The Arthritic Grasshopper: Collected Stories, 1934–1944

Translated by Henry Vale and Bonnie Ruberg, with an introduction by Bonnie Ruberg / Illustrations by Allan Kausch / April 2017 / 6 x 9, 240 pp. / 978-1-939663-22-1 First discovered, celebrated, and published at the age of fourteen by the Surrealists (who declared her to be the “new Alice”), Gisèle Prassinos quickly established herself in the literary world as a fount of automatic tales woven through with transgressive humor, coy menace, and a pervading sense of threatened feminine identity within a hostile world. “Gisèle Prassinos’s tone is unique,” claimed André Breton, “all the poets are jealous of it. Swift lowers his eyes, Sade shuts his candy box.” The Arthritic Grasshopper: Collected Stories, 1934–1944 gathers together an assortment of anxious dream tales drawn from literary journals and plaquettes, introduced and illustrated by such admirers as Paul Éluard, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. These 72 stories include such longer, novella-length narratives as “Sondue,” “The Executioner,”