Free Rein is a gathering of seminal essays by Andre Breton, the foremost figure among the French surrealists. Written between 1936 and 1952, they include addresses, manifestoes, prefaces, exhibition pamphlets, and theoretical, polemical, and lyrical essays. Together they display the full span of Breton's preoccupations, his abiding faith in the early principles of surrealism, and the changing orientations, in light of crucial events of those years, of the surrealist movement within which he remained the leading force.

Having broken decisively with Marxism in the mid-1930s, Breton...

You've Always Been Wrong is a collection of prose and poetic works by the French writer Rene Daumal (1908-1944). A fitful interloper among the Surrealists, Daumal rejected all forms of dogmatic thought, whether religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political. Much like the Surrealists (and French theorists of more recent decades), Daumal saw in the strict forms and certainties of traditional metaphysics a type of thought that enslaves people even as it pretends to liberate them. These "cadavers of thought," Daumal wrote with youthful bravado, "must be met with storms of doubt, blasphemes,...

Mad Love has been acknowledged an undisputed classic of the surrealist movement since its first publication in France in 1937. Its adulation of love as both mystery and revelation places it in the most abiding of literary traditions, but its stormy history and technical difficulty have prevented it from being translated into English until now.

"There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine," writes Andre Breton, leader of the surrealists in Paris in the 1920s and '30s. Mad Love is dedicated to defying "the widespread opinion that love wears out, like the...

What Freud did for dreams, Andre Breton (1896 1966) does for despair: in its distortions he finds the marvelous, and through the marvelous the redemptive force of imagination. Originally published in 1932 in France, Les Vases communicants is an effort to show how the discoveries and techniques of surrealism could lead to recovery from despondency. This English translation makes available "the theories upon which the whole edifice of surrealism, as Breton conceived it, is based."

In Communicating Vessels Breton lays out the problems of everyday experience and of intellect. His...

Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930), born in Randolph, Massachusetts, began to publish stories about New England in the early 1880s. In the following decades, Freeman drew widespread praise for her intimate portraits of women and her realistic depictions of rural New England life. She published short stories, essays, novels, plays, and children's books. Her stories, written in a clear and direct prose, are remarkable for their unpretentious, sympathetic portrayals of the lives of ordinary New Englanders of Freeman's era. Many of the stories depict rebellion against oppressive social and private...

Originally published in France in 1934, Break of Day is Andre Breton's second collection of critical and polemical essays, following The Lost Steps (Nebraska 1996). In fewer than two hundred pages, it captures the first full decade of the surrealist movement. The collection opens with an essay composed in 1924 that examines key elements of surrealism and concludes with Breton's harsh revaluation in 1933 of automatic writing. Among the other essays in the volume are "Burial Denied" and "In Self-Defense," two pieces that, in translator Mark Polizzotti's words, "mark surrealism's conscious break...