embarked upon that week, from Bona Publishers to the Bona Gift Boutique (“Jule’ll follow you around and make suggestions, won’t you Jule?”). Much of their dialogue was encoded in Polari, allowing them to get away with things you are still unlikely to hear at prime time in unencrypted form. Baker also published the lexicon Fantabulosa! for anyone who doesn’t know their aris from their elbow.

Growing up in Australia, Halloween was something I only knew about from American movies rather than a matter of lived experience. As an adult I happened to be in New York at the end of October one year and, rube that I was, entirely underestimated just how big a goddam deal the Halloween parade is, and emerging out of a subway station and trying to make my way to a restaurant I found myself kettled by revellers, which triggered something close to a panic attack. My adopted home of Germany has a half-hearted, ersatz Halloween culture (saving most of its dressing up for Karneval/Fasching), but with the very real horror of soaring infection rates, even that will be on mute this year.

In short – and not to rain on anyone else’s parade – I’ve never really taken to Halloween. For me, the last day of October means one thing: the birthday of Natalie Clifford Barney, the great writer, aphorist and saloniste who recreated Lesbos on the Left Bank, the woman whose horseback prowess inspired admirer Remy de Gourmont to dub her “l’Amazone”, the lover immortalised in the fiction of Liane de Pougy, Renée Vivien and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus. If you’re just joining us, here is a quick primer of at least some of her manifold romantic interests and other connections.

Many years ago on a trip to Paris I sought out Barney’s former home on the rue Jacob. There wasn’t much to see, just the usual slightly forbidding heavy Parisian apartment building door, and it is probably just as well that Natalie’s secret garden wasn’t visible. Its spell could never be as potent as it was in my imagination, or for that matter in Un soir chez l’Amazone. Francesco Rapazzini’s 2001 book imagines Barney at home on the evening of her 50th birthday, as she gathers friends and frenemies who just happen to number among the most fascinating people between-the-wars Paris had to offer: Colette, Rachilde, Paul Morand, Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, André Germain, René Crevel, Natalie’s two lovers of the time, Romaine Brooks and Elisabeth de Gramont, and a new arrival who has her wondering whether she can turn this triangle into a quadrilateral arrangement – Oscar Wilde’s niece Dolly Wilde.

I mention this now because an outstanding English-language, spoken-word version of Rapazzini’s book is now available, in time for Barney’s birthday this year. A Night at the Amazon’s is voiced by Suzanne Stroh to stunning effect (she also translated from the French with Sally Hamilton). She switches between characters with miraculous dexterity, fully inhabiting the personae of long-dead party guests. I had never previously pondered what a drunken Djuna Barnes doing an imitation of Gertrude Stein might sound like, but I am confident that I now know. Literary giants both present and gossiped about emerge as vividly human, as if enjoying a Rumspringa before settling into the canon.

The utterly captivating voice work is accompanied by an evocative soundscape, and together they manage something even cinema can’t sustain for this long – the sense of actually being there, an enveloping intimacy that draws you through space and time, your awareness catching on snatches of conversation, gaining illicit ingress into the minds of passing guests and stealing away with their thoughts. The mix of characters is electric, at times combustive, dividing along lines of class, generation, gender, sexuality, nationality, sensibility. Even the help is fractious. With prudent fictional licence the author has telescoped events, filling out the guest list and bringing forward Natalie’s encounter with Dolly Wilde, for instance (which happened the following year). And maybe ageing Decadent provocateuse Rachilde didn’t actually sniff around the hostess’s bedroom, but I can certainly imagine her doing so. Her disdain for Colette also squares with the record. Here fiction reveals the greater truth of its subjects.

Woody Allen’s facile Midnight in Paris, which shares a time, location and even a couple of characters with Un soir chez l’Amazone, did at least offer one solid observation that is borne out here: no matter how far back you go, the golden age is even further back. In the mid-1920s we find that many of the characters still seem to inhabit, or long for, the opulence, hedonism and spectacle of the Belle Époque. When Marcel Proust is invoked, it is not as a monolithic edifice of Modernism, but a recently departed associate hovering neurasthenically in the minds of guests, one who passed through these very rooms, in fact, as Natalie relates. Her mind also casts back to lover Renée Vivien, who died in 1909. It is, after all, the night when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest and A Night at the Amazon’s is, in a sense, a ghost story.

So if your Halloween plans are on dry ice this year, or any time you want to be transported from your doomscrolling day, take off your mask and huddle up. You don’t even need to wash your hands if you don’t care to (but why is René Crevel taking so long in the bathroom?). Take a look here – yes it is that Large Shopping Platform, but the name at least is appropriate.

And I’ll be back soon-ish with a Bavarian interlude.

You didn’t see me.

I’m just going to leave these ten book selections here, but keep it to yourself. If you tell anybody they’ll be like “I don’t know what you think you saw, because James only does his book recommendations at the beginning and end of the year.” I’ll just deny it all, and they’ll think you’re losing your mind. You want that? You want people to think you’re crazy?

No, I didn’t think so.

