Wakefield Press

A shocking and transgressive work from one of the key figures of postwar Japanese fictionYumiko Kurahashi''s 1963 novella Scorpions takes the form of a transcript of a one-sided interview with L following the arrest and institutionalization of her twin brother K. The two have played a role in a series of horrifying deaths culminating in the murder of their mother. Through a first-person narrative that varies in tone from scientifically clinical to darkly humorous, mingling together references to the Bible and Greek mythology, odd bits of dialogue and obtuse descriptions, we learn of K and L''s shocking crimes as well as the professional and personal entanglement of L and an older man they call the Red Pig, their mother''s former lover. Scorpions remains, after more than half a century, a shockingly transgressive text. It bears allegiance to the most radical French fiction of its time, particularly the work of Jean Genet, an author Kurahashi admired, whose own novels explored the sanctification of criminal behavior.Yumiko Kurahashi (1935–2005) was an influential Japanese writer of experimental fiction. She was nominated early in her career for the Akutagawa prize and later won the Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature for her anti-utopian work Journey to Amanon.

Sternberg’s rule-breaking, genre-defying novel upends the humdrum workday world A nameless employee stands outside the door to an office, hesitating to enter because he is five minutes late. This banal opening then launches into a frenetic narrative that switches genres, modes and universes with abandon. From an account of his feral childhood with a nymphomaniacal mother, to his early development of a third arm and a second head, the employee unspools his subsequent life as department-store wrapper, ladder-descending bureaucrat, traveling salesman, murder suspect and other occupations. Years return and reverse through a series of inflicted hellscapes as a tension builds between an untrammeled imagination willing to commit any crime and the inescapable rigidity of the mind.First published in French by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1958, The Employee was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Humour Noir in 1961. This first English-language translation presents an entropic exercise of the imagination that will leave readers bewildered and breathless.Jacques Sternberg (1923–2006) was a literary maverick, who wrote over 50 books that roamed freely through genre and influence without ever adhering to anything that might threaten constraint. He was briefly a member of the Panic Movement, founded by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor.

Maimed beggars, female automatons, cultural prosthetics: four tales of opulence, poverty and grotesque empathy from the Weimar RepublicFirst published in 1924, Fantastic Orgy is most notable for its title story, an account of a drinking rout organized for maimed beggars in honor of a sideshow attraction, a mechanical woman doomed to early death through disintegration from entertaining the masses—a depiction of a robotic woman preceding by several years Fritz Lang’s less sympathetic presentation in Metropolis. All four stories, however, explore the emotional and material needs of a crippled society, the economic trap of poverty and the hypocritical righteousness of charity. Like an etching by Georg Grosz or Otto Dix translated into literary form, Alexander Frey presents the troubling, at times fantastical notion of a prosthetic humanity for damaged times.Alexander M. Frey (1881–1957) was a German author whose antiwar novel Die Pflasterkästen (The Cross Bearers) is considered by some critics to be superior to All Quiet on the Western Front. Frey refused to join the National Socialist Party, despite having served as a medic in the trenches of World War I alongside dispatcher Adolf Hitler, and fled Germany during World War II.