Wyndham Lewis

Tarr, a classical and rare book that has been considered essential throughout human history, so that this work is never forgotten, we at Alpha Editions have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

Wyndham Lewis' scathing critique of modern democracy and mass society, now back in print."The working of the 'democratic' electoral system is of course as follows. A person is trained up stringently to certain opinions; then he is given a vote, called a 'free' and fully enfranchised person; then he votes (subject, of course, to new and stringent orders from the press, where occasionally his mentor commands him to vote contrary to what he has been taught) strictly in accordance with his training. His support for everything that he has been taught to support can be practically guaranteed. Hence, of course, the vote of the free citizen is a farce: education and suggestion, the imposition of the will of the ruler through the press and other publicity channels, cancelling it. So 'democratic' government is far more effective than subjugation by physical conquest." - Part IV, Chapter 2: The Democratic Educationalist State"a genuinely extraordinary book, because he predicted many things which were from so far off the agenda then that very few people had thought of them, and indeed this book was regarded as slightly madcap even in its era. It looks at theories through Georges Sorel, it looks at theories through Charles Maurras, but in the end it's Lewis' thesis that ultimately in the West-if we don't watch it ...-we will have Left-wing capitalism. This was a heterodox and absurdist thesis in the 1920s, which partly sophisticated Marxian critics and so on laughed to scorn But we have all around us a global, itemized, Left-leaning capitalist order." - Jonathan Bowden

Tarr turned to Hobson, and seized him, conversationally, by the hair. "Well, Walt Whitman, when are you going to get your hair cut?" "Why do you call me Walt Whitman?" "Would you prefer Buffalo Bill? Or is it Shakespeare?" "It is not Shakespeare--" "'Roi je ne suis: prince je ne daigne.'--That's Hobson's choice.--But why so much hair? I don't wear my hair long. If you had as many reasons for wearing it long as I have, we should see it flowing round your ankles " "I might ask you under those circumstances why you wear it short. But I expect you have good reasons for that, too. I can't see why you should resent my innocent device. However long I wore it I should not damage you by my competition--" Tarr rattled the cement match-stand on the table, and the gar on sang "Toute suite, toute suite "

Tarr is Wyndham Lewis' stunning debut novel, here in its original 1918 version. A full-scale Nietzschean assault on bourgeois values, Tarr is set in the cafes and bars of Paris in the early 20th century, and tells the tale of the artists and intellectuals of that time.

Self Condemned, originally published in 1954, tells the story of Professor Renarding and his wife, Essie, as they find themselves in Momaco, a fictionalized version of Toronto, following Ren resignation as an academic in London, England. Reduced to a position at the second-rate University of Momaco, Rennd Essie suffer through a bleak and oppressive isolation in a dreary and alien city. The novel, a devastating, disturbing satire of life in wartime Canada, explores the difficulty individuals face as they struggle to adapt to new surroundings while preserving their sense of wholeness, as well as the bond that develops between people during a shared experience of isolation. .

'The nearest the general run get to art is Action: sex is their form of art: the battle for existence is their picture.' Tarr tells the blackly comic story of the lives and loves of two artists, played out against the backdrop of Paris before the start of the First World War - the English enfant terrible Frederick Tarr, and the middle-aged German Otto Kreisler, a failed painter who finds himself in a widening spiral of militaristic self-destruction. When both become interested in the same two women - Bertha Lunken, a conventional German, and Anastasya Vasek, the ultra-modern international devotee of 'swagger sex' - Wyndham Lewis sets the stage for a scathing satire of national and social pretensions, the fraught relationship between men and women, and the incompatibilities of art and life. In his introduction and notes Scott W. Klein explores Lewis's stylistic experimentation within the context of avant-garde movements in painting, and offers new insights into Tarr as a work of mordent wit and enduringly ferocious irony. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Wyndham Lewis can claim to be one of a tiny handful of British artists who had a European reach and ambition. Creator with Ezra Pound of Vorticism, editor, designer and author of the great art manifesto Blast, a great painter and portraitist, novelist, polemicist and hater of the Bloomsbury movement, through a long life Lewis remained controversial, belligerent and very funny. With Joyce, Eliot and Pound (all of whose definitive portraits he painted) he stood for a heroic engagement with art and literature - and his ultimate (and unique) achievement was to be both a spectacular novelist and a spectacular painter.The Wild Body showcases his most original, daring and entertaining short fiction, mainly written around the time of Blast. In amazing contrast with so much feeble British writing of the period, it shows the heady delight of modernism at full tilt.