In keeping with the season* this capsule collection focuses on travel, or at least a strong sense of place, book-ended by my city of birth and my city of residence. A recurring theme is writers making new lives for themselves away from their homelands, either by choice or necessity. This list also functions as tacit acknowledgement that our ongoing situation will prevent many of us from actually moving very far from where we currently dwell this year.

* the northern summer; I remember how annoying it was growing up in Australia when everyone on the top half of the world presumed their seasons were global. No, some of us were well acquainted with the two-bar heater come July. By way of compensation much of the country has, by northern European standards, at least nine months of summer a year.

Joyce Morgan: The Countess from Kirribilli

I grew up near Sydney Harbour. My childhood home overlooked a container terminal, not at all the sexy part of the harbour that you see on postcards, but nonetheless a compelling tableau which fired my young imagination. I would watch ships inch in and out of port and reflect that everyone, everything on board had seen more of the world than I had. Had I been born somewhat earlier to a shipping magnate perhaps I too might have grown up in the prime harbour frontage of Kirribilli like a certain Mary Beauchamp (1866-1941). A cousin of Katherine Mansfield, in later life she would be a sister-in-law to Bertrand Russell and mistress to H. G. Wells. But it was after travelling through Europe and marrying a Junker count that she became known as Elizabeth von Arnim. She had married into a storied family; as with the Mendelssohns, it’s extremely difficult to keep track of which Arnim is which (two of them turn up in entirely different circumstances here, for instance). It was on and inspired by the count’s estate in what is now Poland that our heroine penned the work that secured her reputation, the highly popular Elizabeth and her German Garden. All of this Joyce Morgan recounts in The Countess from Kirribilli.

Charmian Clift: Mermaid Singing (buy through Bookshop.org: UK/US)

Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston moved in decidedly more bohemian circles. Shortly after the Second World War the married couple left Sydney and, after a spell in London, ended up on Kalymnos, one of the Greek islands that was all but emptied around this time with many residents ending up in – Australia. Johnston and Clift continued to swim against the tide, moving onto Hydra before it was discovered by international travellers, as captured in companion volume Peel Me a Lotus (UK/US). It offers the same acute, lyrical observations, but with an increasing note of sadness; Clift would commit suicide in 1969. Clift and Johnston, and Hydra, were later better known for their association with Leonard Cohen, but honestly that was one of the least of the attractions when I visited the island. Friends have tried to convert me to his music but it just won’t take, and it is now consigned to the “things that James has tried and never needs to try again” along with natural wine, olives, Wes Anderson movies, zip-lining, musicals and literally any spectator sport.

Alicia Foster: Nina Hamnett

God knows I love Nina Hamnett. I love her art, I love her lust for life, I love her filthy, hard-won wisdom, I love her fearless independence, I love the tales of her bohemian exploits – down but not out in Paris and London. Why she isn’t better known I couldn’t say; her work has become more or less invisible, and the last book about her was Denise Hooker’s 1986 Queen of bohemia (which is fine as an introduction, but overly reliant on the artist’s own memoirs). So the news of both a major retrospective of Hamnett’s work at Charleston (the Bloomsbury exclave once home to Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant) and a new book could not be more welcome. Alicia Foster’s Nina Hamnett is part of a series of compact monographs of women artists issued by Eiderdown Books, which also includes studies of Lee Miller, Eileen Agar and the magnificently dandyish Marlow Moss.

John Hopkins: Tangier Diaries (UK/US)

This reissue takes us to the Moroccan port where cheap living and the unique administrative anomaly of the international zone fostered a spirit of tolerance and hedonism. While the “Interzone” formally ended in 1956, that freedom persisted, supporting a bohemian community of foreigners. The diaries of English writer John Hopkins, who died earlier this year, offer a clear-eyed account of the city and its famous inhabitants and visitors, including his mentor Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. “Tangier is a lax place,” notes Hopkins. “Too much dope and too many servants. Food is fresh, booze is cheap and rents are low. In other words, paradise!”

Melanie C. Hawthorne: Women, Citizenship, and Sexuality: The Transnational Lives of Renée Vivien, Romaine Brooks, and Natalie Barney ( US)

You may recall Melanie C. Hawthorne as a translator of Rachilde and biographer of duellist, writer and sculptor Gisèle d’Estoc, a cross-dressing bisexual anarchist. The featured trio of her latest book will be familiar to long-term readers (and if not, here’s a fictional window into their world, and a primer on their complex, interlocking relations). In this academic text, Hawthorne shows how the three creative professionals from the US (Barney and Brooks) and Britain (Vivien) used the privilege bestowed by their wealthy families to explore the world and script new lives for themselves in France, but also the limits that their gender placed on even that privilege. “Drawing on the discourse of jurisprudence, the history of the passport, and original archival research on all three women, the books tells the story of women’s evolving claims to citizenship in their own right.”

Adrien Bosc: Outrageous Horizon (UK)

French writer Adrien Bosc’s Outrageous Horizon (translated by Frank Wynne) is a fictional rendering of events covered in the 2018 book Escape from Vichy, by Eric T. Jennings. In 1941, the Paul-Lemerle was the last ship to leave Marseilles before the port was blocked by the Vichy regime. The Martinique-bound voyage reads like a Modernist bottle episode, with passengers including exiled German writer Anna Seghers, French Surrealist André Breton and his wife, painter Jacqueline Lamba, along with French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and Russian revolutionary Victor Serge. But there are equally compelling characters to discover both before and after the voyage, including the American journalist Varian Fry, whose bravery helped thousands to escape from the Nazis, and Martinique writer Suzanne Césaire, whose encounter with Breton led her to develop the concept of Afro-Surrealism.

