Browse by Artist: PESSOA, FERNANDO

Artist:	PESSOA, FERNANDO
Title:	The Book of Disquiet
Label:	EXACT CHANGE
Format:	Book
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	EC PESSOA

Exact Change is the beautifully designed small press run by Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang of Cambridge, Massachusetts. While some of us have known them for their musical activities associated with the groups named "Galaxie 500", "Magic Hour" and "Damon & Naomi" -- it is clear that their ultimate legacy as superior adherents of the soon to be defunct Human Race will emerge from the persistence and quality of cultural documentation they have developed with Exact Change. In an era where it is practically illegal for an American publishing house to have a consistent personality and generated easthetic, they have streamlined a dedication to resurrecting lost, obscure & historically significant surrealist texts, and in a few short years have presented the series listed here. Absolutely essential documentation, aimed at elevating the potentialities of the rarified human spirit, perfectly presented. "Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was a multitude of writers: his works were composed by 'heteronyms,' alter egos with distinct biographies, ideologies, influences, even horoscopes. The Book of Disquiet is the autobiography of Bernardo Soares, whom Pessoa described as a 'semiheteronym' because 'his personality is not different from mine, rather a simple mutilation of it.' But Soares never completed his book; it was discovered after Pessoa's death, on disordered scraps of paper in a trunk. Nearly fifty years later, The Book of Disquiet was finally published, but because any edition or translation of this work must choose a sequence for its entries, each presents a substantially different text." NY Times Book Review: "Limpid, aphoristic, gorgeous, sometimes maddening and utterly original, this compendium of dull days and transfiguring epiphanies is so distilled it should be dipped into in small does over a lifetime."

Artist:	PESSOA, FERNANDO
Title:	The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript...
Label:	EXACT CHANGE
Format:	Book
Price:	$12.50
Catalog #:	EC PESSOA2

...of the Baron of Teive." "Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was a multitude of writers: his works were composed by 'heteronyms,' alter egos with distinct biographies, ideologies, influences, even horoscopes. The Education of the Stoic is the only work left by the Baron of Teive, who, having destroyed all his previous attempts at literary creation, and about to destroy himself, explains 'the impossibility of producing superior art.' The baron's manuscript is found in a hotel-room drawer -- not unlike editor and translator Richard Zenith's own discovery, while conducting research in the Pessoa archives, of a small black notebook whose contents had never been transcribed. In it he found the missing pieces of this short but trenchant complement to Pessoa's major prose work, The Book of Disquiet. Pessoa himself noted that despite their dialectical differences, the middle-class author of The Book of Disquiet (assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares) and the aristocrat Teive, 'are two instances of the very same phenomenon -- an inability to adapt to real life.'"

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