Hans Henny Jahnn, The Ship

***2008 Update: I started a separate blog for Hans Henny Jahnn here: http://kebadkenya.blogspot.com/

Brad, the editor of the great Neglected Books site [neglectedbooks.com], posted an annotated list of 20 out-of-print books I made in June of 2000. He added links to all the book titles. I'm going to post images of the books discussed (if I still have them).

The permanent link for the list.

10. The Ship by Hans Henny Jahnn (1894 - 1959)

This book is devastating. Even in the fairly rough English translation, it lodged in my brain and I consider it one of the more powerful and disturbing works of the twentieth century. I first encountered Jahnn in the collection Black Letters Unleashed -- an excerpt from The Ship called "Kebad Kenya," which can be read as a stand-alone story. "Kebad Kenya" is also contained in Thirteen Uncanny Stories. Try to find and read this story! I'll post some of it here soon.

Atlas Press published a translation of Jahnn's 1962 novella The Night of Lead. They say that it "shows Jahnn at his darkest: man is portrayed as the toy of supernatural powers, where his only certainty is a bodily existence which, in turn, is blindly bound to the laws of growth, death and decay and procreation - the major themes of Jahnn’s writing." This description can also apply to The Ship. Even after reading Lovecraft and Thomas Bernhard, I'm tempted to think of Jahnn as the most terrifying author. Bernhard can make me feel a little crazy (finishing Correction was one of the more masochistic things I've ever done, and I grew up on gore movies), but he's often hilarious. Jahnn isn't very funny. He's bleak and unrelenting bizarre.





Back cover of Thirteen Uncanny Stories:




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The Case of Hans Henny Jahnn: Criticism and the Literary Outsider (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)
The ship

Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence

Brad, the editor of the great Neglected Books site [neglectedbooks.com], posted an annotated list of 20 out-of-print books I made in June of 2000. He added links to all the book titles. I'm going to post images of the books discussed (if I still have them).

The permanent link for the list.

9. Gathering Evidence by Thomas Bernhard.






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Amos Vogel, Film as a Subervise Art

Brad, the editor of the great Neglected Books site [neglectedbooks.com], posted an annotated list of 20 out-of-print books I made in June of 2000. He added links to all the book titles. I'm going to post images of the books discussed (if I still have them).

The permanent link for the list.

8. Film as a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel

Q and A Magazine asked Vogel "What is your earliest memory?" He responded: "When I was three, my father read me a particularly relevant chapter of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. I cannot deny that I was strangely moved."





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The Journals of Denton Welch

Brad, the editor of the great Neglected Books site [neglectedbooks.com], posted an annotated list of 20 out-of-print books I made in June of 2000. He added links to all the book titles. I'm going to post images of the books discussed (if I still have them).

The permanent link for the list.

7. The Journals of Denton Welch

Wikipedia: Denton Welch




A scan of the Exact Change edition of Maiden Voyage:





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The Journals of Denton Welch













The Denton Welch Journals
The stories of Denton Welch; edited by Robert Phillips.
Denton Welch (Twayne's English Authors)
Denton Welch: The Making of A Writer (Penguin Literary Biographies)
A LAST SHEAF













WHERE NOTHING SLEEPS - THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES AND OTHER RELATED WORKS

Aidan Higgins, Killachter Meadow

Brad, the editor of the great Neglected Books site [neglectedbooks.com], posted an annotated list of 20 out-of-print books I made in June of 2000. He added links to all the book titles. I'm going to post images of the books discussed (if I still have them). The permanent link for the list is here.

6. Killachter Meadow, six stories by Aidan Higgins.

Dalkey Archive says: "Aidan Higgins is one of the most highly respected Irish writers of the past fifty years, heir to such master stylists as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett."

Thomas Bernhard

Three photos of Thomas Bernhard from the book Thomas Bernhard und seine Lebensmenschen. The first photo was taken in 1956. The second photo of Thomas and his mother Herta is from 1933. (A few years later his hair seemed to turn blond.) The third photo is from 1943 and shows Bernhard with his grandfather Johannes Freumbichler.






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Boris Vian

A photo of Boris Vian for my author photo archive. This image comes from the back cover of the Rapp & Whiting edition of Vian's Heartsnatcher (1968; French title: L'arrrache-coeur).

Dalkey Archive recently published an edition of Heartsnatcher.

