Catalog

Complete List of Titles

E-Books | Poetry | Plays | Fiction | Non-fiction
Xenos-Chelsea Editions Collaborations

Special Notice:

Alfredo de Palchi, Terminal Events. This last book by the late poet (1926 - 2020) ends a life in poetry well-planned: it presents an imagined discourse with poet Eugenio Montale, a fanciful and self-deprecatory autobiography, and a liberation of the planet Earth from the cruelty of man, with de Palchi's characteristic rage against violence, glorification of Mother Nature and love of freedom much in evidence. A Xenos Books—Chelsea Editions Collaboration. Click here for a memorial to Mr de Palchi.

The following books are currently in short supply or out of print. Please check with our associate, Small Press Distribution, for availability:

Angels of Youth, by Luigi Fontanella.
Animal World, by Antonio Di Benedetto.
Genre at the Crossroads, by George Slusser, et al.
The Hunts, by Amelia Biagioni.
Jellyfish, by Giancarlo Pastore.
MI-5 Debriefing, by Walter G. Krivitsky.
Scarecrow and Other Anomalies, by Oliverio Girondo. Available as an e-book.
The Wolf at the Door, by Bogomil Gjuzel; a few slightly damaged copies left in stock at $7 each.
The Tiger is the World

E-Books

All Xenos e-books are budget-priced and contain a linked table of contents.
Excerpts from each can be read on its respective Amazon page.

Massimo Bontempelli, On a Locomotive & Other Runaway Tales. Five short stories in the fantasic tradition that explore semi-conscious levels of the psyche and the nature of reality. Bontempelli called his method "realismo magico," and readers will notice an uncanny similiarity to "The Twilight Zone" of Rod Serling.

Emil Draitser, The Supervisor of the Sea. The longer and more serious stories of an acclaimed author that move from Russia to America to the fantastic beyond. Includes the celebrated "Wedding in Brighton Beach" and "Faithful Masha."

Sam Eisenstein, Max and Maxima: Stories of Maturity. Seventeen stories of deceptive, demanding and tricky old age, shifting between dream and waking, memory and reality. Some titles: Communist Free Sex, My Religious Criminal Life, A Ragged Professor, Midnight at the Supermarket, Max and Maxima.

Sam Eisenstein, Loss of Twin: Stories, Thoughts, Phantasms. Thirty fantastic fictions leaping from the certainties of the conventional world to the mysteries of life as it is lived. Here are the vagaries of chance, a riot of identifications, metempsychosis, male-female transformation, animal mysteries and hilarious hallucinations.

Oliverio Girondo, Scarecrow & Other Anomalies. A translation of Espantapájaros and other outrageous and hilarious fantasmagorías by an Argentine genius (or madman), including "Invitation to Vomit," "It's All Drool" and "Lunarlude." English text only.

Gary Kern, Letters from Dwight: Down and Out in Riverside (Exile in California). A series of actual letters, sent over a period of seven years, reporting the experiences of an ex-professor from the East Coast living in a slum in Southern California, renting rooms to odd characters and getting into strange situations.

Gary Kern, Misfortune: First Years in California (Exile in California). A memoir about different kinds of hard luck. "Quads" presents the world of quadriplegics, "Old Woman" details the plight of the old and forgotten, "Polyglottos" concerns a Russian dissident and the difficulties of translating him.

Gary Kern, The Last Snow Leopard. A novel in which the sighting of one last snow leopard in the mountains of Tibet drives three men to extraordinary actions: one wants to hunt it, the second—to protect it, and the third—to behold it as a magical solution to his failed life.

Jennifer Lawler, Then Will Come Night and Darkness. A novel about the personal odyssey of Rebecca Hanover, ex-wife, ex-professor of Old English and ex-con, who is driven by a consuming need to be united with her lost daughter. Attending to words echoing from ancient sagas, she sets out toward the sea on the other side of the country.

John Taylor, Now the Summer Came to Pass. Set by turns in Iowa, Idaho, France and Greece, the collection of eight interconnected stories pays homage to remarkable mentors, chronicles a path to conscious commitment and raises questions about belonging and exile, freedom and responsibility, past and present.

John Taylor, The Apocalypse Tapestries. The e-book version of Taylor's account of a quest for meaning in travels through Europe. The work presents sixty-six poems, prose poems and meditations, some noting down memorable meetings, some inspired by 14th-century French tapestries portraying St. John writing the Book of Revelation.

Ken Wilkerson, Midnight Highway. A boisterous account of a travelling vampire magic show wending its way through the remote reaches of the American Southwest.

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Poetry

William Allen, Sevastopol: On Photographs of War. Poetic responses to photographs taken from 1854 to 1997, mostly in times of war. The reader looks at the photo on the left page and measures the author's response on the right, meanwhile living through trying moments of history.

Mario Azzopardi, Naked As Water, translated from the Maltese by Grazio Falzon. Collected poems of an avant-garde author tormented by the search for love, self and God. A phantasmagoria of nocturnal visions, mythic quest and sexual obsession.