Thomas Sparr: German Jerusalem (UK/US)

This year marks a century since the establishment of the Jerusalem district of Rehavia, a planned, orderly contrast to the contested labyrinthine of the almost adjacent Old City. Along with nearby Talbiya, it later became a magnet for German-speaking Jews fleeing persecution in Europe, including philosophers Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. It was in Rehavia, for instance, that the exiled Else Lasker-Schüler discovered the reality of the “Orient”, a realm she had long romanticised in her writing; she died here in 1945. Thomas Sparr’s study (translated by Stephen Brown) also offers a welcome introduction to writer Mascha Kaléko, who was starting to enjoy popular success for her poetry just as the Nazis took over. Although she had contact with Lasker-Schüler and other bohemian writers in interwar Berlin, Kaléko spent years of exile in the US before arriving in Jerusalem in 1959. Considering – well – everything that has happened in the region in the last century, it is also interesting to note that Rehavia was the birthplace of Brit Shalom, a movement through which Buber, Scholem and others voiced opposition to the Zionist project. Lasker-Schüler’s solution of sending Jews and Arabs off to a fun fair may have been slightly more whimsical, but it shared Brit Shalom’s far-sighted concern that simply introducing newcomers and displacing inhabitants would result in calamity.

Gesa Stedman, Stefano Evangelista (eds.): Happy in Berlin? (UK/US)

To an extent, the residents of Rehavia were seeking to recreate the intellectual openness and cultural vitality of Weimar Berlin, the setting for our last three selections. Happy in Berlin? is a modestly scaled exhibition currently running at Berlin’s Literaturhaus, which examines English writers who gravitated to the German capital in the 1920s and early 1930s. Christopher Isherwood may well be the first name that comes to mind here, and it is Christopher and his kind (including W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender) who dominate the exhibition, but the catalogue is a more rounded and nuanced study. We learn for instance that Berlin offered the best opportunities to view cutting edge cinema at the time, which proved an influence on the filmmaking activities of H. D. and Bryher after their visits to the city. Other writers featured include Vita Sackville-West’s camp brother Eddie, Wyndham Lewis, who rejected the “buggers’ paradise” beloved of Isherwood and his friends and succumbed to the allure of Hitler, and footnotes like Helen D’Albernon, an ambassador’s wife and Sargent subject who gave lavish parties but found at one such event that her distinctly ancien shepherdess costume struck a bum note in the fractious city.

Curt Corrinth: Potsdamer Platz (UK/US)

You would be forgiven for drawing a blank at the name Curt Corrinth. His 1919 novella Potsdamer Platz is best known for the accompanying illustrations by Paul Klee while the text itself reads like a Drunk History retelling of a Félicien Rops etching. The titular Berlin square, which in the Weimar era was a frenetic junction where two rail termini constantly disgorged goggle-eyed provincials into the heart of the teeming capital, becomes the centre of an orgiastic liberation movement, a pornocracy that seeks to supplant the young republic. Translated by W. C. Bamberger, Potsdamer Platz is best approached as a demented, flawed curio rather than a lost classic. But it is particularly striking how Corrinth, evidently in isolation, mirrored the messianic insanity of the “Inflation Saints” – Ludwig Christian Haeusser and the other wandering prophets who were starting to preach a gospel of violently libidinous salvation to traumatised post-war Germany around the same time.

Barbara Hales: Black Magic Woman: Gender and the Occult in Weimar Germany(UK/US)

This persistence of primal, arcane forces at a time of rapidly advancing mechanisation was typical of a city that attracted both Albert Einstein and Aleister Crowley, in a polarised period that embraced both the irrationality of Dada and the sobriety of the New Objectivity. Barbara Hales’s academic text investigates Weimar archetypes such as the New Woman, whose wilful independence could be read by the misogynistic observer as a dark force akin to witchcraft. “Whether fictive or historical, the occult woman’s supernatural ability to tap into an unseen world serves to reconfigure female identity in a time of social and political crisis in the in the popular Weimar imagination: from its traditional conception of woman as nurturing mother and demure housewife to a beastly monster, who threatens the enfeebled and emasculated post-World War One psyche.”

OK, I’m out.

Remember, you didn’t see me.

Berlin is cold and dark, there’s snow on the ground and the supermarkets are full of Lebkuchen and testy shoppers, so … it must be time for Secret Satan! Here we go with our annual serving of books with boho/queer/decadent/surreal/occult themes, and hopefully some surprises. I’ve been doing this since 2017 and while I enjoy selecting the titles, it’s an idea that has grown out of all proportion; something once fun risks becoming gruelling and overlong (this is known as Series Five Arrested Development Syndrome, or SFADS). They’re also getting a little repetitive as I find myself exploring the same furrows, bound by the limitations of my own tastes. Plus, I’m out of touch with publishing schedule rhythms since my own modest endeavours in the field came to a close last year. So, fair warning: this may be the last Secret Satan. But hey! Let’s not bum this party out before it’s even started.

