Mina Loy is one of the lost women of English literature. Writing in the first half of the twentieth century, she was part of the Futurist poets community in Florence and a prominent member of the European arts scene, mingling with avant-garde writers such as Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein. Loy was not simply a muse to the great and the good. Her poetry was regularly published in periodicals and anthologies; however, she published just two books in her lifetime: Lunar Baedecker and Lunar Baedecker & Time Tables. Occasional posthumous publications followed her death in 1966, but she has faded out of public consciousness in the intervening decades. Dalkey's new collection of unpublished writings aims to raise her profile for a new generation.

Stories and Essays of Mina Loy includes short stories, plays, stage directions for a ballet and essays. The pieces are, on the whole, fragmentary. The avant-garde nature of her writing means that much of her prose is disorientating. In her dramas, allegorical characters appear and disappear at lightning pace, reciting obscure lines. Her stories do not rely on traditional narrative structures, instead they flow with intriguing prose and occasionally brilliant minute observation of her characters. She was an outstanding stylist, and some of her pieces are wonderful. "Pazzarella" is a sober reflection on the emotional abuse that can accompany intense sexual relationships, while "The Stomach" is a unique piece on a woman's lot in life. Loy wrote with a sparkling wit, so her dense prose is never overpowering.

However, avant-garde writing can be difficult to grasp at the best of times, and the largely unfinished and unpolished nature of these pieces makes the task doubly daunting. The stories hint at intention and are bursting with style, but often do not provide enough substance for the reader to engage with. The editors have taken the bizarre decision to start with a long piece ("The Agony of the Partition") that is so fragmentary as to be nonsensical, and it is not the only piece with this problem. There are over 100 pages of notes at the end of the book, most of which are unhelpful. So much of this collection is obscure that it becomes a chore to read in too many places.

All of which is a shame, because there are moments in this book, bits of prose and turns of phrase, that hint at something amazing. If the collection aims to breathe life into Mina Loy for a new generation, then it has worked for me, because I have been scrambling on the internet to find a copy of Insel, her only published novel. However, as a stand-alone celebration of a forgotten writer it leaves a lot to be desired.