The final book by the founder of Surrealism, translated into English for the first time."Cavalier Perspective shows us the lion in winter, André Breton near the end of his life, trying to reconcile all the contradictions of his extraordinary career. It is unexpectedly moving to watch him wrestling with his ghosts, aiming for magic, fitting himself uneasily into the new alien landscape of the 1960s."—Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Nam...

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. The long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. With its emphasis on unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, manipulation of language into puns and neologisms, and rhythm, Césaire considered his style a "beneficial madness" that could "break into the forbidden" and reach the powerfu...

This is Breton's definitive statement on l'humour noir, one of the seminal concepts of Surrealism. In his provocative anthology of the writers he most admires, Breton discusses the acerbic aphorisms of Swift, Lichtenberg and Duchamp, the theatrical slapstick of Christian Dietrich Grabbe, the wry missives of Rimbaud, the manic paranoia of Dali, the ferocious iconoclasm of Alfred Jarry and Arthur Cravan and the offhand hilarity of Apollinaire. For each of the authors included, Breton provide...

An indispensible classic of French poetry, this is a new translation of Breton and Soupault's experiment with automatic writing, and also the first known work of literary surrealism.In the spring of 1919, two young men, André Breton and Philippe Soupault, both in a state of shock after World War I, embarked on an experiment. Sick of the literary cultivation of “voice,” sick of the “well-written,” they wanted to unleash the power of the word and to create “a new mor...

A new translation of one of the defining works of the French surrealist movement, an energetic autobiographical novel that is at once both a tumultuous romance story and an initiation into the surrealism of everyday life.In Paris, during the fall of 1926, André Breton met a young woman from the provinces who called herself Nadja because, she said, "in Russian it's the beginning of the word for hope, and because it's only the beginning." Their love affair was brief,...

This is the first publication in English of the anthology that contains Breton’s definitive statement on l’humour noir, one of the seminal concepts of Surrealism, and his provocative assessments of the writers he most admired. While some of the authors featured in The Anthology of Black Humor are already well known to American readers—Swift, Kafka, Rimbaud, Poe, Lewis Carroll, and Baudelaire among them (and even then, Breton’s selections are often surprising)—many others are sure ...

Made into a 1967 film by Louis Malle and never before available in English, this classic of anarchist literature follows a once well-to-do young man forced into an itinerant life of crime.The Thief is a picture of the sleezy underbelly of the Belle Époque, a broadside fired against the corruptions of power and privilege. Written by the anarchist activist Georges Darien (a pseudonym that can be translated as “Lord Nothing”), it found almost no readers when ...

Originally published in Paris in 1929, this collage novel by avant-gardist Max Ernst constitutes a seminal 20th-century work of art. The artist's striking combinations of engravings from Victorian-era books and magazines, accompanied by enigmatic captions, offer a universe of mystery replete with all the possibilities of the bizarre dream world of the surreal. Images speak, language illustrates, and the reader's imagination provides the glue."Irrational, violent, tender, ironic, Max...

Henry Miller's famously banned book is "a matter-of-fact celebration of chucking one's dreary life and following your heart to Paris" (Richard Price).Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in...

'Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and family hangers-on and of grand old houses in St Petersburg and the surrounding countryside in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Young love, butterflies, tutors and a multitude of other themes thread together to weave an autobiography, which is itse...

“The most beautiful book that Genet has written.” —Jean-Paul SartreFirst published in France in 1949, The Thief’s Journal is Jean Genet’s iconic work of autobiographical fiction. This new edition brings his legendary genius to future generations of readers, with an introduction by Genet’s great admirer, Patti Smith.From a prison cell, the journal’s narrator recounts his travels across Europe in the 1930s—as a vagabond, pickpocket, and occasional pr...

CHARLES NICHOLL, author of SOMEBODY ELSE: ARTHUR RIMBAUD IN AFRICA 1880-91 has written of Dennis J. Carlile's translation of RIMBAUD:THE WORKS."These are the best renditions of Rimbaud in English since Wallace Fowlie's nearly forty years ago, and many of them surpass that high standard. These poems have been wrestled with, which is the very least they demand, and successfully brought back home. Carlile gets the difficult switches and swoops of tone mostly right, and the linguistic ...