Prosperos Lost Books
Discover Prospero's Lost Books, a curated collection of surreal fiction and avant-garde drama. Explore works by Italo Calvino, Bruno Schulz, and Eugène Ionesco—lost literary treasures for the modern reader.
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The Street of Crocodiles
by Bruno Schulz
The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.
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Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
In Kublai Khan's garden, at sunset, the young Marco Polo diverts the aged emperor from his obsession with the impending end of his empire with tales of countless cities past, present, and future.
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Guernica, and Other Plays
by Fernando Arrabal
The celebrated Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal, who lived in Madrid under the oppression of the Franco regime, writes passionately of human atrocity and of hope. This collection of plays embodies Arrabal's "theatre of panic," named after the god Pan. The homme panique is a man who refuses to take risks, who avoids danger and therefore heroism, who avoids the irreparable act, but who, ironically, is caught up in a world of chance that forces him to make choices. The collection includes Guernica, an earthy verbal re-creation of Picasso's famous painting, in which an old Basque couple is caught in the air raids; And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers, a violent protest against the Franco regime; the ingenious and poetic The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria; and Garden of Delights, which explores the lesbian tendencies of strong adoles-cent attachments and the sadomasochistic experience of adult love. Includes: 'Guernica' 'And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers' 'The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria' 'Garden of Delights'
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Rhinoceros, and Other Plays
by Eugène Ionesco
A collection of three modern plays by the master of the absurd and member of the French Academy.
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The Bald Soprano, and Other Plays
by Eugène Ionesco
Four original plays by French author Eugène Ionesco.
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"Masquerade" and Other Stories
by Robert Walser
Born in Switzerland in 1878, Robert Walser worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant before discovering what William H. Gass calls his "true profession." From 1899 until he was misdiagnosed a schizophrenic and hospitalized in 1933, Walser produced nine novels and more than a thousand short stories and prose pieces. Walser's contemporary admirers were few but well-placed. They included Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, and Walter benjamin. Today Robert Walser is widely regarded as one of the most important and original literary voices of the twentieth century. In "Masquerade" and Other Stories, Susan Bernofsky, presents a representative selection of Walser's work, from his first published fiction to the stately prose of the last years before his voice vanished forever behind the asylum walls. Written between 1899 and 1933, these 64 sketches, scenes, stories, and wanderings through landscapes and dreamscapes are characterized by startling, skewed comparisons, warpings of syntax, vagaries or perspective, and a delight in contradiction. Quirky, playful, and sometimes bizarre, Walser's texts were unconventional by the standards in the context of today's fiction.