Spurl Editions

My Worst Ideas
Michael Jeffrey Lee

With dissonant black humor, Lee creates a sense of dislocation and mounting desperation. In one story, a lonely young man carries a pigeon’s headless body in his pocket that warms when he nears a potential friend; in another, a pretentious lover is carried down a filthy river after diving in to save his sweetheart, who couldn’t care less. There is an innocence and directness to the writing that makes it harder and harder to ignore the work as it circles the drain of its obsession.

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The Formation of Calcium
M. S. Coe

“The more Mary Ellen tries to reinvent herself, the more lies she tells and the more risks she’s forced to take, and her recordings veer from understandable desperation to myopic self-assuredness, making for a vibrant character study (‘It’s like exhilaration and anticipation colliding down in your stomach, where everything real is felt,’ she says about her gambits). It’s a wild, rewarding ride.” — Publishers Weekly

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ARTHUR’S WHIMS
HERVÉ GUIBERT
Trans. Dana Lupo

Arthur’s Whims is the tale of “a modern saint,” a love story born of a childhood dream of being “alone on a boat with a boy, a friend.” Arthur and his beloved Bichon—a young man who, after drinking Arthur’s tears, becomes pregnant with his child—drift through a stream of identities and circumstances: birdcatchers for a French taxidermist; sailors shipwrecked in an ice fortress; explorers of the Isles of Traitors, Babies, and Sadness; famous magicians in Oklahoma; religious and medical marvels.

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The Cheap-Eaters
Thomas Bernhard
Trans. Douglas Robertson

The Cheap-Eaters have been eating at the Vienna Public Kitchen for years, and true to their name, always the cheapest meals. They become the focus of Koller's scientific attention when he deviates one day from his usual path through the park, leading him to come upon the cheap-eaters and to realize that they must be the focal piece of his years-long, unwritten study of physiognomy. Written in Bernhard's hyperbolic, darkly comic style, The Cheap-Eaters is a study of the limits of language and thought.

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Riviera: Photographs of Palm Springs by John Brian King

Riviera documents the eerie fragments of existence left behind in one city. John Brian King photographed Riviera from 2016 to 2018 in Palm Springs, California, and its surroundings; a full-time resident at the time, he used a cheap instant film camera to give his photographs a unique, washed-out, hazy aesthetic.

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Ghost Variations by John Brian King

A collection of instant black-and-white photographs of the California desert at night, beautifully depicting an aimless, enigmatic state of wandering.

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Witches’ Sabbath
Maurice Sachs
Trans. Richard Howard

Witches’ Sabbath is the remarkable autobiographical chronicle of French author Maurice Sachs (1906–1945). To Sachs, the work was “a statement of account, a moral memo. Or should I say immoral?” Thanks to his lifelong obsession with literature, Sachs developed a style all his own: peppered with keen, acerbic portraits of his contemporaries, sometimes picaresque, introspective and often full of irony.

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Toy Fabels
Cass McCombs

Reading Toy Fabels feels like traveling through Cass McCombs’ singular itinerant experiences — high and low voices merge, as childhood and adulthood, the east and west coasts, paganism and religion, twist into each other. Illustrated by McCombs, Toy Fabels’ brilliance lies in its embrace of the inexplicable and the ephemeral.

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DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT
THE SYMBIONESE LIBERATION ARMY
Edited by John Brian King

Death to the Fascist Insect is a compilation of the writings and transcribed recordings of the Symbionese Liberation Army (1973–75), a radical left-wing group based in the Bay Area of California. This publication chronicles the militant, if half-baked, political theories that inspired the SLA, as well as the ways that the SLA used violence and manipulation of the media to further the group’s goal of provoking armed revolution from the underground.

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One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand
BY Luigi Pirandello
Trans. William Weaver

Luigi Pirandello’s extraordinary final novel begins when Vitangelo Moscarda’s wife remarks that Vitangelo’s nose tilts to the right. This commonplace interaction spurs the novel’s unemployed, wealthy narrator to examine himself, the way he perceives others, and the ways that others perceive him. At first he only notices small differences in how he sees himself and how others do; but his self-examination quickly becomes relentless, dizzying, leading to often darkly comic results as Vitangelo decides that he must demolish that version of himself that others see.

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THE BIG LOVE
BY MRS. FLORENCE AADLAND

The Big Love is a Hollywood nightmare. It tells the story of Errol Flynn – a fading, alcoholic movie star – and the underage dancer-actress Beverly Aadland. The narrator? Beverly Aadland's fame-worshiping mother Mrs. Florence Aadland, who spurs the relationship on. There is nothing subtle or sympathetic about this memoir: It is outrageous, grotesque, surreal, notorious – an intimate look at Hollywood exploitation and decay.

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IN THE MIDST OF THINGS
BY SARAH HIATT

Photographer Sarah Hiatt captures a side of adolescence that we only murkily remember: a feeling of weariness with the present moment, terror of the future, the awkwardness of being in between. Over the course of six years, Hiatt photographed her younger niece and nephews around their home as they grew up in the small town of Joplin, Missouri, for her series In the Midst of Things. The images serve as a coming-of-age story, a visual narrative created through their personal experiences and shaped by the photographer’s struggles with guilt, loss, and loneliness. As their aunt, Hiatt was able to depict the formation of memories and the sad passage of time in a uniquely intimate way.

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LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980–84 by John Brian King

“Newly uncovered, these shots form a porthole into a long-gone era; the LA of old school Hollywood glamour is invisible here, concealed by the clamor of everyday life.” – AnOther Magazine

LAX is comprised of two series of black-and-white images of a metropolis that has now vanished. In the first series, “LAX,” photographer John Brian King engaged in street-style photography in one of the city’s most charged places: Los Angeles International Airport. In the second series, “LA,” King photographed a city at night devoid of people.

The black-and-white film negatives of LAX remained in a box for thirty years; they have now reemerged as the unsettling traces of 1980s Los Angeles.

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My Suicide by Henri Roorda
Trans. Eva Richter

Free ebook

Translated from French by Eva Richter. Henri Roorda – a Swiss anarchist, math teacher, and columnist – shot himself in 1925, but left behind this essay, which examines his life and philosophy of “joyful pessimism.”

In this baleful, little-known treatise, Henri Roorda presents debt and boredom in a world of capital as “his reasons for going,” and he dissects these motivations with such astuteness that his anatomy of himself and his perceived failures becomes spellbinding. My Suicide is both melancholy and humorous, political and deeply personal – a meditation on unfulfilled desires and the “uselessness of old age.”

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