As ever, please consider buying from independent book retailers, from Bookshop.org, or the publishers themselves. I have also just got my first order from Asterism, a great initiative that brings together some of the most interesting small presses working today. More on that below.

Our first book makes a smooth segue from my last post, which concerned the Munich villa of artist Franz Stuck. Secessions (eds. Ralph Gleis and Ursula Storch; no indication of translator) is the catalogue to an exhibition about the Secession movements in three cities, and their most emblematic representatives. The first was Munich in 1892 (Stuck) followed by Vienna (1897, Gustav Klimt), and finally Berlin (1898, Max Liebermann). Recreating these progressive breakthroughs in the sites of their inception (mostly; soz Munich), the exhibition recently wound up in Berlin and will continue next year in Vienna. And for more on the creative energies that made Vienna a leader in art and so many other areas, we have Richard Cockett’s Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World: “Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens.” As well as the fabled, familiar fin-de-siècle, Cockett’s study shows the innovations of the city continuing between the wars. And it is here that we locate Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase. Anita Berber in Wien 1922 (Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy. Anita Berber in Vienna 1922; ed. Magdalena Vuković). While only textually accessible to the German-speakers, this is a handsome, richly illustrated edition. It covers an episode that we looked at last year, when Anita Berber and dance partner Sebastian Droste upended the Austrian capital with scandal both onstage and off. It features numerous images for which the pair posed for the great Viennese photographer Madame d’Ora (Dora Kallmus), an honour they shared, improbably, with the last Empress of Austria. Zita became consort in the middle of World War One and died the year the Berlin Wall fell, by which time she “had herself become a fairy-tale figure, a totem of imperial nostalgia”. That’s from Larry Wolff’s The Shadow of the Empress, in which the decline, fall and spectral afterlife of the Habsburgs is interwoven with the genesis of Richard Strauss’s opera Die Frau ohne Schatten. The libretto was by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who was a friend and keen supporter (along with his frustrated admirer Stefan George) of Leopold Andrian, grandson of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer and member of the Young Vienna group. Andrian’s psyche was a battleground between his faith (Catholic) and orientation (gay), as reflected in his 1895 novella Der Garten der Erkenntnis, in which we share the thoughts of aristocrat Erwin, including his attraction to an impoverished former classmate. It is difficult to overstate the impact of this, one of the key German-language texts of this era, and I was shocked to discover it had never been published in English. Thanks, then, to Francesca Bugliani Knox for translating The Garden of Knowledge and to Studio Will Dutta for this beautiful hand-finished (limited) edition. This slender volume remained Andrian’s sole literary output, more or less; as the 20th century began he embarked on a career in diplomacy.

To be – as Leopold Andrian was – gay, European and aware in 1895 was to live with a vivid sense of peril, and it is another same-sex affair across class lines in the shadow of Oscar Wilde’s trial that year that dominates Tom Crewe’s novel The New Life. It also makes the important point that when you enter conventional marriage as a cover for your sexuality, you’re actually ruining two lives. The titular anti-hero of Laura Lee’s Wilde Nights & Robber Barons: The Story of Marcel Schwabe was sent away to Australia during Wilde’s trial; he, too, had had an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas and was otherwise enmeshed in numerous schemes and scandals of the day, emerging as something of a swishy Flashman. Honestly, it’s a crazy story; try here for a primer. And naturally Wilde’s trial looms large in the reissued Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s, the utterly essential study of the Yellow Decade; I rave at greater length about Matthew Sturgis’s 1995 book here. (Aside: a few years ago I caught an exhibition that included the actual calling card that kicked it all off, in which the Marquess of Queensberry denounced Oscar Wilde for “posing as a somdomite” (sic), although so indistinct was his enraged scrawl he might just as well have accused him of peeing in a submarine.) Meanwhile Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Past explores the often reactionary politics that dwelt within the heart of a movement that prided itself on its apolitical elevation from the concerns of the chattering classes. Alex Murray’s study reveals the quixotic ideologies of the likes of Swinburne, Yeats, Wilde, Symons, Machen, and the feverish jingoism of the two women writers who published under the name Michael Field.

