French modernist library

Jean Paulhan (1884-1968) is renowned in France both for his unrivaled skill as an editor and for his own subtle yet incisive writings. Paulhan directed the Nouvelle Revue Francaise for thirty years, helping to make it into the foremost literary journal of his generation. Although best known for his theoretical writings of the 1940s and 1950s, Paulhan established his reputation as a writer with his short fictional tales, or recits, composed during or just after World War I. Many of them have the war as their backdrop and are autobiographical in origin, evoking Paulhan's time in Madagascar, his brush with death while suffering from pneumonia, and his awkward love life. More than the subject matter, it is the precise, restrained lyricism of the prose, and Paulhan's attentiveness to the quirks and subtle twists of language, that make these stories so remarkable for their time. This book contains a selection of five of the best-known recits: Progress in Love on the Slow Side, The Severe Recovery, The Crossed Bridge, Aytre Gets Out of the Habit, and Lalie. Maurice Blanchot's tribute to Paulhan, "The Ease of Dying," is also included.

Awaiting Oblivion (L'attente l'oubli) is one of the crowning works by the French philosopher and novelist Maurice Blanchot. Located at the crossroads of fiction and philosophy, it is a daring, innovative, and strikingly original experiment in literary form. Strongly reminiscent of Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, Awaiting Oblivion takes place in an anonymous hotel room, furnished with only a bed, an armchair, and a table. There we encounter a man and a woman who (in the words of translator John Gregg) "are alternately waiting for something to happen to them that never does and vainly trying to remember something that may have already happened to them." Blanchot's portrayal of their relationship is a penetrating reflection upon human nature, language, and 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."--BOOK JACKET.

Blanchot describes a world where the Absolute has finally overcome all other rivals to its authority. The State is unified, universal, and homogeneous, promising perfect satisfaction. Why then does it find revolt everywhere? Could it be the omnipresent police? The plagues? The proliferating prisons and black markets? Written in part as a description of post-World War II Europe, Blanchot's dystopia charts with terrible clarity the endless death of god in an era of constantly metamorphosing but strangely definitive ideologies.

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 Dada manifestoes.

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.

You've Always Been Wrong is a collection of prose and poetic works by the French writer Rene Daumal (1908-1944). A fitful interloper among the Surrealists, Daumal rejected all forms of dogmatic thought, whether religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political. Much like the Surrealists (and French theorists of more recent decades), Daumal saw in the strict forms and certainties of traditional metaphysics a type of thought that enslaves people even as it pretends to liberate them. These "cadavers of thought," Daumal wrote with youthful bravado, "must be met with storms of doubt, blasphemes, and kerosene for the temples." Daumal tied Surrealism with mystical traditions. A devoted student of Eastern religions, philosophy, and literature, he combined his skepticism about Western metaphysics with a mystic's effort to maintain intense wakefulness to the present moment and to the irreducible particularity of all objects and experience. Such wakefulness, according to Daumal, leads inevitably to an overwhelming (and redemptive) "vision of the absurd." Daumal's important place in French culture of the late 1920s and 1930s has been assured by both his writings and his role as cofounder of the avant-garde journal Le Grand Jeu. Written between 1928 and 1930, You've Always Been Wrong reveals Daumal's thought as it was coalescing around the rejection of Western metaphysics and the countervailing allure of Eastern mysticism. Thomas Vosteen's nuanced translation provides English-language readers with a provocative introduction to this iconoclastic author.

A cocky black cat that drinks cognac and can't stay out of holes, a hyperactive plumber who pulls out all the stops, an expiring jazzman who sells his sweat, a green soldier who moves into a terribly serious position - these are a few of the outrageous and poignant creations of Boris Vian in Blues for a Black Cat and Other Stories. Julia Older makes available for the first time in English this collection of his short fiction, which was originally published as Les Fourmis. In 1949. It is a delightful introduction to the work of a much-admired French poet, playwright, and song-writer whose celebrity has continued to grow since his untimely death in 1959. These early stories, written in 1944 and 1945, reveal that Vian was already a master of black humor, wordplay, elegant understatement, and leaps of fancy. "Blues for a Black Cat," bubbling with Vian's sense of mischief and evocative of his love for jazz, shows the seamier side of postwar. Parisian night life. "The Plumber" is the nightmare of every citizen who has been incommoded by expensive repairmen. "Pins and Needles" conveys Vian's daring opposition to World War II (his song "The Deserter" later would be censored by the government for inciting sentiment against the French-Algerian conflict). The other stories - "Cancer," "Dead Fish," "Journey to Khonostrov," "Blue Fairy Tale," "Fog," "Good Students," and "One-Way Street"--Are marked by the same. Verbal Niagaras, zany sexual encounters, and absurd situations. But, as Julia Older points out, parody only heightens the masked terrors of war, poverty, ill health, and unemployment that hound the bizarre protagonists of Vian's fablelike narratives.

Blaise Cendrars was the pseudonym of Frederic-Louis Sauser (1887-1961), a Swiss-born poet and novelist. A contemporary of Apollinaire and Max Jacob, and a friend of Chagall and Modigliani, he must be reckoned with as a prophetic voice. Of all the avant-garde writers, he was the one most attuned to our age; hence the title of this collection of his short prose works. Modernities represents the poet at his most intense. The seven essays consider modern artists, many of them his friends and associates, and their altered relations to a new world of communications technology, advertising, and mass politics. These essays are daring and inventive in their expression of the sense of simultaneity - far more so than the "official" artistic manifestoes of their period, the first quarter of the twentieth century. Because most of the selections have never before been translated and have been hard to find, this volume brings to the English-language reader for the first time an essential part of the European voice of the avant-garde.