Jacob Siefring

This is an announcement regarding the future of The Empyrean Series of Sublunary Editions, for which I have served as series editor since its inception in 2021. The forty-ninth and the fiftieth titles, which I am currently editing and designing, are slated to be the last in the series. The forty-ninth title, as previously announced, will be Peter Lebrecht: A Tale Devoid of Adventures (by Ludwig Tieck, 1795, newly translated by Douglas Robertson). Editorial work on the series will be brought to completion with the publication of our fiftieth title, An Account of Marvels and of Beasts (by the Tang dynasty writer Niu Sengru, newly translated by Maxwell Massa), on or around May 15. Coincidentally, this date will mark roughly five years since the publication of the first title in the series, Three Dreams (Jean Paul and Laurence Sterne), in the spring of 2021.

It has been an amazing five years of publications. I know that my co-editor Joshua Rothes and I are both proud of all that we have achieved. By resurrecting sundry voices from centuries past, we have altered and added to the fields of American modernism, Iberian literature, Romanticisms English and German, early modern English literature, and several other fields. In the words of Julie Melby (writing in American Book Review), the series catalog ”serves as a wake-up call to scholars and general readers alike”. It is tempting to single out some of the names that made the series what it was: Jean Paul, Kathleen Tankersley Young, James Thomson, Antonio de Guevara, Thomas De Quincey, Boris Pilnyak, and so on. Such a list feels absurdly incomplete alongside a full listing of the many authors whose work we have championed. This post concludes with a list of the series titles in sequence, if only because it is good to preserve and remember them in one place.

It has been rewarding to work with the many brilliant editors and translators whose work made our volumes possible. I am grateful to the series’s subscribers and its devoted readers and enthusiasts, and to the many librarians, booksellers, and scholars who helped readers to discover books in the series. We could not have done it without you.

The series will continue to operate as an equal partnership between Joshua Rothes and myself, and to sell its stock of titles remaining in print. These are available for purchase through Asterism Books, our Seattle distributor. I would encourage you to explore the catalogue, if you are not familiar with it already, and also to share your enthusiasm for the books with your friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.

—Jacob Siefring

The Empyrean Catalogue

Three Dreams / Jean Paul and Laurence Sterne (tr. Thomas De Quincey, Noel & Ewing, ed. Siefring)

Vagaries Malicieux / Djuna Barnes

The Last Days of Immanuel Kant / Thomas De Quincey

Maria Wutz / Jean Paul (tr. Francis & Rose Storr and Ruth Martin)

If You Had Three Husbands / Gertrude Stein

Fantasticks / Nicholas Breton

Ivan Moscow / Boris Pilnyak (tr. A. Schwartzman)

Poems / Karl Kraus (tr. Albert Bloch)

Newton’s Brain / Jakub Arbes (tr. Josef Jiří Král)

A Looking Glasse for the Court / Antonio de Guevara (tr. Sir Francis Bryan & Jessica Sequeira)

Morning Star / Ada Negri (tr. Anne Day)

A Cypresse Grove / William Drummond of Hawthornden

Zorrilla, the Poet / José Zorrilla (tr. Eliot, Walsh, Everett, & Kennedy)

Poems / Miguel de Unamuno (tr. Eleanor Turnbull)

Essays, Paradoxes, Soliloquies / Miguel de Unamuno (tr. Stuart Gross & J. E. Crawford Flitch)

Joan of Arc / Jules Michelet and Thomas De Quincey (tr. G. H. Smith)

Pages from the Diary of a Jackass / Ante Dukić (tr. Vincent Georges)

Prefaces / Jean Paul (tr. Brooks, Carlyle, Dollenmayer, Grill, Glebe, Harley, Kennedy, Martin, Spencer)

The City of Dreadful Night and Other Writings / James Thomson

The Collected Works / Kathleen Tankersley Young (ed. Erik de la Prade & Joshua Rothes)

Exercises / Benjamín Jarnés (tr. Joshua Rothes)

At the Doors and Other Stories / Boris Pilnyak (tr. Cornos, Himmell, Laskin/Zisman, & Lozowick)

Sonnets and Poems / Antero de Quental (tr. S. Griswold Morley & Edgar Prestage)

Gebir, with “Crysaor” and “The Phocæans” / Walter Savage Landor

Hallucinated City / Mário de Andrade (tr. Jack E. Tomlins)

The Collected Works I: Prose, Selected Letters / Emanuel Carnevali (ed. Joshua Rothes)

The Collected Works II: Poetry, Criticism, Selected Translations / Emanuel Carnevali (ed. Joshua Rothes)

Two Stories / Jean Paul (tr. Alexander Booth & Matthew Spencer)

 Biographical Recreations from the Cranium of a Giantess / Jean Paul (tr. Genese Grill)

The Collected Poems / Amy Levy

Four Sermons / Jeremy Taylor

Tentacular Cities / Émile Verhaeren (tr. Jacob Siefring)

Life of Don Quixote and Sancho / Miguel de Unamuno (tr. Homer P. Earle)

I Have Seen Angels and Monsters / Eugene Jolas

Seccession in Astropolis / Eugene Jolas

The Country Preacher / Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (tr. Douglas Robertson)

Twelve Stories, with Selected Early Writings / Margery Latimer

Of the newe landes: A Critical Study of the Document Published in Antwerp, circa 1510 / Jan van Doesborch (ed. Jacob Siefring)

A Very Original Dinner / Fernando Pessoa (ed. Natalia Jerez Quintero)

Dialogues with Leucò / Cesare Pavese (tr. William Arrowsmith & D. S. Carne-Ross)

Logbook of Giannozzo the Balloonist / Jean Paul (tr. David Dollenmayer)

Kruitzner / Harriet Lee

The Failure / Giovanni Papini (tr. Virginia Pope)

Of Clouds and Mists: The Collected Poems / Pascal D’Angelo (ed. Dennis Barone)

The Adventures of Lady Egeria / W. C. (ed. Steven Moore)

The Parson in Jubilee: An Appendix / Jean Paul (tr. Matthew Spencer)

Sturly / Pierre Custot (tr. Richard Aldington)

The Mariner: A Static Drama in One Act / Fernando Pessoa (tr. Geoffrey Brock)

Peter Lebrecht: A Tale Devoid of Adventures / Ludwig Tieck (tr. Douglas Robertson)

An Account of Marvels and of Beasts / Niu Sengru (tr. Maxwell Massa)