THE COMPLETE WILD BODY is the first in a long list, republished by Black sparrow Press, of exemplary essential modernistic landmarks on the road of excessive self-discovery by THE ENEMY, Wyndham Lewis his-self. To give you an inkling of the kind of bombastic verbiage that riddles this prose like so many death-traps: "To introduce my puppets, and the Wild Body, the generic puppet of all, I must project a fanciful wandering figure to be the showman to whom the antics and solemn gambols of these wild children are to be a source of strange delight."

The literary Lion here roars loudly somewhat unbecoming of English gentlemanry, which is exactly the vorticist point right in the center of this bull's eye Wyndham Lewis slays exactly all we ever thought refined and full of polite mannerisms in modern society. "tyros" accompany on canvas these stories of his, for Wyndham Lewis is one of the greatest painters of modernism as well as author, being the founder of VORTICISM, the only avant-garde movement of 20th century Britain; likewise he influenced and intellectually ruled and/or fascinated Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stein,et.al.etc., and a slew of lesser-known (unjustifiably) Artists circa (roughly) the turn of the century to the dropping of the atom bomb. His Art like his life was lived under the persona of the enemy and his condemnation was indeed high praise in that he deemed whomever worthy of his intellectual onslaught. His graphic works brilliantly illustrate the volume and compliment the tales that smack of a science-fictive otherworldliness but are entirely realistic, to the extensive degree as to be super- realism (surrealism); especially in consideration that all the characters are mere auotmatons executing their behaviour patterns as if ordered to do so by some outside force of cosmic porportions. Not to say they are dull and predictable, not in any absolute sense; Ker-Orr is our adventuer, a "soldier of humour" in a very pataphysical sense, whose definition is the "science of imaginary solutions". Conjured up as by tricks is an entire situational reality where the narrator is faced with human mimickery and acts, deified with a strict militant stance,according to a system of beliefs prescribed by "inferior religions". Lewis rewrote/re-worked the stories twenty years plus later and tells us all he did in these pioneering myths he's still exhausting philosophically. The stories are replete with all the enthusiasm of a young artist forgeing new worlds in a time of intense innovation, and of all his myriad works, this book is my and many others favorite; I consider it one of the ten greatest books- among 50 plus boxes -I own. I would be-deck it with the constellations entire, not just five dim suns, which is not enough illuminism to shed lite on the innumerable profoundities barely contained herein.

While Joyce was still working on traditional prose in The Dubliners and Eliot hadn't entered his Waste Land, Wyndham Lewis wrote a series of short stories that shattered expectations of english writing. A correspondent of Pound, Eliot, Yeats and Joyce, Lewis was too prickly a personality to be accepted into the canon as they were. As with many great writers his achievement was too difficult and uncomfortable for society to accept. This collection prints the 9 stories about life in the Breton countryside as they were collected in 1927 and then follows them with the originally published stories from which they were revised. The prose still feels entirely new and strange, and, unlike most contemporary writing that tries to achieve that status, it is both entertaining and theoretically astute.