More distaff Decadence in Extraordinary Aesthetes: Decadents, New Women, and Fin-de-Siècle Culture (ed. Joseph Bristow), which highlights the neglected work of writers like Amy Levy, Ella D’Arcy, Mabel Dearmer (a writer and illustrator who provides the outstanding cover image) along with changing male views of modern womanhood. Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives is a more accessible study with extensive thematic overlap. Author Jad Adams celebrates “pioneers of a new style, living lives of lurid adventure and romance, as well as experiencing poverty, squalor, disease, and unwanted pregnancy” and notes that “A third of the writers of the Yellow Book, the outstanding literary and artistic journal which published in the middle years of the 1890s, were women.” Across the Channel we find the wonderful Rachilde, card-carrying cross-dresser (for real) whose works combine gender sedition, diabolic forces and a whole Index Librorum Prohibitorum of other outré themes. Available in English for the first time (translated by Brian Stableford), her gothic, supernatural novel The Princess of Darkness (1896) is “a frightening treasure that any connoisseur of perversity is bound to savor”. Rachilde issued the book under a male pseudonym before reviewing it under her own name and, hilariously, trashing it. This brings us to her close companion Jean Lorrain. About a decade ago, I was lamenting that there was only one book by “Sodom’s ambassador to Paris” available in English, but now we have quite a selection, thanks in large part to Snuggly. The latest additions to their roster are his first book The Blood of the Gods (1882, translated by Jacob Rabinowitz), a proto-Decadent collection of stories in verse, and The Turkish Lady (no indication of translator). This is a trio of stories whose title tale (1898) was originally published with narrative photos in something like a fotonovela style. Rachilde and Lorrain were united not just by friendship and scandal – they were also both celebrity spokesmodels for Vin Mariani, a “tonic” wine reputed to aid productivity and wellbeing, a fact not unrelated to its high cocaine content. It enlivened the fun-de-siècle revels of everyone from the most disreputable bohemians to Pope Leo XIII. Yet another Vin Mariani shill was French writer Joséphin Péladan, who was also a self-proclaimed “sandwich man of the Beyond” and descendant of Assyrian kings. Son of Prometheus: The Life and World of Joséphin Péladan is the first major study in English of this singular figure who “authored over a hundred novels and monographs in an attempt to bring about the spiritual regeneration of society through mythopoetic art underpinned by esoteric thought.” Author Sasha Chaitow has written extensively on Péladan, and this volume also includes a foreword by Per Faxneld, who certainly knows his way around this field.

Faxneld is the editor, along with Johan Nilsson, of Satanism: A Reader, which reaches back to the mid-19th century in its survey of a phenomenon too often confused with the imbecilic mummery of devil worship. “Ranging from the esoteric to the anti-clerical, countercultural, and political, the texts span a wide variety of genres, from poetry and polemical religious tracts to ritual instructions and internet FAQ’s.” There is contemporary commentary to accompany these texts, which come from authors including Helena Blavatsky, history’s first self-proclaimed Satanist Stanisław Przybyszewski and – yes, you know he’s coming, there he is … he’s here! – Aleister Crowley. Here he is again trying to sneak in through the back door of a roman à clef, Ethel Archer’s The Hieroglyph. The author of The Book of Plain Cooking dishes up something considerably spicier in this, her sole novel which encompasses “her relationship with the magus Crowley and the various guises he took as poetic mentor, psychonaut, and mystical philosopher”. And Tobias Churton continues his impressively thorough survey of Crowley’s global adventures by detailing The Great Beast’s dark doings in the City of Light. Aleister Crowley in Paris finds Crowley joining the Golden Dawn’s Inner Order, proposing to Eileen Gray and staging “a demonstra­tion for artistic and sexual freedom at Oscar Wilde’s tomb”. In Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States we rediscover Black Rosicrucian Paschal Beverly Randolph, a practitioner of the occult carnality that Crowley would later espouse (author Lara Langer Cohen offers an intriguing introduction to Randolph here). Our subterranean journey takes in “Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies”, with a consistent focus on the uses of space (space, of a different kind, is the place for Afrofuturism, a “lens used to imagine a more empowering future for the Black community through music, art, and speculative fiction.”) Around the same time we find the Oneida Community, one of the many competing sects in 19th-century upstate New York. In An Assassin in Utopia, Susan Wels relates the story of this idealistic society/sex cult and of one frustrated member, incel malcontent Charles Julius Guiteau (you know you’re an incel when you can’t get laid in a sex cult) – and a depressingly familiar pathway to violence, in this case the assassination of US President James Garfield.

Admirers of libidinal 20th-century British occultist Austin Osman Spare are alerted to the reissue of the standard Spare biography by Phil Baker and A Bestiary of Austin Osman Spare, a slim edition accompanying an exhibition at the Viktor Wynd Museum in London (available at the discount price of £6.66, because of course) plus a new edition of Spare’s key text, The Book of Pleasure. The combination of words and images in which Spare sets out his esoteric philosophy is challenging; even Phil Baker calls it “almost unreadable by modern standards … vexing to read, like being told a boring dream”. Context always helps, and this edition comes with additional material including an afterword that analyses Spare’s “Sacred Alphabet”, which was in turn remarkably similar to a system of private signs devised by 19th-century French medium Hélène Smith. In Hélène Smith: Occultism and the Discovery of the Unconscious, Claudie Massicotte explores the life of a figure increasingly viewed in the context of outsider art rather than simply the credibility or otherwise of spiritualist practice. Jennifer Higgie’s The Other Side details other women producing art across dimensions, “from the twelfth-century mystic, composer and artist Hildegard of Bingen to the nineteenth-century English spiritualist Georgiana Houghton, whose paintings swirl like a cosmic Jackson Pollock; the early twentieth-century Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint […] and the British surrealist and occultist, Ithell Colquhoun.”

