Bücher veröffentlicht von Snuggly Books

The poet Ethel Archer was a long-time associate of the occultist Aleister Crowley and a member of the A¿A¿, his magical order. The Hieroglyph, her only novel, long out of print and here presented in a new edition with an introduction by literary scholar Daniel Corrick, is a mystical roman à clef of the highest order, revolving around her relationship with the magus Crowley and the various guises he took as poetic mentor, psychonaut, and mystical philosopher. The story follows the scandal surrounding the ill-fated public ceremonies known as the Rites of Eleusis, through the cataclysm of the Great War and beyond into undreamt of quests for salvation. Archer's reminiscences abound with descriptions of magical initiations, astral journeys and mescaline visions, as well as providing a speculative glimpse into the psychology of Crowley and the alternative fates which might have awaited him. The present edition also includes, as supplementary material, the series of unsigned articles, two of which have never before been reprinted, which led to the downfall of the A¿A¿.

Originally published in an edition of only 20 copies, The Cheetah-Girl, Edward Heron-Allen's masterpiece of biological science fiction, is here offered for the first time in paperback.

René Crevel (1900-1935), a bisexual communist who suffered from tuberculosis, was one of the most important surrealist authors, a true genius, and possibly the best writer of surrealist fiction, and no other of his works of fiction is more surreal than Are You All Crazy?-originally published in 1929 and here presented for the first time in English in a superb translation by Sue Boswell. In this feverish, full-speed-ahead novel of out-and-out madness, we meet a redhead who gives birth to a blue child, hear the naughty song of the pigtail-pullers, visit the Sexual Institute of Dr Optimus Cerf-Mayer, attend an eonism séance, and witness a fifty-kilo rat disembowelling a fakir. Are You All crazy? is a subversive masterpiece and a work of deep psychological interest, which, although puzzling in the utmost in its excesses of satirical bravado, certainly must be acknowledged to be one of the great European novels.

Who is he? What is his real name? Is he a reincarnation, a time-traveller, or someone made from chopped up DNA on a USB stick?In Surrender to a Stranger, British cult author Jeremy Reed offers a Burroughsesque Elizabethan drama in the super-exposure of contemporary London streets, in which our mysterious hero, Mr. W.H., along with a queer coterie of characters, soak up the ambience of sexy story telling. A daring and provocative novel of poetic brilliance, Surrender to a Stranger is a glitter-worded Marlovian comedo-tragedy in which every sentence is written as if it has been lived.

The Zaffre Book of Occult Fiction, the third volume of the books of occult fiction of many colours, brings together twenty-one tales, dating from 1908-1937, from the occult revival of the British Isles. Including both well-known figures, such as Dion Fortune and Algernon Blackwood, and lesser-known practitioners, such as Ethel Archer and the eccentric Prince Immanuel of Jerusalem, the present instalment is sure to fall within the sphere of beatific approval of not only seekers, adherents and occult enthusiasts, but also Masters and Ascendants. Containing a varied and luxuriant array of stories, about visions and hauntings, mystical agencies and seers, The Zaffre Book of Occult Fiction, edited by Brendan Connell, is an indispensable addition to any library of the supernatural and occult.

The Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles, here presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the most unusual works of Charles Nodier, and can readily be seen as a remote precursor of Alfred Jarry's "pataphysics," Guillaume Apollinaire's "surrealism" and Dadaism. Originally published in 1830, more than a hundred years before the publication of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Nodier's novel, like the latter, is a highly avant-garde work of dream fiction. It is deliberately incoherent, and in places deliberately incomprehensible, but its incoherence is never without an underlying purpose and an underlying schema, partly because it takes for granted the thesis that the apparent incoherence, inconsequentiality and incomprehensibility of real dreams must have an underlying purpose, however arcane, and an underlying schema, however bizarre-and that expeditions in literary surrealism are valuable processes of exploration, capable of offering valuable and unique rewards. It is, in its own peculiar fashion, a masterpiece of intelligence, wit and literary artistry. This edition of The Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles supplements the title novel with three related texts: "On the Phenomena of Sleep," an essay on dreams, and two biographical fantasies, "Polichinelle," and "The Bibliomaniac."

Raun, certainly one of the great works of Futurist drama, if not the greatest, was written by Ruggero Vasari from 1926 to 1927 before being published in 1932. Here, presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brendan and Anna Connell, and with an introduction by Maria Elena Versari, is a dystopian masterpiece that is as relevant today as it was when it was originally composed. Rivaling, in its own way, the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, Raun is a fully-equipped tragedy in which, in the Era of Machines, eugenics are used to dehumanize a society obsessed with technical achievement and which is willing to sacrifice all in order to reach ever more exalted heights.

The Zinzolin Book of Occult Fiction, the first in a planned series of books of occult fiction of many colours, brings together twenty-two tales, dating from 1888-1911, from the occult revival of the British Isles. Including both well-known figures, such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Aleister Crowley, and lesser-known talents, such as Helen Fagg and the mysterious Zuresta, this inaugural volume is sure to bring diversion and illumination to both interested acolyte and erudite mahatma alike. Containing a varied and rich array of stories, about dreams and séances, visionaries and madmen, The Zinzolin Book of Occult Fiction, edited by Brendan Connell, is an indispensable addition to any library of the supernatural and occult.

Exceedingly rare, even in the original French, and here translated for the first time into English by Brian Stableford, The Priestesses of Mylitta, first published in 1907, is Jane de La Vaudère's Babylon-set novel of decadence and amour. Revolving around the cult of the eponymous goddess, whose worship consists, in part, of newly married women delivering themselves to haphazard lovers, the story, which was very probably the author's last completed work, is one of both tenderness and torture, brutal bloodshed and the adoration held in delicious kisses.There is nothing half-hearted about The Priestesses of Mylitta, and no sign that La Vaudère was not as intensely emotionally involved with the project as she generally seemed to be; and the book, doused as it is with homicidal horrors and permeated with the incense of love, will surely delight all fans of her wonderful creations.

The current volume, edited and translated from the French by Brian Stableford, brings together fourteen stories composed in the thriving tradition of "literary Satanism" that was pioneered in the 1820s and continued throughout the century and into the twentieth, which subjected the figure to closer and more skeptical scrutiny than the theologians of the past, attempting a more clinical analysis of the idea.Including such fiendish pieces as "A Dream of Hell" by Gustave Flaubert, which was written when the author was sixteen years old, and "Dead Man's Dale," a classic tale of the Devil by the great Romantic writer Charles Nodier, The Snuggly Satanicon provides a useful additional piece of a much vaster jigsaw comprised by one of the chief imaginary motifs of modern literature, helping to provide a broader glimpse, and hence a more accurate appreciation, of a bigger picture.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, almost exclusively remembered today as the author of the prototypical "Masochistic" novel Venus in Furs, was, in fact, a thinker of far-reaching aspirations and abilities. The present volume is one of the first representative collections the Austrian writer's shorter works in over a century.Ranging from Viennese high-society to the lives of minorities in the east of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the tales herein explore Sacher-Masoch's preoccupation with ongoing social disparities, the symbolism of Slavic mythology, and both the cruelty and nobility of the feminine soul. Featuring frenzied romantics, peasants, Sadistic noblewomen, artists, and eccentrics, The Black Gondola and Other Stories offers a new assessment of the fiction of one of the most interesting German-language authors, whose work, encompassing the poetic, macabre, and erotic, was also often surprisingly compassionate.