The trumpets of Jericho

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This fierce fable of childbirth by German Surrealist Unica Zürn was written after she had already given birth to two children and undergone the self-induced abortion of another in Berlin inthe 1950s. Beginning in the relatively straightforward, if disturbing, narrative of a young woman in a tower (with a bat in her hair and ravens for company) waging a psychic war against the parasitic son in her belly. The Trumpets of Jericho dissolves into a beautiful nightmare of hypnotic obsession and mythical language, stiched together with anagrams and private ruminations. Arguably Zürn's most extreme experiment in prose, and never before translated into English, this novella dramatizes the frontiers of the body--its defensive walls as well as it cavities and thresholds--animating a harrowing and painfully honest depiction of motherhood as a breakdown in the distinction between self and other, transposed into the language of darkest fairy tales. -- Provided by publisher