Unique in Hungarian literature, at the time of its first appearance in 1935, Towards the One & Only Metaphor was greeted with plaudits by such leading Hungarian critics as Laszlo Nemeth, Andras Hevesi, and Gabor Halasz, with Nemeth declaring: "Szentkuthy's invention has the merit that he pries writing open in an entirely original manner. . . Where everything was wobbling the writer either joins the earth-shaping forces, or else he sets up his culture-building laboratory over all oscillations. Seated in his cogitarium, even in spite of himself, Szentkuthy is brother to the bellicose on earth in the same way as a cloud is a relative to a plow in its new sowing work." Szentkuthy referred to this nearly unclassifiable text as a Catalogus Rerum, "an index that is of entities and phenomena, a Catalogue of Everything in the Entire World." In a sequence of 112 shorter and longer passages, Szentkuthy has recorded his experiences and thoughts, reflected on his reading matter as well as political, historical, and erotic events, moving from epic subjectivity to ontological actualities: "Two things excite me: the most subjective epic details and the ephemeral trivialities of my most subjective life, in all their own factual, unstylized individuality - and the big facts of the world in their allegorical, Standbild-like grandiosity: death, summer, sea, love, gods, flowers." Similar in kind to the ruminative waste books of Lichtenberg and the journals of Joubert, while Towards the One and Only Metaphor is a fragmentary text, at the same time, it is ordered, like a group of disparate stars which, when viewed from afar, reveal or can be perceived to form a constellation - they are sculpted by a geometry of thought. Szentkuthy conjures up and analyzes spectacle and thought past and present with sensitivity, erudition, and linguistic force. As Andras Keszthelyi observed, the text is essentially something of a manifesto, "an explicit formulation of the author's intentions, his scale of values, or, if you wish: his ars poetica." Through dehumanization, Szentkuthy returns us to the embryo and the ornament, but so as to bring us into the very particles of existence. Towards the One and Only Metaphor is also a confessional, a laying bare of the heart, even through masks, but in moving beyond the torpid self-obsession that rules our age, Szentkuthy's revelations yield forth the x-ray of a typus, and like Montaigne and Rousseau, he is equally revealing, entertaining, and humorous. Now available in English for the first time, Towards the One & Only Metaphor is destined to stand as one of the principal works of world literature of the 20th century.

Featuring an extended introduction by scholar of British Romanticism, Alan Vardy, Fragments consists of Wordsworth's philosophico-aesthetic prose fragment "The Sublime & the Beautiful" and "Hawkshead & the Ferry." While a fragmented text, unfinished, almost certainly abandoned by the author, the difficulties of the former text no longer appear fatal so much as evidence of Wordsworth's rigorous struggle to come to terms not only with his own aesthetic experiences, but with the philosophical aesthetics of his epoch. What were once read as confusions may now be seen as productive of complex accounts of lived affective experiences. In critical terms, current aesthetic occupations have perhaps finally found Wordsworth's text. By placing the prose fragment in a separate appendix, the original editors of Wordsworth's Prose Works removed it from its actual place in The Unpublished Tour. New analysis of the manuscripts reveals that "The Sublime & the Beautiful" is actually part of the Tour. In reprinting the "Hawkshead & the Ferry" section of the Tour, our edition restores this original context, lost in the standard Oxford edition. The prose fragment begins in the precise place where "Hawkshead & the Ferry" ends - on the west side of Windermere looking north to the Langdale pikes. Were the missing pages of "The Sublime & the Beautiful" to be recovered, the transition from picturesque viewpoint to speculation on the philosophical status of that view would be apparent. Understanding the significance of our affective response to natural objects could not be more central to a Wordsworthian poetics predicated on the internalization of aesthetic sensations into perceptions and ideas, associations of one kind or another, and finally into the very stuff of the poetry. Fragmented or not, this prose treatise on a subject of such centrality to the poet's project can no longer be ignored. It is this general neglect that the present text hopes to address by publishing these fragments on their own for the very first time.

Spring 2032: an enigmatic bandleader named Triboulet arrives by helicopter in Rome, where his troupe awaits with a legion of animals and unruly kids. When performing acrobatic feats and provoking states of joyous panic through their ritualistic music, the troupe's arrival proves restorative, for the world is beset with famines, plagues, and religious conflicts, which Triboulet seeks to neutralize with freeing laughter. While they begin constructing strange edifices in the city, sacred sites around the world suffer terrible, often humorous forms of vandalism, provoking the ire of religious and political authorities, who grow suspicious of the troupe and leery of the increasing allure they exert over people. Although radical Islamic sects claim responsibility for the attacks on Catholic and Jewish sites, no one is certain who is responsible-is it the Jihadists, anarcho-atheist intellectuals, or eco-terrorists? And who really is the masked Triboulet? The very future of the world is at stake, and while touring Jerusalem during Christmas, Triboulet and his merry troupe bear witness to the world's pivotal crossing into a new reality. Albert Camus noted that 'the metaphysics of the worst' expresses itself in a literature of damnation and argued that 'we have still not yet found the exit' from such literature. With his second novel, Hanshe has found the way out, offering in fact something not only promising, but astounding, a pathway that is into a new reality, into a 'physics of the best.' The Abdication is a true ero(t)icomic epic. * "With this new novel, Hanshe reinforces his growing reputation as one of today's most original and thought-provoking novelists." -Keith Ansell-Pearson "The Abdication is a visionary novel of dangerous ideas, a theological thriller concerned with the absence of god and the question posed by the phrase: Dionysus versus the Crucified. It is as richly allusive as it is physically direct: a novel of revolt that can at times be revolting in its relentless push to break the mold of idealist thought. As well argued as it is intricately arcane, indeed dense with learning and lore, this book is both experimental and assured, a comedy of high seriousness and gospel of the flesh that our winded civilization has needed for 2,000 years. Ridendo dicere severum " -Stuart Kendall, author of Georges Bataille

Towards a Genealogy of Spectacle is an exploration of contemporary experience of spectacle in its multiple layers, as it attempts to expose the forces that are at work in the making of spectacular events. It sets before itself two goals: to understand the language of spectacle, and to dissect the pathos of spectacle of contemporary society. In an age that is saturated with technology and the products of mass media, it aims to show how and why grand artistic spectacles are needed for the life and health of a culture. The book engages with the ideas of various thinkers from Kant and Schopenhauer to Foucault and Debord on the subject and aims to open up new spaces for thinking and is an invitation to spectacle-makers towards a fusion of art and philosophy. --- "In Towards a Genealogy of Spectacle Yunus Tuncel shows what it means to reflect, once again, Nietzsche's claim of aesthetic justification of life in the height of our time. He does not just accept this claim, but rather renews it by thoughtfully bringing before our eyes how spectacle could be thought of as a place for the gathering of creative forces." (Arno B hler, Wien)