The Dance of Moon and Sun: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (eds. Judith Noble, Tilly Craig and Victoria Ferentinou) is apparently “the first critical examination of her diverse legacy” (really? genuinely asking here; I thought there had been at least one but that could be the expired eggnog talking) in which contributors “explore themes of authorship and agency, Colquhoun’s drawing practice, her Celtic motifs, British Surrealism and alchemy.” Her American contemporary Paulina Peavy was a compelling figure and one I’ve been keen to explore further; she claimed her works were guided by a UFO who came to her during a séance, and she would paint wearing special masks for which she patented a face glue. Laura Whitcomb’s Paulina Peavy: Etherean Channeler is the first major work dedicated to this singular creative force, who early on espoused what she called “conscious surrealism”. The environments in which one of the great 20th century Surrealists lived and created in Britain, France, Spain and Mexico are the subject of Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington, an intimate view from family member Joanna Moorhead, who previously penned a biography of Carrington. The artist’s close companion and collaborator Remedios Varo is the subject of a new academic study. Remedios Varo: Science Fictions (eds. Caitlin Haskell and Tere Arcq) explores “the integral relationship between Varo’s layered interests—in alchemy, architecture, magic, mysticism, philosophy, and science—and her beguiling technical approach to art making”. If nothing else, Varo is responsible for the artsiest pharmaceutical ads imaginable – her 1960s images for Bayer are representations of various maladies in an uncompromisingly occult style (please consult your alchemist if symptoms persist). But for some reason Leonora Carrington always forms a double act in my head with Dorothea Tanning; forthcoming book Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning covers the extraordinary sweep of the American artist’s life. Author Amy Lyford covers not just Tanning’s art but her endeavours in literature and film as well, in a career often filed under “Surrealism”, although she herself said “it disgusts me to be lumped in with all of these so-called Surrealist painters.”

Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable (ed. Jennifer R. Gross) is a major new study combining text and images from a polymath creator who is impossible to pin down to a medium or movement. Through her persona, connections and output, Mina Loy offers us numerous pathways. Here she is, for instance, alongside Beatrice Wood, Clara Tice and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in Radicals and Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern by Lottie Whalen, “the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the tone for the rise of New York as the twentieth-century capital of modern culture.” That quartet features in the brief yet highly consequential story of the World War One-era journal The Blind Man which re-emerged recently in a rerun of the endless debate around authorship of the radical Dada work Fountain (Duchamp v. Freytag-Loringhoven, round 176). Emily Hage’s Dada Magazines: The Making of a Movement examines The Blind Man and other publications, and a brief detour of these forking paths takes us to another study of the material legacy of Dada, The Dada Archivist: Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters and Berlin Dada by Stina Barchan. Following our thread back to Loy at the centre of the labyrinth and then groping back out into the darkness to a slightly menacing roar in the distance we come to Futurism & Europe: The Aesthetics of a New World (eds. Fabio Benzi and Renske Cohen Tervaert) which “examines for the first time the many interconnections between Futurism and other European avant-gardes as varied as the Bauhaus in Germany, De Stijl in the Netherlands, Omega Workshops in Britain, Constructivism in Russia and Esprit Nouveau in France”. Loy was one of a surprising number of women who ventured into the unwelcoming terrain of Futurism. My favourite is probably the brilliant Valentine de Saint-Point, who came up with her own Futurist manifesto (which begins: “Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn.” What’s not to love?). In Marisa Mori and the Futurists: A Woman Artist in an Age of Fascism, Jennifer S. Griffiths introduces us to another woman artist who embraced the dynamism and optimism of early Futurism – not only tracing aircraft in flight on her canvases but flying herself in early two-seater planes. She broke with the Futurists as they moved closer to Mussolini and she was more or less wiped from the narrative of the movement. Because – surprise! – fascists ruin everything.

Amrit Kaur knew it; Italian writer Livia Manera Sambuy went In Search of Amrit Kaur (translator Todd Portnowitz) after coming across a photo of the Indian royal with an intriguing caption. “It claims that the Punjabi princess sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp where she died within a year.” Not all of this will turn out to be true. Nancy Cunard, Martha Gellhorn and Sylvia Townsend Warner knew it. They join other subjects electrified by the Spanish Civil War and the Republican cause in Sarah Watling’s Tomorrow Perhaps the Future. And Peter Feuchen knew it. The Danish adventurer and committed anti-fascist is the subject of Reid Mitenbuler’s Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age. The extraordinary Irving Penn cover image shows Freuchen, alongside his wife Dagmar Cohn, in a fur coat made from a polar bear he killed in Greenland. Feuchen spent many years in Greenland and was deeply enmeshed in and respectful of Inuit culture. The white sheen of the island in maps, and its outsized scale in the Mercator projection has captured many an imagination. In advance of Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s 1960s journey from Togo to the Arctic island we find another West African adventurer in Philippe Soupault’s slim novella The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle (translated by Justin Vicari). “Inspired by a Liberian schoolmate’s sudden departure for Greenland on a whim and his subsequent disappearance into that distant country, Soupault imagines his alter ego’s adventures as entries in a journal both personal and fictional. Adopted by an Inuit tribe, Pirouelle drifts from one encounter to another, from one casual murder to another, until his life of liberty and spontaneity leads him to stasis at the edge of existence.” Philippe Soupault is one of those names you often find in a conga line of between-the-wars luminaries without (if you’re anything like me) being able to definitively place them. This is in part explained by a dearth of texts available in English, so all credit to publisher Wakefield (who have also added to their impressive series of Marcel Schwob rediscoveries with the essay collection Spicilege, translated by Alex Andriesse). Moving from the Surrealist Soupault to the “counter-Surrealist” René Daumal, we alight upon an intriguing relaunch. Many years ago in Sydney, back in a time when you could stumble on a mystery without instantly googling it away, I found a second-hand book by Patti Smith in a tiny, unusual format with foil stamp lettering. I had recently discovered her music but didn’t even know she issued books, so the whole thing was an intriguing enigma, and the small object seemed charged with a magic that resided just beyond my conscious awareness. Only many years later did I piece it all together: this was one of a series of books by Hanuman, which began in 1986; the press operated out of the Hotel Chelsea in New York but had its small-format books printed in India. The short texts, which covered the counterculture past and present, are now being reissued. From the first series comes René Daumal’s The Lie of the Truth (trans: Philip Powrie), a feisty rumination on falsehood. As it happens, Patti Smith is a great admirer of Daumal and his “science of imaginary solutions”, in particular his master work Mount Analogue. In his own day, Daumal came into conflict with André Breton – usually a good indication of character.

