Paris Peasant (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism, yet Exact Change's edition is the first U.S. publication of Simon Watson Taylor's authoritative translation, completed after consultations with the author. Unconventional in form--Aragon consciously avoided recognizable narration or character development--Paris Peasant is, in the author's words, -a mythology of the modern.- The book uses the city of Paris as a stage or framework, and Aragon interweaves his text with images of related ephemera: cafe menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments and newspaper clippings. A...

V romane vsego odna martovskaja nedelja 1815 goda, no po sushhestvu v nem poltora stoletija; chitatelju rasskazano o posledujushhih sud'bah vseh istoricheskih personazhej - Frederika Dezhorzha, uchastnika vosstanija 1830 goda, generala Fav'e, srazhavshegosja za osvobozhdenie Grecii vmeste s lordom Bajronom, marshala Bert'e, tragicheski metavshegosja mezhdu vrazhdujushhimi lagerjami do poslednego svoego chasa - chasa samoubijstva. Skvoz' Strastnuju nedelju prosvechivajut i jepizody istorii XX veka - final pervoj mirovoj vojny i znakomstvo junogo Aragona s shahtjorami Saarbrjukena, zabastovki...

This novel, much of it written amidst the horror of the trenches when Louis Aragon (1897-1982) was a medical orderly during the First World War, demonstrates the chasm that separates the works of the artists and writers of what would become Dadaism and those, say, of the English War poets. In a world of moral destitution beyond any rational forbearance, what can remain? How can one write at all, let alone something as absurd as a novel? Anicet or the Panorama is both a roman a clef (Aragon's friends, including Andre Breton, are recognizable), and a novel of the total liquidation of a...