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...

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 ...

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,...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

The collected poems of one of the world's greatest living writers, Tomas Transtromer, available in this comprehensive edition.In day's first hours consciousness can grasp the worldas the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.Translated into fifty languages, the poetry of Tomas Transtromer has had a profound influence around the world, an influence that has steadily grown and has now attained a prominence comparable to that of Pablo Neruda's during his lifetime. But ...

Continuing the subversive self-revelation begun in Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller takes readers along a mad, free-associating journey from the damp grime of his Brooklyn youth to the sun-splashed cafes and squalid flats of Paris. With incomparable glee, Miller shifts effortlessly from Virgil to venereal disease, from Rabelais to Roquefort. In this seductive technicolor swirl of Paris and New York, he captures like no one else the blending of people and the cities th...

A beautiful new edition—the first in nearly twenty years—of the work of Wallace Stevens, a founding father of contemporary American poetry, with a dazzling range of work that is at once emotional and intellectual. As John N. Serio reminds us in his elegant introduction, Stevens has written more persuasively than any other poet about the significance of poetry itself in everyday life: “The imagination—frequently synonymous with the act of the mind, or poetry, for Stevens—is what gives life ...

A new translation finally appears of one of the seminal books in the history of literature. Adored by the Surrealists, Les Chants de Maldoror was hailed by them as a dark progenitor of their movement, and its author, Le Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse) elevated to the status of literary idol. It was in these pages that André Breton discovered the phrase which would come to represent the Surrealist doctrine of objective chance: as beautiful as the random encounter between an umbrella ...