‘Europe’s belated answer to Lolita’
– Gabriel Josipovici, TLS (International Books of the Year 2004)

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) – mathematician, physicist and compulsive scribbler – invites a thirteen-year-old flower seller to call on him at home. He is vain, pettish, frisky; she becomes his housekeeper, pupil and lover; and there blossoms, in this novel’s wry, playful imagining of the real-life romance between Lichtenberg and Maria Stechard, a rare but credible happiness.

Gert Hofmann (1931–93) was ‘one of the finest 20th-century German writers, extraordinarily versatile, a writer of surprises’ (Irish Times). Lichtenberg and The Little Flower Girl was his last novel. His son Michael Hofmann is a poet and the translator of works by Joseph Roth, Wolfgang Koeppen, Kafka, Brecht and others.

Francis Ponge  Unfinished Ode to Mud
translated by Beverley Bie Brahic
ISBN 978–0–9557285–6–3; £7.50

‘So here I am with my pebble, which intrigues me, touches unknown springs in me. With my pebble that I respect. With my pebble for which I want to substitute an adequate logical (verbal) formula . . .’ (‘My Creative Method’)

Still radical, the poems of Francis Ponge (1899–1988) seek to give the things of the world, mute sharers of our existence, their due. Impatient with the usual baggage of literary description, Ponge attends to a pebble, a washpot, an eiderdown, a platter of fish, with lyrical precision; playing with sounds, rhythms and associations of words, he creates wholly new objects – ‘but which may be more touching, if possible, than natural objects, because human’.

Picasso, Sartre and Calvino were among Ponge’s admirers. Over half of the poems in Unfinished Ode to Mud have not been published before in English.

Beverley Bie Brahic is a poet (Against Gravity, 2006) and translator (Apollinaire, Cixous, Derrida, Roubaud). A Canadian, she lives in Paris and Stanford, California.

Elise Valmorbida  The TV President
ISBN 978–0–9557285–7–0; £7.50

In a re-enactment of the 1963 Dallas motorcade for a reality TV show, one JFK lookalike is killed and another injured. The unhinged widow and the wounded survivor, both disguised in black burqahs, drive from Dallas to Detroit in a gold SUV to hear a murderer’s confession.

Tune in to The Big Dealey, a betting show with a line-up of colourful assassination suspects. Watch as colossal brands, religious forces and infotainment wreak havoc with the truth. Race towards HyperFriday, when gamers, viewers and voters are promised the greatest election ever seen. Part mystery, part road-movie, this novel offers a wholly original and blackly funny switchback ride.

Italian-Australian émigré Elise Valmorbida runs a communications agency and teaches creative writing at Central St Martin’s in London. Her published works include the critically acclaimed novel Matilde Waltzing (1997) and The Book of Happy Endings (2007).