books to read

Simone Weil described “decreation” as “undoing the creature in us”–an undoing of self. In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson explores this idea with characteristic brilliance and a tantalizing range of reference, moving from Aphrodite to Antonioni, Demosthenes to Annie Dillard, Telemachos to Trotsky, and writing in forms as varied as opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, shot list, and rapture. As she makes her way through these forms she slowly dismantles them, and in doing so seeks to move through the self, to its undoing.

In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs’s grand “cut-up” trilogy that starts with The Soft Machine and continues through Nova Express reaches its climax as inspector Lee and the Nova Police engage the Nova Mob in a decisive battle for the planet. Only Burroughs could make such a nightmare vision of scientists and combat troops, of ad men and con men whose deceitful language has spread like an incurable disease be at once so frightening and so enthralling.

"Surrealism is the "invisible ray" which will one day enable us to win out over our opponents. "You are no longer trembling, carcass." This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere."The Surrealist world is a beautiful place: houses with eggshell roofs, a half-fried egg for a sun hanging from the sky, birds flying and splashing into the sunny yoke and painting the clouds bright yellow, people with mirrors for faces walking down alleys and pathways lined with seashells and coral and strange weeds, talking in symphonies, the world resounding with the sound of music! Anything and everything is possible in the Surrealist world! Secret houses pave the floor of the ocean in which secret people live among mermaids and dolphins! The waters of such oceans turn into honey and milk as they crash on the chocolate shore, where children build castles, children having big, resplendent eyes, children with little wings, children like fairies and forest nymphs, darting in and out of little chocolate rooms. I am besotted with André and his delectable prose and his stunning imagination! The Soluble Fish, a piece of surrealist fiction, sandwiched between two manifestoes in this book, is a quintessential surrealist work; perfectly embodying the ideas of the grand master. It is strange, it is disturbing, it is vivid imagination at its eloquent best!"I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going..."The first manifesto, published in 1924, gives a comprehensive outline of the Surrealist agenda. The avant-garde had already expressed his discontent with Realist and Naturalist fiction which resulted in the inception of the schools of Expressionism and Symbolism. But Breton took it up a notch and, though, in veering away from traditional fiction, Surrealism does resemble Expressionism, its underpinnings are slightly different. The Surrealist sees and interprets the world from the eyes of the unconscious. Freudian psychoanalysis and dream-theory had a great influence on Breton who sought to incorporate and apply Freud's theories to literature. Thus, in the first manifesto, he defines Surrealism as: \ SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express--verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner--the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.\ \ ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.\ To open up the vaults of the unconscious, the Surrealist surrenders complete control over his conscious thought and eases himself into a trance-like state. With a pen in his fingers and a paper on the desk, he becomes a mere medium of expression. Language gushes and spills forth and makes all sorts of associations on the paper without the avant-garde controlling or manipulating anything. This is what Breton calls automatic writing."Language has been given to man so that he may make Surrealist use of it."Surrealist aesthetics and the need for a Surrealist sensibility after WWI forms the subject of the first manifesto. The second manifesto is a kind of a rant in which Breton answers to criticisms and vilifications. A few extracts follow the second manifesto in which the political sympathies of Breton and the Surrealists are explored. Frankly speaking, everything after the The Soluble Fish is tedious, dense and gratuitous. Those interested in the dynamics present between Socialism/Marxism and Surrealism might find these latter extracts useful but even so Breton never speaks in a clear and succinct voice in these excerpts, and his thought is ultimately lost in unnecessary verbiage. Even so, the first manifesto and the piece of fiction justify their function completely and are a triumph. This is recommended to all those who seek understanding of the Surrealist agenda. Breton, at least in the first half of the book, shall not disappoint. "And you will see into the bowels of the earth, you will see me more alive than I am now when the boarding saber of the sky threatens me. You will take me farther than I have been able to go, and your arms will be roaring grottoes full of pretty animals and ermines. You will make only a sigh of me, that will go on and on through all the Robinsons of earth. I am not lost to you: I am only apart from what resembles you, on the high seas, where the bird called Heartbreak gives its cry that raises the pommels of ice of which the stars of day are the broken guard."

Les Enfants Terribles holds an undisputed place among the classics of modern fiction. Written in a French style that long defied successful translation - Cocteau was always a poet no matter what he was writing - the book came into its own for English-language readers in 1955 when the present version was completed by Rosamond Lehmann. It is a masterpiece of the art of translation of which the Times Literary Supplement said: "It has the rare merit of reading as though it were an English original." Miss Lehmann was able to capture the essence of Cocteau's strange, necromantic imagination and to bring fully to life in English his story of a brother and sister, orphaned in adolescence, who build themselves a private world out of one shared room and their own unbridled fantasies. What started in games and laughter became for Paul and Elisabeth a drug too magical to resist. The crime which finally destroyed them has the inevitability of Greek tragedy. Illustrated with twenty of Cocteau's own drawings.

