Robert Desnos Book order

Published in 1943 (just a year before its author was arrested by the Gestapo for his Resistance activities), The Die Is Cast was a departure for Robert Desnos: a shift from his earlier, frenetic Surrealist prose to a social realism that borrowed as much from his life experience as his career as a journalist. Drawing on his own use of drugs in the 1920s and his doomed relationship with the chanteuse Yvonne George, Desnos here portrays a band of opium, cocaine and heroin users from all walks of life in Paris. It is a startlingly contemporary portrayal of overdoses, arrests, suicides and the flattened solitude of the addict, yet published in occupied Paris, years before “junkie literature” established itself with the Beat Generation. An anomaly both in his career and for having been published under the Occupation by an active member of the Resistance, The Die Is Cast now stands as timely a piece of work as it had been untimely when it first appeared.

The book features nearly 300 poems by Robert Desnos, a pivotal figure in the Surrealist movement, celebrated by André Breton as its 'prophet.' This selection draws from three of his collections, showcasing the breadth of his influence across various art forms during the twentieth century. Despite his significance, Desnos' work remains largely underrepresented in English, and this volume aims to bring his remarkable poetry to a wider audience.

Written in April/May 1922, this is the first prose work by Robert Desnos. At first it appears to be a sort of roman a clef. All of Desnos's friends in the Paris Dada Movement make their appearance, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon and Benjamin Peret among others. The Dada movement seemed played out, killed off by a mixture of public success, internal dissensions and boredom with the predictability of its scandals. The Punishments of Hell thus lies between Dada and Surrealism. All is confusion at this critical pass when the future seems simultaneously at stake and within one's grasp, and this novel perfectly embodies its modern chaos.

Originally published in 1924 to immediate and lasting acclaim, Liberty or Love! is the story of Sanglot the Corsair's pursuit of the siren Louise Lame. Written by one of the most important surrealist writers of all time, Robert Desnos, the novel is filled with virtue and bravura, mystery and the marvellous, adventure and the erotic. Characters appear and vanish according to whim and desire, they walk underwater, they nonchalantly accept astounding coincidences. Desnos's novel is the perfect embodiment of the Surrealist spirit: joyful, despairing and effortlessly scandalous.

Robert Desnos (1900-1945) was one of the primary poets and writers of the Surrealist movement of 1924-1930. He wrote, and collaboratively wrote, many influential and celebrated books. He died as a result of his internment. This title presents a comprehensive anthology of the writings of Desnos.