Art and writings by Surrealist painters and poets from a wide range of countries.

Surrealist Poets is a single-volume reference that contains selected essays from Critical Survey of Poetry, Fourth Edition. The essays in Surrealist Poets discuss such influential poets as Louis Aragon, Robert Bly, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Neruda, and Guillaume Apollinaire.

Surrealist Poetry presents new English translations of nearly 150 poems alongside their original French and Spanish versions. Founded by André Breton in 1924, Surrealism sought to examine the unconscious realm by means of the written or spoken word. Seeking to expand the ability of language to evoke irrational states and improbable events, it consistently strove to transcend the linguistic status quo. By stretching language to its limits and beyond, the Surrealists transformed it into an instrument for exploring the human psyche. The twenty-three poets in this collection come not only from France, where Surrealism was invented, but also from Spain, Belgium, Martinique, Mauritius, Catalonia, Mexico, Chile, and Peru. Three of them were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (Vicente Aleixandre, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz). Equipped with a critical introduction and a brief bibliography, this anthology will appeal to anyone interested in modern literature.

Poetry by one of the most powerful female figures in twentieth-century surrealism, now collected in English for the very first time. Alice Paalen Rahon was a shapeshifter, a surrealist poet turned painter who was born French and died a naturalized citizen of Mexico. Her first husband was the artist Wolfgang Paalen, among her lovers were Pablo Picasso and the poet Valentine Penrose, and over the years her circle of friends included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Joan Miró, Paul Éluard, Man Ray, and Anaïs Nin. This bilingual edition of Rahon’s poems confirms the achievement of this little-known but visionary writer who defies categorization. Her spellbinding poems, inspired by prehistoric art, lost love, and travels around the globe, weave together dream, fantasy, and madness. For the first time in any language, this book gathers the three collections of poetry Rahon published in her lifetime, along with uncollected and unpublished poems and an album of portraits, manuscript pages, and artworks.

Corpses mark surrealism's path through the twentieth century, providing material evidence of the violence in modern life. Though the shifting group of poets, artists, and critics who made up the surrealist movement were witness to total war, revolutionary violence, and mass killing, it was the tawdry reality of everyday crime that fascinated them. Jonathan P. Eburne shows us how this focus reveals the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the thought and artwork of the surrealists and establishes their movement as a useful platform for addressing the contemporary problem of violence, both individual and political. In a book strikingly illustrated with surrealist artworks and their sometimes gruesome source material, Eburne addresses key individual works by both better-known surrealist writers and artists (including André Breton, Louis Aragon, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí) and lesser-known figures (such as René Crevel, Simone Breton, Leonora Carrington, Benjamin Péret, and Jules Monnerot). For Eburne "the art of crime" denotes an array of cultural production including sensationalist journalism, detective mysteries, police blotters, crime scene photos, and documents of medical and legal opinion as well as the roman noir, in particular the first crime novel of the American Chester Himes. The surrealists collected and scrutinized such materials, using them as the inspiration for the outpouring of political tracts, pamphlets, and artworks through which they sought to expose the forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the state, its courts, and respectable bourgeois values. Concluding with the surrealists' quarrel with the existentialists and their bitter condemnation of France's anticolonial wars, Surrealism and the Art of Crime establishes surrealism as a vital element in the intellectual, political, and artistic history of the twentieth century.

Never Mind The Beasts is Marcus Slease's second book for Dostoyevsky Wannabe and his debut novel. Beginning in Portadown, Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the book details the author's move as a small child, with his family, first to Milton Keynes and then to Las Vegas before documenting his further solo travels writing and teaching English as a second language in everywhere from South Korea, Poland to Turkey and, latterly, Spain (Madrid and Barcelona).

Long unavailable in English, Surrealism and Painting remains one of the masterworks of twentieth-century art criticism."--BOOK JACKET.

"This is a kind of "essence of Breton", variously translated by some of our finest writers, each of whom highlights different facets of Breton's complex work. Mark Polizzotti's useful introduction provides context and a brief analysis of the artist and his times."—Diane di Prima, author of Recollections of My Life as a Woman "Mark Polizzotti, who is a poet, a translator, and the author of the definitive biography of André Breton, has chosen stellar translations of Breton's dazzling poetry and placed it in its lively context. This shapely introduction to the life and work of André Breton is smart, concise, and exciting. I cannot imagine a better one."—Ron Padgett, poet and translator of The Complete Poems of Blaise Cendrars "The Poets for the Millennium Series generally and André Breton's Selected Works specifically offers a workable image of an author and the work and the conjuncture, all at once. What comes across is a vivid presentation of Andre Breton not just as an art czar, a manifesto merchant, but a serious, haunted, inventive and strangely profound poet of the imagination, who invented or archeologized new ways of dreaming, but insisted on bearing witness with them in the actual world. Polizzotti does justice--as I think no other writer has--to the double burden of Breton's work."—Robert Kelly "A superbly chosen selection of Breton's poetry and prose, translated in every case with an elegant intelligence, and preceded by an unusually thorough introduction showing quite exactly how the poet's life informed each epoch of his work. It proves again the remarkable un-boringness of Breton, and how important he is now to our own poetry and to us.—Mary Ann Caws, author of The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter and editor of The Surrealist Painters and Poets