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Cult French author Jean-Pierre Martinet’s obscenely tragic novella, translated into English Adolphe Marlaud’s rule of conduct is simple: live as little as possible so as to suffer as little as possible. For Marlaud, this involves carrying out a meager existence on rue Froidevaux in Paris, tending to his father’s grave in the cemetery across the street, and earning the outlines of a living through a part-time job at the funerary shop on the corner. It does not, however, take into account the intentions of the obese concierge of his building, who has set her widowed sights on his diminutive frame, and whose aggressive overtures are to trigger a burlesque and obscene tragedy. Originally published in 1979, The High Life introduces cult French author Jean-Pierre Martinet into English. It is a novella that perfectly outlines Martinet’s dark vision: the terrors of loneliness, the grotesque buffoonery of sexual relations, the essential humiliation of the human condition and the ongoing trauma of twentieth-century history. Jean-Pierre Martinet (1944–1993) wrote only a handful of novels, including what is largely regarded as his masterpiece, the psychosexual study of horror and madness, Jérôme. Largely ignored during his lifetime, his star has only recently begun to shine in France, and he is now regarded as an overlooked French successor to Dostoyevsky. Reading like an unsettling love child of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jim Thompson, Martinet’s work explores the grimly humorous possibilities of unlimited pessimism.

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First discovered, celebrated and published by the Surrealists at the age of 14 (they declared her the “new Alice”), Gisèle Prassinos quickly found herself established in the literary world as a fount of automatic tales freighted with transgressive humor and a pervading sense of threatened feminine identity. “Gisèle Prassinos’ tone is unique,” claimed André Breton, “all the poets are jealous of it. Swift lowers his eyes, Sade shuts his candy box.” The Arthritic Grasshopper and Other Tales gathers together all of her literary prose from 1934 to 1944, an assortment of anxious dream tales drawn from journals and plaquettes, introduced and illustrated by such admirers as Paul Éluard, Man Ray and Hans Bellmer. The 72 stories include such longer, novella-length tales as “Sondue,” “The Executioner” and “The Dream.”Gisèle Prassinos (1920–2015) was born in Istanbul of a Greek father and an Italian mother. One summer day at the age of 13 and in a fit of boredom, she began to compose short absurdist vignettes, filling up pages of paper with tales of sarcastic stains, arrogant hair and liquid frogs. Her first collection was published in 1935, with a preface by Paul Éluard and a frontispiece portrait by Man Ray. With World War II, Prassinos stopped publishing, but in 1954 she returned to literature with a series of novels and stories still imbued with a Surrealist sensibility.

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