First published in 1959, "Surrealism" remains the most readable introduction to the French surrealist poets Apollinaire, Breton, Aragon, Eluard, and Reverdy. Providing a much-needed overview of the movement, Balakian places the surrealists in the context of early twentieth-century Paris and describes their reactions to symbolist poetry, World War I, and developments in science and industry, psychology, philosophy, and painting. Her coherent history of the movement is enhanced by her firsthand knowledge of the intellectual climate in which some of these poets worked and her interviews with...

An early cameo of Latin American surrealism, Rosamel del Valle's erotic narrative of ecstasy and perdition creates the rhythm of the dream and the tempo of madness. Intermittently a waiflike young woman, Eva, intrudes into the daily routine of the writer. Her appearances are marked by a circle of red and the vision of a deep well with a star hanging over it. A tone poem of surrealist encounter, pursuit, and loss, Eva y la Fuga was written in 1930 and finally published posthumously in 1970, by Monte Avila Press in Venezuela. Anna Balakian offers here the first translation of the work...