René Crevel was similarly at odds with Breton; his sexuality couldn’t fail to provoke the homophobic pontiff of Surrealism. Crevel’s bizarre 1929 novel Are You All Crazy? (translated by Sue Boswell) takes us from bohemian Paris via Davos (where the tubercular Crevel sought treatment) before winding up in Berlin, where we encounter Dr Optimus Cerf-Mayer – a grotesque parody of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Naturally you remember René Crevel from his habit of smoking opium in a submarine in Toulon with lesbian princess Violette Murat, and this brings us neatly to the brilliant photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer, who captured Murat and others in the port city. Take a look at this delightful video in which she recalls hanging out with Jean Cocteau as he cruised sailors (and smoked opium). Her candid studies of this time are recorded in albums held by the Tate, a stupendous, cornucopious selection of between-the-wars bohos, raging queens and other Flowers favourites – Bunny Roger, Edward Burra (“Lady Bureaux”), Augustus John, Bryher, Kenneth Macpherson, Jimmie Daniels, Brian Howard, William Seabrook [breathes into paper bag]. The photographer’s own tale is finally told in Thoroughly Modern: The Pioneering Life of Barbara Ker-Seymer, Photographer, and Her Brilliant Bohemian Friends by Sarah Knights. “Ker-Seymer was prefigurative in the way she lived her life as a bisexual woman and in her contempt for racism, misogyny and homophobia. Fiercely independent, for much of her life she rejected the idea of family, preferring her wide set of creative friends.” Then, naturally, she gave up photography and opened a laundrette and made a big success of it and I LOVE HER. More singular destinies in Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories which together support author Diarmuid Hester’s thesis that “places make us”. The journey includes destinations such as E. M. Forster’s Cambridge, Josephine Baker’s Paris, Claude Cahun’s Jersey and James Baldwin’s Provence. And not just places on a map, but the actual spaces in which their occupants lived out a freedom frequently denied them elsewhere. The evocation of queer space in Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris (eds. Simonetta Fraquelli and Cindy Kang) has something decidedly current about it, from the bisexual lighting of the cover image to the confidence of the imagery within. “Laurencin’s feminine yet sexually fluid aesthetic defined 1920s Paris, and her work as an artist and designer met with high demand, with commissions by Ballets Russes and Coco Chanel, among others. Her romantic relationships with women inspired homoerotic paintings that visualized the modern Sapphism of contemporary lesbian writers like Natalie Clifford Barney.” And in a new edition of Barney’s The One Who Is Legion we are confronted with a true anomaly of her oeuvre. It is her only novel, the only book she issued in English (rather than her preferred French) and her most consistent engagement with modernism. It concerns a suicide who returns as “a genderless being with no memory of a pervious life, she/he is merged with the One. […] Now in a noncorporeal state, A.D. is able to turn aside from carnality, becoming ‘legion’ – that is, part of everyone.” (Suzanne Rodriguez).

