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All items are available in the City Lights Bookstore (Map & Directions). You can also order these items directly from our web site, simply click on the "add to cart" button next to the book of your choice. All orders will be sent by DHL Ground service. For expedited shipping or international orders, please see our Ordering Information . |
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Paris Peasant
by Louis Aragon Translated by Simon Watson Taylor "I was seeking... a new kind of novel that would break all the traditional rules governing the writing of fiction, one that would be neither a narrative (a story) nor a character study (a portrait), a novel that the critics would be obliged to approach empty-handed..." –Aragon 1878972103 $15.95 Temporarily out of stock |
| The Adventures of Telemachus by Louis Aragon "Aragon did not have to liberate his mind through automatic exercises, but by mastering and playing with the narrative devices of classical episodic fiction he succeeded in freeing himself from the constraints of mimeticism in regard to fable, meaning, and language... descending into the diabolical nirvana of dada." – Renée Riese Hubert & Judd D. Hubert 1-878972-22-3 $13.95 Temporarily out of stock |
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The Theater and Its Double
by Antonin Artaud A classic collection of manifestos on the possibilities, chemistry, and dangers of the theater. 0-8021-5030-6 $12.00 |
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Artaud Anthology
by Antonin Artaud Translated by Jack Hirschman This collection gives us quintessential Artaud on the occult, magic, the theater, mind and body, the cosmos, rebellion, and revolution in its deepest sense. 0-87286-000-0 $14.95 |
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Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings by Antonin Artaud Edited by Susan Sontag A revolutionary figure in the literary avant garde of his time, Artaud is now seen to be central to the development of post-modernism. These writings include his verse, prose poems, film scenarios, a historical novel, plays, and essays. 0-520-06443-7 $24.95 |
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The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism
by Georges Bataille Georges Bataille was one of the most provocative and controversial writers of his time. These essays, the result of profound reflection in the wake of World War II, comprise his most incisive study of surrealism, insisting on its importance as a cultural and social phenomenon with far-reaching consequences. They clarify Bataille's links with the surrealist movement, and shed light on his complex and greatly misunderstood relationship with André Breton. 1844675602 $19.95 |
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Blue of Noon by Georges Bataille Translated by Harry Mathews Set against the backdrop of Europe's slide into Fascism, Blue of Noon is one of Bataille's most overtly political works, exploring the ambiguity of sex as a subversive force and dissecting the fetishes of violence, power and death that mesmerized an age. 0-7145-3073-5 $14.95 |
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Divine Filth
by Georges Bataille Translated by Mark Spitzer Divine Filth is a collection of long-overlooked erotic prose and scatological fragments rivaled only by Georges Bataille's most well-known work, Story of the Eye, for pure "pornographic" content that transcends the limits of literature and the self. These are the shattered mystic visions of a seminal Surrealist with a deep thirst for the negation of consciousness through ecstasy, humiliation, depravity and pain. 1840681128 $13.95 Temporarily out of stock |
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Erotism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille Translated by Mary Dalwood Taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensuality-- Georges Bataille pursues these themes with an original, often startling perspective. 0-87286-190-2 $16.95 |
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The Impossible
by Georges Bataille Translated by Robert Hurley In a philosophic erotic narrative, an essay on poetry, and in poems Georges Bataille pursues his guiding concept, the impossible 0-87286-262-3 $12.95 |
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Story of the Eye
by Georges Bataille Translated by Joachim Neugroschel Bataille's first novel, a legendary shocker that uncovers the dark side of the erotic by means of forbidden, obsessive fantasies of excess and sexual extremes. 0-87286-209-7 $9.95 |
| The Tears of Eros by Georges Bataille On the track of violence and the erotic through art theory, philosophy, anthropology, and the history of consciousness. With 200 illustrations from cave art to the modern. 0-87286-222-4 $18.95 |
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Anthology of Black Humor
by André Breton This is the first publication in English of the resplendent anthology that contains Breton's definitive statement on l'humour noir, one of the seminal concepts of Surrealism, and his provocative assessments of the writers he most admired. The entries range from the acerbic aphorisms of Swift, Lichtenberg, and Duchamp to the theatrical slapstick of Grabbe, from the wry missives of Rimbaud and Jacques Vaché to the manic paranoia of Dali, from the ferocious iconoclasm of Alfred Jarry and Arthur Craven to the offhand hilarity of Apollinaire. 0-87286-321-2 $18.95 |