Jacket design by Lawrence Edwards. Here's the front cover:

Boris Vian, Foam of the Daze

Brad, the editor of the great Neglected Books site [neglectedbooks.com], posted an annotated list of 20 out-of-print books I made in June of 2000. He added links to all the book titles. I'm going to post images of the books discussed (if I still have them). The permanent link for the list is here.

4. L'Ecume des Jours by Boris Vian (1920 - 1959). English translations:

-- Mood Indigo (Grove 1968, tran. John Sturrock)
-- Froth on the Daydream (Quartet 1967, trans. Stanley Chapman)
-- Foam of the Daze (Tam Tam Books 2004, trans. Brian Harper)

Tosh Berman of Tam Tam Books is publishing new translations of Vian's books. Here's a link to Foam of the Daze.

Two covers of Froth on the Daydream from Wikipedia (I don't own these editions):


Grove's edition (Front photo credited to Shaumiane Production -- get in touch if you know what that means, because Google isn't helping):




While I'm at it, here are scans of more of Vian's books in English translation.

Tom Recchion (who has a new album out on Birdman) designs Tam Tam's covers:




No designer or illustrator listed for this cover:

Two plays published by Grove:



Illustration by Peter Miles on the below book from Quartet:

Rene Crevel, Difficult Death

Brad, the editor of the great Neglected Books site [neglectedbooks.com], posted an annotated list of 20 out-of-print books I made in June of 2000. He added links to all the book titles. I'm going to post images of the books discussed (if I still have them). The permanent link for the list is here.

3. Difficult Death by Rene Crevel (1900-1935, France).

First published in France in 1926 as La Mort Difficile. David Rattray's English translation was published by North Point Press in 1986. Rattray died in 1993 (I need to check out his How I Became One of the Invisible immediately) and he held the copyright, so maybe that is why it hasn't been republished. The North Point edition includes an introduction by Rattray and an 8-page foreword by Salvador Dali, written in 1954.

The photograph of Crevel on the cover is by Thea Sternheim. David Bullen designed the cover.


Another photo of Crevel by Sternheim:

Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus

Brad, the editor of the great Neglected Books site [neglectedbooks.com], posted an annotated list of 20 out-of-print books I made in June of 2000. He added links to all the book titles. I'm going to post images of the books discussed (if I still have them). The permanent link for the list is here.

2. Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933, France).

First published in France in 1914. Rupert Copeland Cuningham's English translation first published in the UK by Calder in 1970 (and then in the US by University of California). Reprinted in 1983 in paperback by Calder and Riverrun. Again reprinted in 2003 by Calder/Riverrun (the edition I scanned). Hopefully we won't have to wait until 2023 for another reprint. Print-on-demand is always an option!***

Read Luc Sante's essay/review "The Scientist of the Fantastic" about Roussel, from the New York Review of Books, 1985. Read some pages from John Ashbery on Roussel.

***Jan.2008 update: I've since learned that John Calder has retired (was there an international day of mourning?), and his line has been purchased by Oneworld. Their statement: "Oneworld Classics is delighted to announce the acquisition of the legendary Calder Publications list – which includes works by Beckett, Céline, Artaud, Duras, Trocchi, Barker, Ionesco and Robbe-Grillet, among many others – and the Calder Bookshop on The Cut, near Waterloo, famous for its eclectic events programme."

Start flooding them with requests for Locus Solus.

Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization

Brad, the editor of the great Neglected Books site [neglectedbooks.com], posted an annotated list of 20 out-of-print books I made in June of 2000. He added links to all the book titles. I'm going to post images of the books discussed (if I still have them). The permanent link for the list is here.

1. Products of the Perfected Civilization: The Selected Writings of Chamfort, translated and with an introduction by W. S. Merwin. [First published by Macmillan in 1969 (send me a scan if you have that edition); this is the 1984 reprint from North Point Press.]

Jacket design: David Bullen
Jacket illustration: anonymous engraving of Robespierre

From the flap: Chamfort is said to have been among the first in storming the Bastille . . . Nietzsche wrote that without Chamfort "the Revolution would have been deprived of its most tragic spirit and its sharpest sting; it would be considered a far more stupid event, and would not exert its present seductive fascination."

Thank you Farley's Bookshop in New Hope PA for keeping this title on the shelf long past its expiration date.