Metaphorically speaking the world is a real network of nerves, blood vessels and lymphatics: a plexus.And Henry Miller is a human ganglion placed inside this huge Plexus…Often I have wondered, after reading about evenings with Mallarme, or with Joyce, or with Max Jacob, let us say, how these sessions of ours compared. To be sure, none of my companions of those days ever dreamed of becoming a figure in the world of art. They loved to discuss art, all the arts, but they themselves had no thought of becoming artists. Most of them were engineers, architects, physicians, chemists, teachers, lawyers. But they had intellect and they had enthusiasm, and they were all so sincere, so avid, that sometimes I wonder if the music we made might not have rivalled the chamber music which issued from the sacred quarters of the masters.So many have a potential and so few live up to it, “For many are called, but few are chosen.”

Arthur Rimbaud is remembered as much for his volatile personality and tumultuous life as he is for his writings, most of which he produced before the age of eighteen. This book brings together his poetry, prose, and letters, including "The Drunken Boat," "The Orphans' New Year," "After the Flood," and "A Season in Hell," considered by many to be his. 'Complete Works' is divided into eight "seasons" - Childhood, The Open Road, War, The Tormented Heart, The Visionary, The Damned Soul, A Few Belated Cowardices, and The Man with the Wind at His Heels - that reflect the facets of Rimbaud's life. Insightful commentary by translator and editor Paul Schmidt reveals the courage, vision, and imagination of Rimbaud's poetry and sheds light on one of the most enigmatic figures in letters.

Continuing the subversive self-revelation begun in Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller takes readers along a mad, free-associating journey from the damp grime of his Brooklyn youth to the sun-splashed cafes and squalid flats of Paris. With incomparable glee, Miller shifts effortlessly from Virgil to venereal disease, from Rabelais to Roquefort. In this seductive technicolor swirl of Paris and New York, he captures like no one else the blending of people and the cities they inhabit.

'I have become whore through kindness and libertine through virtue.'Orphaned and penniless at the age of twelve, the beautiful and devout Justine embarks upon her remarkable odyssey. Her steadfast faith and naive trust in everyone she meets destine her from the outset for sexual exploitation and martyrdom. The unending catalogue of disasters that befall her, during which she is subject to any number of perverse practices, illustrates Sade's belief in the primacy of Nature over civilization. Virtue is no match for vice, and as criminality and violence triumph, Justine is doomed to suffer.Sade's writings have become a byword for transgression and obscenity, and the logical amorality of his philosophy still has the power to shock. By overturning social, religious, and political norms he puts under scrutiny conventional ideas of justice, power, life, and death. Justine is a ferocious physical and intellectual assault on the absolute notions of good and evil, and as such, one of the earliest literary manifestos for atheism.

My Mother is a unique bildungsroman of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother.—Publishers WeeklyMy Mother, Madame Edwarda and The Dead Man comprises three short pieces of erotic prose that fuse elements of sex and spirituality in a highly personal vision of the flesh. They present a world of sensation in which only the vaulting demands of disruptive excess and the anguish of heightened awareness can combat the stultifying world of reason and social order. Each of the narratives contains a sense of intoxication and insanity so carefully delineated by the author that it seems to infect the reader.Philosopher, novelist and critic, Georges Bataille is a major figure in twentieth-century literature whose startling and original ideas increasingly exert a vital influence on the shaping of thought, language and experience. Best known outside France for the vertiginous sexual delirium of his short novel, Story of the Eye, the vast scope of Bataille's interests and intellect made him a major force in many spheres.Bataille's essays range over such diverse topics as economics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, yoga and anthropology. His critical essays, Literature and Evil and his complex meditations on the dark coupling of sex and death, Eroticism, are both available from Marion Boyars. Bataille's available fiction includes L'Abbé C, a twisted document detailing the holy horrors of sex and Blue of Noon, now an established modern classic in its seventh printing.

J. G. Ballard's fourth novel, which established his reputation as a writer of extraordinary talent and imaginative powers, tells the story of a physician specializing in the treatment of leprosy who is invited to a small outpost in the interior of Africa. Finding the roadways blocked, he takes to the river, and embarks on a frightening journey through a strange petrified forest whose area expands daily, affecting not only the physical environment but also its inhabitants.Through a 'leaking' of time, the West African jungle starts to crystallize. Trees are metamorphosed into enormous jewels. Crocodiles encased in second glittering skins lurch down the river. Pythons with huge blind gemstone eyes rear in heraldic poses.Fearing this transformation as a herald of the apocalypse, most flee the area in terror, afraid to face a catastrophe they cannot understand. But some, dazzled and strangely entranced, remain to drift through this dreamworld forest. Travelling through this gilded land, the doctor tries to resist its strange allure, while a tribe of lepers search for Paradise…

