The Ways of Paradise

By Peter Cornell

"Peter Cornell presents his Ways of Paradise as notes for a now vanished work by a deceased friend, who spent three decades in the National Library of Sweden researching for his “magnum opus.” These fragments—“on the connections between art, literature, spirituality and the occult through history, with a particular focus on spirals and labyrinths,”—are the remaining traces of the dead man’s work,” shepherded into “found manuscript” form by his “sole remaining friend.” Published in 1987, this little garden of wonders became a cult book in Sweden, and rightly so. The Ways of Paradise is splendidly translated by Saskia Vogel and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, who use plant-based inks and no plastic-based coatings for their beautifully sober books—an ecologically sound design decision worth heeding.“
–Herbert Pföstl

A cult book at the intersection of fiction and essay, on the connections between art, literature, spirituality and the occult through history.

In his foreword to The Ways of Paradise, Peter Cornell presents this so-called found manuscript, the work of a now-deceased, obscure researcher who spent three decades in the National Library of Sweden working on his magnum opus. Upon his death, no trace of this work remains aside from this set of notes and fragments which form an enigmatic set of texts on the connections between art, literature, spirituality and the occult through history, with a particular focus on spirals and labyrinths. Ranging from the Crusades to Ruskin, Freud to surrealism, cubism, automatic writing, Duchamp, the Manhattan Project, Pollock and Smithson, this cult book, first published in Sweden in 1987, is translated into English for the first time by Saskia Vogel.

2025; paperback; 7.8" x 4.9"; 152 pages; ISBN: 9781804271063.