The writers and publishers issuing these rediscovered works and thoughtful reappraisals of the past are doing utterly commendable work, which is more vital than ever in the face of the cretinous trolls driving our exhausting culture wars. Three new books illuminate the history of drag, two covering New York (Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City by Elyssa Maxx Goodman and the first-person testimony of Craig Olsen’s P.S. Burn This Letter Please), plus Drag: A British History. The home of the panto dame has proved surprisingly hospitable to cross-dressing entertainers (not always, of course), and Jacob Bloomfield’s study locates drag as “an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture.” Jac Jemc’s inventive Empty Theatre novelises a familiar double act: the gothic burlesque of Empress Elisabeth (subject of a post earlier in the year – this is what I mean by furrows!) and the Wagnerian escapism of her cousin Ludwig II of Bavaria, living out his sexuality in the shadows of his fantasy castles. Another gay king reigns (in his own head, at least) over The Story of the Paper Crown (translator: Frank Garrett). Polish author Józef Czechowicz was better known as a poet, and has never been previously available in English. It is difficult to believe that this dazzlingly inventive book is 100 years old; in it we encounter “Henryk, a sensitive young man who, through philosophical debates, sex, religious visions, and febrile fantasies, undertakes a journey whose ultimate purpose is to come to terms with his homosexuality as well as to build a foundation for an authentic life.” This was an outcome sadly denied pre-Raphaelite artist Simeon Solomon, who was arrested for cottaging and eventually broken by prison and drink. Less familiar than his canvases and drawings are his written works, including prose poems, correspondence, and a “one-act farce on the erection of Cleopatra’s Needle”, which are gathered in Collected Writings. This is another title from Snuggly, clearly Secret Satan’s MVP. Their books, plus the Czechowicz (publisher Sublunary), the Hanuman reissues and our old favourite Spurl, as well as numerous other interesting publishers are available through a new(-ish) joint initiative Asterism. You can order directly from their online bookstore – I recently got my first dispatch from them, and quicker than most suppliers in the US can manage. Their line-up offers a wide variety of inventive, sometimes challenging works from small presses with a sense of mission and passion. More than just a platform, this is a little model of hope, a reminder that individual expression can, indeed should co-exist with collective endeavour: we are alone, we are not alone.

To Be Seen: Queer Lives 1900–1950 (eds. Mirjam Zadoff and Karolina Kühn) takes us to Germany, from the Wilhelmine era to the post-World War Two reconstruction period. Along with private individuals, this volume covers the equivocal records of pioneers such as Claire Waldoff, Elisàr von Kupffer, and Magnus Hirschfeld. The good doctor Hirschfeld appears again in Jeffrey Schneider’s Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Emancipation in Imperial Germany, which explores soldier fetishisation, “an underground sexual economy of male prostitution as well as a political project to exploit the army’s prestige for queer emancipation.” It quotes from my edition of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Berlin’s Third Sex, the first English translation from Hans Ostwald’s visionary “Metropolis Documents” series – one of the most comprehensive studies of urban experience ever undertaken. I have long been puzzled that there hasn’t been more interest in the Metropolis Documents so the appearance in English of another volume, Ten Life Histories (translated by Stephen Carruthers) is a welcome development. Wilhelm Hammer’s 1905 text examines the lives of Kontrollmädchen – prostitutes registered with the Berlin police – in a pathologising approach familiar from the author’s study of Berlin lesbians, the only one of Ostwald’s series to be banned. I realise early 20th-century German publishing conventions may not be a matter of unending fascination for all, but I was intrigued to see the arrival of Siegfried the Wrestler: The Wilhelmine World of a Colportage Novel. Kolportage was the name given to the door-to-door sale of books in instalments; originally this included all kinds of literature, but later tended toward less sophisticated fare which was considered morally questionable. Author Peter S. Fisher notes that in current scholarship, patronising dismissals by middle-class opponents of this “trash” form are easier to find than responses from their – often working-class – readers. German writer Klabund (Alfred Henschke) emerged from Munich bohemian circles; he had his own moral battles to fight, facing accusations of obscenity and lèse-majesté. Here the perennially ill author, who died in Davos in 1928, delivers something feverishly akin to the Czechowicz and Crevel works noted above (all three writers died in their thirties). Spook (1922; translated by Jonah Lubin) is a “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” and also features a magnate draining the blood of his son to gain eternal life (sorry! I’m getting mixed up – that was from the news).

“Pablo Picasso,” insisted Jonathan Richman, “was never called an asshole.” Author Claire Dederer might disagree; in Monsters she considers case studies including Richard Wagner, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen and Norman Mailer as she seeks to answer the eternal question – can you hate the artist and love the art? Picasso joins an eclectic cast including Mascha Kaléko, Gustaf Gründgens, Theodor Adorno, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller in Love in a Time of Hate (translated by Simon Pare). The format of Florian Illies’s latest book will be familiar to anyone who read the author’s 1913; it has the same dense simultaneity, the same acceleration toward doom, the same weighting toward German names. The text swoops down on a subject for a few paragraphs – sometimes just one – before shifting elsewhere, only to return pages or chapters later. But where 1913 walked us through a year before war, here we have a whole decade of rolling anticipation, focusing on the conjunctions of creative professionals in the shadow of the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of the Third Reich. Nin and Miller also feature in Dirty Books by Barry Reay and Nina Attwood, the story of Obelisk Press and its evolution into the Olympia Press. Both outfits provided a kind of literary laundering service, taking the profits from erotica and putting it into challenging modernist works. “From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The books were written by young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists, many anonymously. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided.” The name Olympia Press, by the way, came from Édouard Manet’s scandalous 1860s canvas Olympia, which also inspired Michel Leiris’s 1981 The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat, to which Tomoé Hill now responds in her debut, Songs for Olympia (another title available through Asterism). A response to a response may sound a little … removed. Yet this is a stimulating confrontation with Manet, Olympia (actually Victorine), Leiris, and her own biography, in a profoundly personal panel discussion entwined with memory, desire and scent: how would Victorine smell if she stepped out of her frame?

Thanks for reading; I hope you’ve found something special for yourself and/or the twisted sophisticates of your acquaintance.