Antonin Artaud’s novelised biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously his most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, HELIOGABALUS is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author’s preoccupations of the time with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, the book shows Artaud at his most lucid as he assembles an entire world-view from raw material of insanity, sexual obsession and anger. Artaud arranges his account of Heliogabalus’s reign around the breaking of corporeal borders and the expulsion of body fluids, often inventing incidents from the Emperor’s life in order to make more explicit his own passionate denunciations of modern existence. No reader of this, Artaud’s most inflammatory work – translated into English here for the very first time – will emerge unscathed from the experience. Translated by Alexis Lykiard and with an introduction by Stephen Barber (author and cultural historian).

From his birth in a cradle of sperm to his death on a blood-soaked pillow, Heliogabalus, Emperor from the age of fourteen, embodies the depravity and decay of Rome in the third century. Although steeped in vice and tormented by madness, the deviant tyrant is elevated to a divine status, at the crossroads between the Greco-Latin world and the Orient.Considered one of the most accomplished and accessible of Artaud's works, while also one of his most imaginative, Heliogabalus, or The Anarchist Crowned is a hallucinatory, surreal depiction of a historical figure, as well as a revolutionary founding text from the father of the Theatre of Cruelty.

"Artaud remains one of the significant and influential theorists of modern theatre."—Gerald Rabkin, Rutgers University

Antonin Artaud's novelized biography of the third-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is both his most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, when Artaud was preparing his legendary "Theatre of Cruelty," Heliogabalus is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification, and terminal violence. Reflecting its author's preoccupation with the occult, magic, -Satan, and esoteric religions, the author assembles an entire world-view from the raw material of insanity, sexual obsession and anger.

For the first time in English, a glittering novella about stardom from “one of the greatest avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth century” (Judith Thurman, The New Yorker) Winner of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature All eyes are on Rikio. And he likes it, mostly. His fans cheer, screaming and yelling to attract his attention—they would kill for a moment alone with him. Finally the director sets up the shot, the camera begins to roll, someone yells “action”; Rikio, for a moment, transforms into another being, a hardened young yakuza, but as soon as the shot is finished, he slumps back into his own anxieties and obsessions. Being a star, constantly performing, being watched and scrutinized as if under a microscope, is often a drag. But so is life. Written shortly after Yukio Mishima himself had acted in the film “Afraid to Die,” this novella is a rich and unflinching psychological portrait of a celebrity coming apart at the seams. With exquisite, vivid prose, Star begs the question: is there any escape from how we are seen by others?

The past comes to haunt contemporary London in this evocation of the life of the little-known Roman boy-emperor Heliogabalus. The Roman gay world is mirrored in Jim's relations with his duplicitous partner Danny and the contemporary London scene they inhabit. Events take a weird twist when Jim discovers that his partner is living a double life as a member of a Soho cult involving bizarre sex rites on Hampstead Heath. Jim, repulsed by the cult's activities, finds his relationship with Danny at an end and that he has become a target for the leader's reprisals. He is forced to take refuge with a female friend, Masako, with whom he visits Rome to investigate sites associated with Heliogabalus. She leads him to a meeting with a wealthy young man called Antonio who claims to be the emperor reincarnated. When Jim and Masako return to London, Antonio pays them a visit which leads to a conclusion every bit as dramatic as Heliogabalus' own murder. An electrifying poetic recreation of a bizarre period of ancient history, this narrative also dissolves boundaries of gender in the complex relationship of Jim and Masako.

Bringing together scholars from English literature, geography, politics, the arts, environmental humanities and sociology, Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene contributes to the emerging debate between bodies of thought first incepted by scholars such as Mouffe, Whyte, Kaplan, Hunt, Swyngedouw and Malm about how apocalyptic events, narratives and imaginaries interact with societal and individual agency historically and in the current political moment. Exploring their own empirical and philosophical contexts, the authors examine the forms of political acting found in apocalyptic imaginaries and reflect on what this means for contemporary society. By framing their arguments around either pre-apocalyptic, peri-apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic narratives and events, a timeline emerges throughout the volume which shows the different opportunities for political agency the anthropocenic subject can enact at the various stages of apocalyptic moments. Featuring a number of creative interventions exclusively produced for the work from artists and fiction writers who engage with the themes of apocalypse, decline, catastrophe and disaster, this innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the politics of climate change, the environmental humanities, literary criticism and eco-criticism.

"Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation is intended to provide readers of literary criticism, art history, political philosophy, and the social sciences with a fresh perspective from which to revisit dead-end theoretical debates over concepts such as "agency," "essentialism," and "realism" - and, at the same time, to offer a new take on anarchism itself, challenging conventional readings of the tradition. The anarchism that emerges from this reinterpretation is neither a musty rationalism nor a millenarian irrationalism, but a living body of thought that points beyond the sterile antinomies of post-modern and Marxist theory."--BOOK JACKET.

A collection of manifestos originally published in 1938, in which the French artist and philosopher attacks conventional assumptions about the drama, and calls for the influx of irrational material - based on dreams, religion, and emotion - in order to make the theater vital for modern audiences.