Amelia Biagioni, The Hunts, translated from the Spanish by Renata Treitel. A bilingual edition of an astonishing poetic cycle that ranges across time and space to recreate the eternal hunt: the unstoppable, restless process of the universe chasing, tormenting and consuming itself. First appearance in English of an Argentine master, who died in the year 2000. OUT OF PRINT

Tomislav Marijan Bilosnic, The Tiger is the World. A cycle of poems and prose-poems in five parts inspired by the ferocity, willfulness and magnificent physical presence of the tiger. By turns playful, dark, autobiographical, rapturous and mystical, the poems seek the nature of the tiger, who comes to the poet and takes over his heart and his mind. OUT OF PRINT

Alfredo de Palchi, The Aesthetics of Equilibrium. The evolution of the anthropoid killer Homo sapiens and the lion who opposes him, presented in 64 prose poems. A powerful blast against human cruelty and devastation. Translated from Italian by John Taylor.

Alfredo De Palchi, Addictive Aversions, translated from the Italian by Sonia Raiziss & others. Erotic and anti-erotic poems by a poet "not for the fainthearted" (Library Journal). Order

Alfredo De Palchi, Anonymous Constellation, translated from the Italian by Sonia Raiziss. A collection of stark and sometimes brutal poems reflecting on the universality of violence, by the New York Italian poet. These crystallizations of life-experience achieve a strange beauty.

Alfredo De Palchi, The Scorpion's Dark Dance, translated from the Italian by Sonia Raiziss. A bilingual edition of La buia danza di scorpione, a series of poems written by the young man in an Italian prison after World War II.

Luigi Fontanella, Angels of Youth, translated from the Italian by Carol Lettieri & Irena Marchegiani Jones. A cycle of poems reaching for the ineffable wisps of thoughts, memories and impressions that make up one's private world. Especially moving are "Stanzas for Emma," a series of poems dedicated to the poet's far-distant daughter. OUT OF PRINT

Bogomil Gjuzel, The Wolf at the Door: A Poetic Cycle, translated from the Macedonian by P. H. Liotta. A search for roots, humanity and survival in the gloom of recent Balkan history, with illuminating notes and observations by the translator. Introduction by Charles Simic. This is the first appearance in English of Macedonia's major poet. Order

Vicente Huidobro, The Poet Is a Little God, translated from the Spanish by Jorge García-Gómez. A bilingual edition of El Espejo de Agua, Poemas Arcticos and Ecuatorial by the Chilean poet who strove to compete with nature itself in creative imagery.

Imre Oravecz, When You Became She, translated from the Hungarian by Bruce Berlind. Nearly a hundred prose poems delineating a love affair with extraordinary variety, intensity and subtlety. The book sold out within hours when first published in Budapest. Order

Lutz Rathenow, The Fantastic Ordinary World of Lutz Rathenow: Poems, Plays & Stories, translated from the German by Boria Sax & Imogen von Tannenberg. A bilingual edition of satires, skits and grotesqueries conveying the maddening humdrumness of the ultimate police state.

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Plays

Jens BjØrneboe, Amputation: Texts for an Extraordinary Spectacle, translated from the Norwegian by Solrun Hoaas & Esther Greenleaf Mürer. First publication in English of both versions of the Norwegian iconoclast's shocking plays that are (in his own words) "...directed against those forms of society that do not allow room for people who think differently from those in power." Order

Gary Kern, The Mad Kokoshka. In 1919 the Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka created a sensation when he introduced his friends to his new model and companion, TheSilent Woman: a lifesize doll in the image of Alma Mahler, the beautiful widow of the great composer. Opera-goers were shocked to see them together in a private box at the theater. Even before this scandal, the newspapers in Germany were calling him "der tolle Kokoschka" — the mad Kokoschka.

Manlio Santanelli, Emergency Exit, translated from the Italian by Anthony Molino with Jane House. A ferocious and funny play set in an earthquake zone. "Extraordinary, intended for audiences who hunger for the rare and the beautiful" (Eugene Ioneseco).

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Fiction

Antonio Di Benedetto, Animal World, translated from the Spanish by H. E. Francis. A bilingual edition of Mundo animal, a collection of short stories with hallucinatory animal transformations by an internationally acknowledged Argentine master. OUT OF PRINT

Hugh Fox, The Last Summer. A novel about a professor dying of cancer and trying to pack his erudition into his son, who prefers video games and Coca-Cola, by the acclaimed author of Leviathan and Shaman. Order

Oliverio Girondo, Scarecrow & Other Anomalies, translated from the Spanish by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert. A bilingual edition of outrageous and hilarious fantasmagorías by an Argentine genius (or madman), including "Invitation to Vomit," "It's All Drool" and "Lunarlude." First appearance in English.

Edvard Hoem, Ave Eva: A Norwegian Tragedy, translated from the Nynorsk ("New Norwegian") by Frankie Belle Shackelford. A brooding novel from the North, part romance, part murder mystery, part social commentary, all mixed together into a great spiritual quest.

