Calder Publications: The First Five

£46.95 £23.48

Calder Publications was started by John Calder in 1949, and became known for the edgy names it was proud of having in its list. This year, we’re relaunching Calder Publications with a brand-new look and a promising haul of titles. We are proud to be able to offer the first five Calder relaunch title…

Changing Track

By Michel Butor

£8.99 £7.19

On a train from Paris to Rome on his way to surprise his lover, the businessman Léon Delmont begins to mull over his past and question the decisions he has made about his future. These musings – together with his impressions of the unfolding scenery, conjectures about his fellow passengers and some…

The Blind Owl and Other Stories

By Sadeq Hedayat

£9.99 £7.99

Written in Persian, The Blind Owl is predominantly a love story – an unconventional love story that elicits visions and nightmare reveries from the depths of the reader’s subconscious. A young man, an old man and a beautiful young girl perform, as if framed within a Persian miniature, a ritual of de…

Undine

By Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué

£9.99 £7.99

When the knight Huldbrand finds shelter at an old fisherman’s cottage outside a haunted forest, he encounters and falls in love with his host’s adopted daughter, the mysterious Undine. As it turns out that his beloved is a mermaid from a royal house and that Huldbrand was already more or less betrot…

The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett

By John Calder

£9.99 £7.99

Increasingly Samuel Beckett’s writing is seen as the culmination of the great literature of the twentieth century – succeeding the work of Proust, Joyce and Kafka. Beckett is a writer whose relevance to his time and use of poetic imagery can be compared to Shakespeare’s in the late Renaissance. John…

The Lulu Plays

By Frank Wedekind

£12.99 £10.39

Two of Wedekind’s most seminal plays, Earth-Spirit and Pandora’s Box both focus on the actions of the young heroine Lulu, who embodies both animal sensuality and waif-like innocence, as she escapes a life on the streets, receives a society education, marries, takes on various lovers, becomes a dance…

Spring Awakening

By Frank Wedekind

£9.99 £7.99

Spring Awakening is set in a small German town in the 1890s where adolescent boys and girls grope their way towards knowledge and maturity against the blocks set up by parents and teachers in the name of “morality”. Melchior, fearless in his pursuit of the truth, manages to retain his freedom of spi…

Moderato Cantabile

By Marguerite Duras

£8.99 £7.19

A distressed young man murders the woman he loves in a café, watched by a large crowd. Fascinated by the crime she has witnessed, Anne Desbaresdes returns several times to the scene, forming a relationship with a man who also saw the murder, and drinking through the afternoon with him as he patientl…

Locus Solus

By Raymond Roussel

£9.99 £7.99

Based, like the earlier Impressions of Africa, on uniquely eccentric principles of composition, this book invites the reader to enter a world which in its innocence and extravagance is unlike anything in the literature of the twentieth century. Cantarel, a scholarly scientist, whose enormous wealth…

Jealousy

By Alain Robbe-Grillet

£8.99 £7.19

In his most famous and perhaps most typical work, Robbe-Grillet explores his principle preoccupation: the meaning of reality. The novel is set on a tropical banana plantation, and the action is seen through the eyes of a narrator who never appears in person, never speaks and never acts. He is a poin…

Green Henry

By Gottfried Keller

£17.99 £14.39

The story of young Henry, who struggles to fulfill his ambitions to become a successful painter and is torn between the gentle Anna and the proud and sensual Judith, is one of the most outstanding and personal Bildngsromane written in the German language. Written between 1846 and 1855, Keller’s poet…

Collected Poems

By Sydney Goodsir Smith

£12.99 £10.39

The premature death of Sydney Goodsir Smith at the age of fifty-nine, while this volume of his ‘Collected Poems’ was in production, deprived the world of one of the major personalities in twentieth-century British literature. The poems included in this volume, mostly written in Scots dialect – from…

Cain’s Book

By Alexander Trocchi

£8.99 £7.19

Written in America while Trocchi was working on a scow on the Hudson River, Cain’s Book is an extraordinary autobiographical account about a junky’s life, and an honest, raunchy, eye-opening trip through hell. Probably the most famous novel about drug addiction and the hazards and excitements of an…