Spells - Michel de Ghelderode

Spells by Michel de Ghelderode, translated by George MacLennan / ISBN 9781939663207 / 240-page paperback with flaps from Wakefield Press *** “I live outside the world in a universe I myself have created, like a madman or a holy visionary.”—Michel de Ghelderode Hitherto unavailable in English, Spells, by the Belgian dramatist Michel de Ghelderode, ranks among the twentieth century’s most noteworthy collections of fantastic tales. Like Ghelderode’s plays, the stories are marked by a powerful imagination and a keen sense of the grotesque. Written at a time of illness and isolation, it was Ghelderode’s last major creative work, and he claimed it as his most personal and deeply felt one: a set of written spells through which his fears, paranoia, and nostalgia found concrete form. By turns mystical, macabre and whimsically humorous, and set in the unsettled atmosphere of Brussels, Ostend, Bruges, and London, the stories embody a uniquely strange vision of the world, and bear witness to Gheld