The original Ritalin kid, Harmony Korine burst on the scene with Kids, a film so gritty and unsettling in its depiction of teen life that it was slapped with an NC-17 rating and banned in some theaters across the country. In some ways, the media frenzy over the rating overshadowed the harrowing portrait of teenagers destroying their lives and the then twenty-one-year-old screenwriter who created them. "Whether you see the movie as a masterpiece or as sensationalism," wrote Lynn Hirshberg, "the movie is relentless and brilliant and extremely disturbing. It's powerful-both steel-eyed and sexy; horrifying and captivating."Now, in this first book of fictional set pieces, Korine captures the fragmented moments of a life observed through the demented lens of media, TV, and teen obsession. Korine reinvents the novel in this highly experimental montage of scenes that seem both real and surreal at the same time. With a filmmaker's eye and a prankster's glee, this bizarre collection of jokes, half-remembered scenes, dialogue fragments, movie ideas, and suicide notes is an episodic, epigrammatic lovesong to the world of images. Korine is the voice of his media-savvy generation and A Crack-Up at the Race Riots is the satiric lovechild of his dark imagination.

This book is nearly 100 years old and a manifesto of something never done before. It would be unfair to give it a review on pure literary meters.André Breton is the father of surrealism. This is his way of fighting for his vision.In my mind there are two factors to determine whether art is important: 1. it's something new. 2. it has something to say. Craft is also an important factor – but still pure aestethics in the face of art.This book was high on something new and something to say. It was low on craft.A nice (and fast!) read anyway.Favorite quote (in Finnish): Sillalla huojui kissankasvoinen kaste.

“The definitive translation for our time.”–Edward HirschFrom Dante’s Inferno to Sartre’s No Exit, writers have been fascinated by visions of damnation. Within that rich literature of suffering, Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell–written when the poet was nineteen–provides an astonishing example of the grapple with self. As a companion to Rimbaud’s journey, readers could have no better guide than Wyatt Mason. One of our most talented young translators and critics, Mason’s new version of A Season in Hell renders the music and mystery of Rimbaud’s tale of Hell on Earth with exceptional finesse and power. This bilingual edition includes maps, a helpful chronology of Rimbaud’s life, and the unfinished suite of prose poems, Illuminations and A Season in Hell cement Rimbaud’s reputation as one of the foremost, and most influential, writers in French literature.

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 André 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 diamond, in its own dust." Celebrating breton's own love and lover, the book unveils the marvelous in everyday encounters and the hidden depths of ordinary things.

Oh man how long ago I loved this shit 12+ years ago when drunk and my hair was all crazy before crazy hair was even close to cool and I was all like I'm the late 20th century's carbohydrate-addled Artuad update and I was all about how Van Gogh was suicided by society and oooooo ccccccaaaaaa hhhhhhaahahahaha kkkkkkskskskss ththshshthht how i loved those pages of chanting - definitely worth checking out, especially if you've ever seen that silent movie about that Joan of Arc chick that Artaud's in - he also was a founding Surrealist but thought Breton was a total loser and also believed he was the reincarnation of Arthur Rimbaud because if you compress the name Arthur Rimbaud you get Artaud.

De la peste, du pus et des poux : tel pourrait être le leitmotiv de cet invraisemblable petit brûlot, tout entier nourri de violence, d'idées morbides et de délires à la limite du supportable. Et que n'ont pas supporté les bien-pensants de l'époque, les mêmes qui, à Charleville, méprisaient Rimbaud et l'accusaient, comme on accusa Lautréamont, de vouloir tuer la poésie. Mais le vertige et la démesure furent plus forts que les réactionnaires : Maldoror, le double maléfique de Lautréamont, en crachant son poison et son fiel, jetait les bases d'une des oeuvres les plus énigmatiques et les plus fascinantes de notre poésie. Alchimie délirante d'un esprit dément, sublime perle noire née d'un champ d'ordures, Les Chants de Maldoror demeurent l'une des rares traces de la fulgurante trajectoire d'Isidore Ducasse, mystérieusement foudroyé en pleine jeunesse. Sa mort, après son oeuvre illuminée, allait alimenter sa légende et le faire entrer dans le club très fermé des poètes mythiques.Édition établie par Jean-Luc Steinmetz.

Andre Breton described Maldoror as -the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential.- Little is known about its pseudonymous author, aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846) and early death in Paris (1870). Lautreamont bewildered his contemporaries, but the Surrealists modeled their efforts after his black humor and poetic leaps of logic, exemplified by the oft-quoted line, -As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.- Maldoror 's shocked first publisher refused to bind the sheets of the original edition--and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book, which warns the reader, -Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger.- This is the only complete annotated collection of Lautreamont's writings available in English, in Alexis Lykiard's superior translation. For this latest edition, Lykiard updates his introduction to include recent scholarship.