Secrets is almost like a literary séance.

A collection of poems and short stories, but that feels somewhat reductive. Its organising consciousness belongs to a failed writer whose room is full of abandoned manuscripts, contradictory autobiographies, unfinished translations, aphorisms and private systems of meaning. If that wasn't 'enough', from there, the book begins to sprawl outward through Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Huysmans, Dada, theology, music, memory, war and the problem of language itself. It moves like snowball of intellectual accumulation — a mind attempting to empty itself of everything it has inherited.  

The book repeatedly circles failure, secrecy, erasure, obsession and the difficulty of escaping what has formed you, shifting between fiction, quotation, criticism and philosophical argument without much concern for conventional borders. There is something ghostly and freakishly spectral about it, this kind of literature as crowded room from which everyone must somehow be evicted before thought can begin. Éditions Maudites describes itself as a press for formally experimental, subversive and marginal writing, and Secrets is very much that kind of object.

Éditions Maudites, 2023. First edition. Paperback, 313 pp. Limited edition of 100 copies. Light handling wear only; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Near fine condition.