| Poems of André Breton by André Breton This revised edition (with additional poems) is the single most comprehensive critical edition of Breton's poems available in English. Other editions may claim to be "comprehensive", but none come close to the range of poems presented in this edition. Surrealist scholar Jean-Pierre Cauvin and, once again, Breton scholar Mary Ann Caws translate and edit this title with critical introductions, prefaces, commentary, bibliography, and notes. This title has remained elusive and expensive in the used market, as students and scholars have snapped up the few copies ever available through any book search. Like him or hate him, few have had as important an impact on 20th century artistic thought and culture as Breton and his Surrealist movement. 0-9768449-2-3 $19.95 |
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Communicating Vessels
by André Breton What Freud did for dreams, André 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." 0-8032-6135-7 $12.00 |
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Mad Love
by André Breton "I have wanted to show above all what precautions and what ruses desire takes, in search of its object and evading it." – Andre Breton 0-8032-6072-5 $13.00 Temporarily out of stock |
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Nadja
by André Breton Originally published in France in 1928, Nadja is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. 0-8021-5026-8 $13.00 Temporarily out of stock |
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Surrealist Love Poems
edited by Mary Ann Caws Love poetry includes, yes, descriptions of the beloved. And images of a fantastic idyll complete with falling stars, the sound of the sea, and beautiful countryside. In the hands of Surrealists, though, love poetry also includes gravediggers and murderers, dice and garbage, snakeskin purses and "the drunken kisses of cyclones." Surrealist Love Poems brings together sixty poems by Surrealists who charged their work with all forms of eroticism. Expertly and energetically edited by Mary Ann Caws, this collection seeks to demonstrate the truth of Breton's words, that "the embrace of poetry like that of bodies / As long as it lasts / Shuts out all the woes of the world." 0226098729 $15.00 |
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My Body and I René Crevel In My Body and I, René Crevel attempts to trace with words the geography of a being, exploring the tension between body and spirit. Crevel's meditation is a vivid personal journey through illusion and disillusion, secret desire, memory, the possibility and impossibility of life, sensuality and sexuality, poetry and the wilderness of the imagination. 0974968099 $14.00 Temporarily out of stock |
| Putting My Foot in It René Crevel "First published in 1935, Crevel's surrealist novel about a decadent lunch party is beautifully written and beautifully translated." –Publishers Weekly 1564780171 $9.95 |
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Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution: Writings, 1927-1933 Salvador Dali This book is a translation of the first volume of Oui- a collection of texts compiled and edited by Salvador Dali's great chronicler, colleague and friend, Robert Descharnes. Arranged chronologically, these diverse (polymorphously perverse) texts cover the period of Dali's creative life, from his student days to his early associations with the Surrealist movement. 1878972227 $13.95 |
| The Powers of the Word by René Daumal Translated by Mark Polizzoti Since his death in 1944, René Daumal has come to be recognized as one of the original minds of 20th-century French letters. The Powers of the Word spans a lifetime of essays and notes-- many here translated for the first time-- from the earliest incitements to drug use and revolt, through Daumal's unique readings of literary works, to his more mature, but no less ardent, meditations. 0-87286-259-3 $12.95 Temporarily out of stock |
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A Night of Serious Drinking by René Daumal The fantastic world depicted in A Night of Serious Drinking is actually the ordinary world turned upside down. The characters are called the Anthographers, Fabricators of useless objects, Scienters, Nibblists, Clarificators, and other absurd titles. Yet the inhabitants of these strange realms are only too familiar: scientists dissecting an animal in their laboratory, a wise man surrounded by his devotees, politicians, poets expounding their rhetoric. These characters perform hilarious antics and intellectual games, which they see as serious attempts to find meaning and freedom. 1585673994 $13.95 |
| Mount Analogue by René Daumal René Daumal’s Mount Analogue is a twentieth century classic, combining the author’s poetic gifts and philosophical accomplishments in a manner that is both entertaining to read and profound to contemplate. Among other things, this is a marvelous tale in which the narrator/author, one of an intrepid company of eight, sets sail in the yacht Impossible to search for Mount Analogue, the solid, geographically located, albeit hidden, peak that reaches inexorably towards heaven—as Mount Olympus reached to the home of the Greek gods, or Mount Sinai to the presence of Yahweh. 1585673420 $14.95 Temporarily out of stock |
