Presents the essential ideas of the founder of French surrealism

Founder of the Surrealist movement, Andre Breton has also come to be recognized as one of the twentieth century's most innovative and influential poets. The inaugural volume in the Poets for the Millennium series, Andre Breton offers the most comprehensive selection available in English of Breton's poetry, along with a selection of his major prose writings. The translations, a number of which are published here for the first time, are by some of the most notable poets in our language, including David Antin, Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Michael Benedikt, Robert Duncan, David...

-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...

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...

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...

Weaves a tapestry of daily life as seen through a magical perspective. This book combines Breton's autobiographical fact with memory and imagination, and spins a love story in modern literature.

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...

The Lost Steps (Les Pas perdus) is Andre Breton's first collection of critical and polemical essays. Composed between 1917 and 1923, these pieces trace his evolution during the years when he was emerging as a central figure in French (and European) intellectual life. They chronicle his tumultuous passage through the Dada movement, proclaim his explosive views on Modernism and its heroes, and herald the emergence of Surrealism itself. Along the way, we are given Breton's serious commentaries on his Modernist predecessors, Guillaume Apollinaire and Alfred Jarry, followed by his not-so-serious...

"Weder dynamisch noch statisch sehe ich die Schönheit, sondern so, wie ich dich gesehen habe. So wie ich gesehen habe, was zur festgesetzten Stunde und für eine festgesetzte Zeit - und ich hoffe und glaube mit ganzer Seele, dass sie sich noch einmal werden festsetzen lassen - dich mit mir harmonieren ließ."§Nadja ist die Geschichte einer zufälligen Begegnung, die zugleich die Aktualisierung einer lange bestehen, äußerst intensiven Bekanntschaft zu sein scheint. Nadja wird geschildert als eine junge Frau, die auf geheimnisvolle Weise mit dem Erzähler vertraut ist und sich rein intuitiv...