André Breton Books

"In the spring of 1919, two young men, André Breton and Philippe Soupault, one a student of law and the other of medicine, both in a state of moral shock after the carnage of World War I, embarked on an experiment in writing. Sick of the literary cultivation of an individual voice, sick of the "well-written," they wanted to unleash the power of the word as such, the better to create "a new morality" that would stand in place of "the prevailing morality, the source of all our trials and tribulations." They devised a plan. They would write over the course of a week; they would write for only so much time on each day of the week; they would write fast and then faster. When the week was over, the writing would be over, and they would not go back to it or clean it up in any way. Finally, the project must proceed in perfect secrecy. They must not tell anyone what they were up to. This was how The Magnetic Fields, the first sustained exercise in automatic writing as a form of literary composition, came to be. Charlotte Mandell's brilliant new translation reveals a key work of twentieth-century literature anew"-- Provided by publisher

Presents an overview of the life and work of the groundbreaking artist Man Ray (1890-1976) who broke down the boundaries between photography and graphic design with his innovative techniques. This collection of famous, lesser known, and unknown works illustrates Man Ray's singular visionary power.

Presents a definitive statement on l'humour noir, one of the seminal concepts of Surrealism. This title offers an anthology of the writers the author most admires. It discusses the acerbic aphorisms of Swift, Lichtenberg and Duchamp, the theatrical slapstick of Christian Dietrich Grabbe, the wry missives of Rimbaud, and the manic paranoia of Dali.

"Nadja, " originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in teh city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. "The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen, " Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.

Ein poetisches Manifest beschreibt einen Traum von einer alten Zigeunerin auf der Insel Bonaventure, einem bedeutenden Wallfahrtsort für Meeresvögel. Der Traum wird von der Anordnung bunter Fässer und deren kabbalistischen Zeichen inspiriert, die auf einem Fischerboot entdeckt wurden.

In L'Amour fou nun mischen und ergänzen sich Reminiszenzen an die surrealistische Bewegung, Räsonnements über Filme, Plastiken, Lektüreerlebnisse, Exkurse und Aperçus. Scharfsinnige Analysen und sublime Beobachtungen finden sich in diesem Text, der essayartig das Thema der romantischabsoluten Liebe umspielt und einkreist.