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Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire Poet, critic, avante-garde writer and one of the first to formulate the principles of Cubism and explore many of the techniques that would become part of the dadaist and Surrealist repetoire, Apollinaire was one of the most important writers of his time. Included in this bilingual edition are poems from his seminal collectsion Alcools & Calligrammes, as well as much of his critical writings and stories, including Le Poete Assassine. 0-8112-0003-5 $14.95 |
| Capital of Pain by Paul Eluard Capital of Pain, first published in 1926, has had a lasting impression on more readers than one might expect. Young Frenchmen between the wars carried it in their backpacks; other poets were dazzled, young and old, all discussed and often argued about this remarkable book. Indeed, it has never gone out of print in France. Today this collection is thought by many to be the key to grasping what Surrealist texts are like. It clearly shows the freshness of early Surrealism, as well as the despair of postwar trauma. Paul Eluard (1895-1952) was a founder, along with Andre Breton and Louis Aragon, of the Surrealist group and was, through the years, the most celebrated poet among that extraordinary grouping of poets. This volume, the first new translation of this work in over thirty years, presents the text of Capital of Pain in its entirety in a bilingual format. Translator Mary Ann Caws also provides an insightful and in depth survey of Eluard's poems and writings. 0976844966 $19.95 |
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Last Love Poems of Paul Eluard by Paul Eluard The marvelous books of Last Love Poems (Derniers poemes d'amour), composed during 1946-1951, give us an idea of Eluard's technical mastery as a mature poet, enabling us to participate in the universality of his poetry, and to understand why he is held in such international esteem. 0-9768449-3-1 $17.95 |
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Conductors of the Pit
edited by Clayton Eshleman "Forget the orchestra/ conduct the pit!" Clayton Eshleman commands, of both himself and his muses as they search for "the gulf between worlds." Featuring major forces of the surrealist movement such as Rimbaud, Artaud, and Neruda, this fully annotated anthology contains their most essential work - poems that shaped the modern age - available side by side for the first time. Carefully chosen background material puts each artist and poem into a cultural and historical context. 1932360743 $14.95 Temporarily out of stock |
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Constellations of Miró, Breton
Edited by Paul Hammond During the early days of the Second World War, the Catalan painter Joan Miró created a startling series of twenty-three gouaches, his Constellations, works redolent with the nightmare of contemporary events. In 1958 the French poet André Breton composed his own Constellations, a set of hermetic prose poems meant to "illustrate"--that is, not simply to shed light on, but to lend luster to--Miró's paintings, and to resume a peripatetic dialogue about exile. In Constellations of Miró, Breton Paul Hammond unravels some of the mysteries of the call-and-response of these two Surrealists by reading the pictures against the poetry, the poetry against the pictures, and both against the madness of a history that none of us has left that far behind. 0-87286-372-7 $18.95 |
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The Shadow and Its Shadow:
Surrealist Writings on the Cinema Edited and translated by Paul Hammond The Shadow and Its Shadow is a classic collection of writings by the Surrealists on their mad love of moviegoing. The forty-odd theoretical, polemical, and poetical re-visions of film in this anthology document Surrealism's scandalous and nonreductive take on film. Writing between 1918 and 1977, the essayists include such names as Breton, Aragon, Desnos, Dalí, Buñuel, and Man Ray, as well as many of the less famous, though equally fascinating figures of the movement. 0-87286-376-X $17.95 |
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Meadowlark West
by Philip Lamantia Lamantia combines savage satire with an intense lyricism; and these poems open the coiled dream door of the labyrinth to apocalyptic terrors, catastrophes of the political world, old myths of the earth, the sublimity of birds, the wild West, the commune of anarchs and the regenerative power of love. 0-87286-176-7 $4.95 |
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Bed of Sphinxes:
New and Selected Poems 1943- 1993 by Philip Lamantia The poems collected here range from visionary apocalypse to a lyrical fusion with nature. By turns nightmarish, erotic, and hermetic, they create an astonishing world charged by Lamantia's energy and erudition. 0-87286-320-4 $12.95 |
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Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