Antonio Porta, Dreams & Other Infidelities, translated from the Italian by Anthony Molino. Stories halfway between dream and waking that explore the uncensored territory of the mind, by a renowned experimentalist. Order

Ellen Tifft, Moon, Moon, Tell Me True. A novel about American carnival life and the hopes and disappointments of lower-income people just after WWII, written with unusual directness, honesty and charm by a lifetime resident of the Finger Lakes region of New York.

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Non-fiction

Jean-Pierre Barricelli, Fireplaces of Civilization: Literary Portraits of Florence, Paris, Sicily, Seville and Granada. Imaginative essays evoking great cities in their art, literature and daily life, written by a distinguished scholar, linguist and musician.

Darnetta Bell & Kevin Bongiorni (eds.), Cemeteries & Spaces of Death. Essays on the grim subject – Aztec sacrifices, danse macabre, Frankenstein, Hemingway, the cult of Jim Morrison, etc.– by a variety of authors.

Emil Draitser, The Supervisor of the Sea. A Jewish-Russian émigré, Professor Draitser presents in this collection his longer and more serious stories in a sequence that moves from Russia to America to the fantastic beyond.

Gary Kern, Letters from Dwight. A series of actual letters, sent over a period of seven years, that depict the life of an ex-professor living in a slum, renting rooms to odd characters and getting into strange situations.

Gary Kern, Misfortune. A memoir about different kinds of hard luck. "Quads" presents the world of quadriplegics, "Old Woman" details the plight of the old and forgotten, "Polyglottos" concerns a Russian dissident and the difficulties of translating him.

George Slusser & Jean-Pierre Barricelli, Genre at the Crossroads: The Challenge of Fantasy. Forthcoming (available October, 2003). Twenty essays in this volume make the case for fantasy, especially for science fiction, tracing its origins and exploring its richness.

Ken Wilkerson, Blue Ride. Fifteen stories of raw and desperate characters in the outback towns of Southern California by an American writer who explores the desert wastes.

Flavio Almerighi, Storm Petrel. Poems of raw and immediate experience set in contrast to lyrical and romantic effusions. A hard-headed realism tempered by sympathetic understanding. Translated by Steven Grieco-Rathgeb. Preface by Giorgio Linguaglossa.

Elisa Biagini, The Plant of Dreaming: Poems. Striving to communicate the purity and pain of each experience, to rediscover the reality in each moment, the author enters into a creative dialogue with the poetry of Paul Celan and Emily Dickinson. Translated from Italian by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, Eugene Ostashevsky & Gregory Conti, with a preface by the author & an introduction by Riccardo Donati.

Peter Dellolio, A Box of Crazy Toys: 100 Liquid Landscapes. Experimental poems at the limits of imagination: "A rubber floor asked / to be forgiven. Pink / plates went on a pilgrimage..."

Alfredo de Palchi, Nihil. A wholly original book of poetry and prose in which the author imaginatively floats down the river of his youth, the Adige, and describes scenes of beauty and horror, com¬ment¬ing upon them. The river leads to memories, time and space; the forward motion – to more extreme reaches of human experience; and the mood – to a more powerful rage against cruelty, viciousness and death. Translated, with a preface, by John Taylor.

Francesca Dono, Six Degrees From the North Pole. Sharp and slippery poems that catch the fragments of mind, matter and movement in an original and ever changing construction of reality. Bilingual Italian-English, translated by Lilly Sutherland.

Michael Palma, Faithful in My Fashion: Essays on the Translation of Poetry. One of the outstanding translators of Dante in our time discusses the art of translation and literary companionship in eleven genial and witty essays, plus an interview.

Gayle Ridinger, The Prose of Other People. Twenty-three short stories, some no more than a page, most a page or two, a few more than five pages, set in America and Europe, deceptively simple, often with a twist. Sample titles: "Ungiven Gifts," "Something Called Age," "In the Presence of All Presences and Absence of All Witnesses."

Victoria Surliuga, Shadow, translated from the Italian by Alessandro Carrera & Giorgio Mobili. Artwork by Ezio Gribaudo. Couplets and short poems of childhood's dream and memories probing into the depths where life and dream cannot be told apart. Bilingual: Italian-English.

Giuseppe Talia, Thalia: Poems. A high-spirited collection of 52 poems celebrating the southern climes of Italy, the land of Calabria, its nature, beauty and joy. The title denotes the ancient Goddess of Song and Dance, the Muse of idyllic poetry. Translated from the Italian by Nehemiah H. Brown.

John Taylor, The Dark Brightness. A fine volume of verse that takes the reader on an exploration of unfamiliar terrain with the senses heightened. It is quiet and sensitive; one perceives and feels every drop, shadow and ray of light. The mood is enhanced by black and white graphics produced by three French artists — Sibylle Baltzer, Nelly Buret and Caroline Francois-Rubino — and one Greek — Dimitris Souliotis.

Claudia Zironi, Eros and Polis: of that time when I was God in my belly. Claudia Zironi turns the tables on male writers with her poetic reminiscences of former boyfriends and lovers. Her tone by turns is bemused, angry, grateful and sometimes revelatory. Her style is sharp, spare and paradoxical.