Mina Loy's technique and subjects - prostitution, menstruation, destitution, and suicide - shock even some modernists and she vanished from the poetry scene as dramatically as she had appeared on it. Roger Conover has resuced the key texts from the pages of forgotten publications, and has included all of the futurist and feminist satires, poems from Loy's Paris and New York periods, and the complete cycle of "Love Songs," as well as previously unknown texts and detailed notes.

Loosely based on Loy's real friendship with the German painter Richard Oelze, this is the only novel by the inimitable modernist poet and artist Mina Loy, which was never published during her lifetime. It tells the story of an unusual friendship between the narrator (a stand-in for Loy herself) and Insel, a surrealist painter of great talent but terrible living habits.

Posthumously launched as the "electric-age Blake", Mina Loy's futurist techniques were unlike anything British critics had seen before; her subjects - sex, parturitiion, prostitution, suicide, addiction, retardation - were considered shocking even by some modernists. Updating and correcting the earlier book, this edition features previously unknown works by Loy rescued from Dada archives and avant-garde magazines. All of Loy's futurist and feminist satires are included, as are the poems from her Paris and New York periods, the cycle of "Love Songs", and her portraits-in-verse which define the trajectory of her favoured company and geography - from fellow modernist Joyce and Brancusi in Paris in the 1920s to fellow destitutes in New York's Lower East Side in the 1940s.

"Stories and Essays of Mina Loy" is the first book-length volume of Mina Loy's narrative writings and critical work ever published. This volume brings together her short fiction, as well as hybrid works that include modernized fairy tales, a Socratic dialogue, and a ballet. Loy's narratives address issues such as abortion and poverty, and what she called "the sex war" is an abiding theme throughout. "Stories and Essays of Mina Loy" also contains dramatic works that parody the bravado and misogyny of Futurism and demonstrate Loy's early, effective use of absurdist technique. Essays and commentaries on aesthetics, historical events, and religion complete this beguiling collection, cementing Mina Loy's place as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.