Vitezslav Nezval Written in 1935 at the height of Czech Surrealism, this parable of menstruation is a bizarre erotic fantasy of a young girl's maturation into womanhood. Drawing on de Sade's Justine, and Nosferatu and the language of pulp serials, this a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involves a vampire with a taste for chicken blood, changelings, lecherous priests, with an androgynous merging of brother and sister. An exploration of the grotesque, a meditation on youth and age, sexuality and death. ISBN: 808626419X $14.00 Temporarily out of stock |
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Locus Solus
by Raymond Roussel First published in 1914, this is perhaps Rousel’s masterpiece. Based, like the earlier Impressions of Africa, on uniquely eccentric principles of composition, this book invites the reader to enter a world which in its innocense and extravagence is unlike anything in the literature of the twentieth century. 0714507342 $14.95 Temporarily out of stock |
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Chanson Dada: Selected Poems
by Tristan Tzara Chanson Dada contains all the poems of legendary Dada poet Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) translated by English poet Lee Harwood. Translated as a labor of love over a ten year period the poems encompass the full range of Tzara's works, the results of which have brought Tzara's poetry to life for English language readers for over 25 years. Completely revised, updated edition of this classic survey. ISBN: 0976844907 $17.95 |
| Surreal Lives The Surrealists 1917-1945 by Ruth Brandon Ruth Brandon spins the many stories of Surrealism with wit, energy, and insight, bringing sharp analysis to an eccentric cast of characters whose struggles and achievements came to mirror and define the way the world changed between the wars. 0-8021-3727-x $16.00 |
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A Book of Surrealist Games Compiled by Alastair Brotchie This crazy collection allows everyone to play as the Surrealists did. Weird word-games and other mind-traps. 1-57062-084-9 $11.95 |
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Investigating Sex
Surrealist Discussions 1928-1932 edited by Jose Pierre 'Are women's orgasms more intense than men's?' 'When and how did you lose your virginity?' 'Do you believe that there exists one woman who is your destiny?'. In January 1928, long before Masters & Johnson began their clinical surveys, the surrealists initiated their own remarkable 'researches into sexuality.' These took the form of round-table interrogations, twelve in all, the last being held in 1932. 0860916030 $20.00 |
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A Cavalier History of Surrealism by Raoul Vaneigem Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith Though blistering in its criticism of Surrealism's artistic and political aporias, the book identifies the "radioactive fragment of radicalism" that the movement never quite managed to shed. Packed with quotations that still shock after so many years, Vaneigem's pseudonymous primer summarizes the views of the Situationists on their celebrated forerunners. 1-873176-94-5 AK Press $9.95 Temporarily out of stock |
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Looking at Dada
by Sarah Ganz Blythe & Edward D. Powers The book examines some 30 major, representative artworks from each of the principal cities where the movement took hold: Zurich; Berlin, Cologne, and Hannover; Paris; and New York. Largely drawing on the unparalleled collection of Dada artworks in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, it investigates all of the major areas and processes in which the Dada artists worked, including abstraction and figuration; painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography; the readymade, collage and photomontage; as well as poetry, performance and the applied arts. The book's sequences of handsome color plates and accompanying clear discussions focus on major social and artistic questions that contributed to Dada's consistent practice of subverting expectations, 0870707051 $14.95 |
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Dada: The Revolt of Art by Marc Dachy Dada had an immense effect on art throughout the 20th century. Its emphasis on machines reflected similar mechanistic currents in art through the war years; its appropriation of advertising imagery was revived in Pop Art in later decades; and its anti-aesthetic, anti-object, and anti-art principles persisted in important spurs of artistic theory and practice through the end of the century. The movement's history is outlined in this concise, readable text-the only short introduction devoted exclusively to Dada, supplemented with essential documents and a useful bibliography. 0810992558 $12.95 |
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The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology
Edited by Dawn Ades Bringing together key Dada texts, many of them translated into English for the first time, this volume immerses readers in some of the most famous (and infamous) periodicals of the time, from Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire and Francis Picabia’s 391 to Marcel Duchamp’s The Blind Man and Kurt Schwitters’s Merz. Published in Europe and the United States between 1916 and 1932, these journals constituted the movement’s lifeblood, communicating the desires and aspirations of the artists involved. 0226006980 $25.00 |
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