Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Watchfiends and Rack Screams: Artaud's Last Unpublished Work

Watchfiends and Rack Screams: Artaud's Last Unpublished Work

Artaud, Antonin
Barber, Stephen
Eshleman, Clayton

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $25.00

ISBN10: 3035804419
ISBN13: 9783035804416
Publisher: Diaphanes
Published: Oct 21 2025
Pages: 332
Weight: 0.61
Height: 1.02 Width: 4.72 Depth: 7.48
Language: English

Antonin Artaud's last large-scale work, published in its complete form in English for the first time.

Drawings on texts and letters dating from 1946, some of them written while he was still confined at the Rodez psychiatric hospital, Artaud devoted the months of November 1946 to February 1947 to completing his book through a long series of vocal improvisations titled Interjections, dictated at his pavilion on the edge of Paris. He cursed the assassins he believed were on their way there to steal his semen, to make his brain go up in smoke as under the action of one of those machines created to suck up filth from the floor, and finally to erase him. The publisher who had commissioned the book, Louis Broder, was horrified at reading its incandescent, fiercely obscene, and anti-religious manuscript and refused to publish it. Ambitious and experimental in scale, fragmentary and ferocious in intent, it was not published until 1978, in an edition prepared by Artaud's close friend Paule Thévenin. Artaud commented that it was an impossible book, and that nobody has ever read it from end to end, not even its own author.

Clayton Eshleman, together with his translation collaborators such as David Rattray, began to work soon after 1978 on an English-language edition, with extracts appearing especially in Eshleman's poetry magazine, Sulfur. This volume presents his translations with additional ones by Paul Buck, and Catherine Petit it in its complete form in English for the first time.

Also from

Artaud, Antonin

View All

Also in

General Poetry

View All