By Léon Genonceaux. Introduction and translation by Iain White.
The nineteenth-century French writer and publisher Léon Genonceaux (1856—?) is as much of an enigma as those two legendary enfants terribles whom he was the first to publish: Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. After he had done so, a conviction for publishing indecent literature followed, and Genonceaux fled to London, returning to Paris around 1900 and then disappearing forever around 1905, leaving behind a wild, stupefying masterpiece called The Tutu. The Tutu is one of those mythical beasts—a great lost book; a book that, if it had been published when it was written (in 1891), would have been one of the defining works of late nineteenth-century French literature. In fact it was published, but was never distributed to bookstores, and today only six copies of the original edition survive. Willfully scatological, erotic and gleefully Nietzschean in its dismemberment of fin-de-siecle morality, The Tutu is at once a sort of ultimate Decadent delirium and also a proto-modernist novel in the vein of Ulysses. Its existence was first posited in 1966 by a famous literary hoaxer, and until a handful of copies turned up some years later, in the early 1990s, it was presumed to be a fabrication. This is the first English translation.
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
My first encounter with London's Atlas Press was in the late 1980s, when I was given a copy of David Gascoyne's translation of André Breton and Philippe Soupault's Magnetic Fields. With that book, they immediately became the first publisher I decided to trust blindly, and I've done my best to read everything they've published ever since—which hasn't always been easy, given their on-again, off-again availability in the US. With ARTBOOK | D.A.P. now distributing them this side of the waters, it's a good time to start diving back into their catalog of extremist literature—now a full 30 years' worth of forays into what they call the "anti-tradition" of the more "belligerent avant-gardes" of the last 200 years. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 6.75 x 7.5 in. / 176 pgs / illustrated throughout. LIST PRICE: U.S. $25.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $34.5 ISBN: 9781900565639 PUBLISHER: Atlas Press AVAILABLE: 9/30/2013 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Out of stock TERRITORY: NA LA ME
Published by Atlas Press. By Léon Genonceaux. Introduction and translation by Iain White.
The nineteenth-century French writer and publisher Léon Genonceaux (1856—?) is as much of an enigma as those two legendary enfants terribles whom he was the first to publish: Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. After he had done so, a conviction for publishing indecent literature followed, and Genonceaux fled to London, returning to Paris around 1900 and then disappearing forever around 1905, leaving behind a wild, stupefying masterpiece called The Tutu. The Tutu is one of those mythical beasts—a great lost book; a book that, if it had been published when it was written (in 1891), would have been one of the defining works of late nineteenth-century French literature. In fact it was published, but was never distributed to bookstores, and today only six copies of the original edition survive. Willfully scatological, erotic and gleefully Nietzschean in its dismemberment of fin-de-siecle morality, The Tutu is at once a sort of ultimate Decadent delirium and also a proto-modernist novel in the vein of Ulysses. Its existence was first posited in 1966 by a famous literary hoaxer, and until a handful of copies turned up some years later, in the early 1990s, it was presumed to be a fabrication. This is the first English translation.
