“Charles Cros was a being miraculously gifted in every way, a strangely personal and charming poet, a true scientist, a disconcerting fantasist.” —Alphonse Allais
Charles Cros and Émile Goudeau were quintessential Bohemian poets of the 1880s. Cros also experimented with the phonograph and color photography; Goudeau founded the Hydropathes, who met to declaim poetry while not drinking water. Cros and Goudeau’s only collaboration was a series of five exuberant stories published in 1880, which satirized such hot topics as divorce and capital punishment with bawdy humor and wild flights of fancy. All five stories are included here, plus four solo stories by Cros that complete the series, translated and annotated by Doug Skinner.
“Émile Goudeau was a fine man, and he had a lot of talent, an original talent as flavorsome as wine.” —Maurice Donnay
“Amiable smuttiness.” —Émile Zola
These dense and nutty gems will surprise you!
CLICK HERE to order UPSIDE-DOWN STORIES — the 35th title in our seminal Absurdist Texts & Documents series.
This edition collects
Meet Jack Sturrett, a book reviewer for a London literary magazine. Dissatisfied with his job, he makes an impulsive decision to leave the city without informing anyone of his departure. He boards a bus which takes him to a small town up north where he gets a job as a tourist guide after becoming so widely read in the town”s history that he passes for a local. Outside work he maintains the identity of a tourist, living in hotels and constantly reinventing his back-story. As his fake local persona becomes threateningly real, he finds himself a suspect in a murder investigation.
Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Toronto. Her first novel, Rewrite, was published by NON Publishing (Vancouver) in 2014. A film adaptation of Tourist (2017, 100 min), which she wrote and directed herself, won “Best Feature” at Mostra del Cinema di Taranto, Italy (2018). The film has also been screened at the Philosophical Film Festival (Skopje, 2018), and the Blow-Up International Art House Film Festival (Chicago, 2017). Trifonova is the author of the scholarly monographs Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology (2014) and The Image in French Philosophy (2007), and the edited volumes Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (2017) and European Film Theory (2008). She has been a visiting scholar and/or artist at the American Academy in Rome, the Brown Foundation at the Dora Maar House (France), The Fondation des Treilles (France), the New York University Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, and the Pushkinskaya Art Centre in St. Petersburg. She is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at Le Studium Centre for Advanced Studies in Tours, France.
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