THE MONK
by Matthew Gregory Lewis,
as retold by Antonin Artaud
Monk Lewis is surrealist in the beauty of evil
- André Breton
Born out of the shocks of the French Revolution and published in 1796 when its author was just twenty, The Monk brought M.G. Lewis M.P. instant success and notoriety: prosecution, the condemnation of respectable society, and admiring notices from readers as discerning as Mary Wollstonecraft and the Marquis de Sade. Over a century later Antonin Artaud would rework a text which had long preoccupied him, and whose evocations of clerical abuse, incest, demonic sexuality, and malign inherited destinies echoed his own obsessions, all played out under the sign of the supernatural:
an imposition of magic onto a reality which it absorbs and works into the form of a novel by means of the hallucinatory and real poetry of the higher spheres, of the deep eddies of the invisible.
by Matthew Gregory Lewis, as retold by Antonin Artaud
Translated by John Macmillan
Introduction by Stephen Barber
Artworks by Martin Bladh
out now
Hardbound, 376 pages, 190 x 148mm
ISBN 978-1-915908-15-5
Release date 01/09/2026
About the authors
Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud’s work has a world-renowned status for experimentation across performance, film, sound, poetry and visual art. In the 1920s, he was a member of the Surrealist movement until his expulsion, and formulated theoretical plans across the first half of the 1930s for his ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ and attempted to carry them through. He made a living as a film actor from 1924 to 1935 and made many attempts to direct his own film projects. In 1936, he travelled to Mexico with a plan to take peyote in the Tarahumara lands. In 1937, preoccupied with the imminent apocalypse, he travelled to Ireland but was deported, beginning a nine-year asylum incarceration during which he continued to write and also made many drawings. After his release in 1946, he lived in the grounds of a sanatorium in Ivry-sur-Seine, close to Paris, and worked intensively on drawings, writings and sound-recordings.
He died on 4 March 1948. His drawings have been exhibited on several occasions, notably at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna in 2002 and at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 2006.
John Macmillan
John Macmillan is an independent translator based in Lisbon, who has produced versions of works by Karel Hlaváček, Paul Celan, Unica Zürn, František Halas, and Joë Bousquet, among others. His co-translations of Hector Meinhof’s Three Nails, Four Wounds and Egregore have been published by Infinity Land Press; his versions of Antonin Artaud’s early texts and The Tarahumara (with Peter Valente) are in preparation from the same publisher.
Stephen Barber
Stephen Barber is the author of thirty fiction and non-fiction books, most recently White Noise Ballrooms and The Projectionists. His books have been acclaimed as ‘brilliant, profound and provocative’ by The Times newspaper, and he has been called ‘a writer of real distinction’ and ‘the most dangerous man in Europe’ by The Independent newspaper. The Sunday Times newspaper hailed his books as ‘exhilarating and disquieting’. In 2020, the author David Peace wrote in The Times Literary Supplement: ‘Beginning in 1993 with Artaud: Blows and Bombs, Stephen Barber has quietly, independently forged one of the most singular and enriching bodies of work in contemporary writing.’ He is a professor at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London.
Martin Bladh
Martin Bladh is a Swedish-born artist of multiple mediums and co-founder of Infinity Land Press. His work is driven by the idea that cruelty is the source of creativity, the relationship between victim and executioner, and the ever-present notion of evil.
Bladh’s published work includes The Rorschach Text, The Hurtin’ Club, The Torture of the 100 Pieces, Braquemard: The Clavicle of Gilles de Rais, DES: The Theatre of Death and Michael Carter - The Practitioner. He lives and works in London.