ISBN 0-8112-0632-7 (US hbk),,, 0-8112-0633-5 (US pbk)

"The Supermale ("Le Surmâle") by Alfred Jarry, first published in French in 1902, is a disturbing yet hilarious vision of the future (the 1920s!). Jarry, most famous for his uproarious (and at the time scandalous) play Ubu Roi , here combines fin-de-siécle love of posing -- the desire to shock the bourgeoisie -- with Gargantuan sexual excess, in a short novel whose black humor in many ways anticipates the Surrealists and such disparate writers as Queneau and Genet.

"In her introduction, the translator Barbara Wright states: 'The essence of the Supermale is that he goes beyond everything hitherto imaginable'. Jarry inherited this credo of exploring the limits of human sensations from the 'Decadents' of the 1890s but transformed it into his own philosophy of 'pataphysics' -- an attempt to create a new system of values out of the nihilism of the Ubu plays. Miss Wright further explains: 'The Supermale is obsessed with the potentialities of man and what he considers to be his limitations; with the idea of extending frontiers, pushing the possible to the limits of the imaginable, discovering what might be done by will power to liberate and control the energy of the universe'. But Jarry has by no means written a philosophical tract. Choosing to test man's potential in the sexual arena, Jarry has created a remarkable piece of bittersweet erotica, comic in its wit and deliberate pretension, and poignant in the Supermale's conclusion: 'Assiduous lovemaking leaves no time to experience love'." [jacket blurb, US pbk, 1977]

"A surreal satire imbued with pataphysical insights." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1997).