The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards

(A Novel Against Psicho-Analise)
By Emil Szittya

"Austro-Hungarian vagabond poet, anarchist, and historian of suicide, Emil Szittya’s Hashish Films offers marvelously incautious texts riddled with fractured confessions and bewildering verdicts from the feral interwar years of the European avant-garde. Szittya’s “minor epiphanies” in “anarchist orthography” testify to a dedication to hallucinations that possibly “rattled his cage” and may yet shake ours. This fine gem is the first of Szittya’s books to appear in English. It was expertly translated by W. C. Bamberger and published by the always adventurous, ever exciting Wakefield Press. Group it on your shelf with Dada-Mystic Hugo Ball, one-armed adventurer-poet Blaise Cendrars, and the Comte de Lautréamont."
–Herbert Pföstl

Emil Szittya’s earliest known work of significance, The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards, was published in German in Budapest in 1916, yet it portrays the hallucinatory Paris in which the author had chosen a temporary dwelling at that time. Prose poems for lack of a better word, Szittya’s "hashish films" were almost lost to time but can now be recognized as similar to the work of Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire. They nevertheless reflect the author’s lifelong refusal to ally himself to any literary or artistic movement. It is a strange literary work as international and untethered as the author himself had been, a symbolic map of Montparnasse that incorporated the visual world of the painters around him.

2025; paperback; 7" x 4.5"; 80 pages; ISBN: 9781962728041.