Exact Change – serie

Paris Peasant (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism. Unconventional in form and fiercely modern, Aragon uses the city of Paris as a framework interlacing text with the city's ephemera: cafe menus, maps, monument inscriptions, newspaper cuttings and the lives of its citizens. No one could have been a more astute detector of the unwanted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by such intoxicating reveries about a sort of secret life of the city...' Andre Breton'

Apollinaire's first book: a collection of outrageous short stories about heretics, renegade mystics and criminal religious fanatics, The Heresiarch & Co. was Apollinaire's first book, and reportedly remained his favorite. Making full use of his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure historical, ecclesiastical and geographic information, Apollinaire's stories rely neither on the dream nor on unlikely juxtaposition, but instead represent an approach that André Breton called a "formula" for Surrealism; its "music," Breton famously wrote, is "like gold pebbles rolled in a torrent." Apollinaire himself wrote of The Heresiarch & Co., "This is a book for those who love literature, powerful and disturbing, strange and logical ... The author, amid so many fantastic, tragic and sometimes sublime inventions, intoxicates himself with a charming erudition with which he also intoxicates his readers.

The singular novel by the legendary author of the play, UBU ROI, is a book that can only be compared to Rabelais or Sterne. FAUSTROLL recounts the adventures of the inventor of PATAPHYSIC, the 'science of imaginary solutions.' Jarry would have found an audience more readily if he had simply written a work of science fiction, a symbolist narrative, a bawdy tale or a spriritual allegory. As it is, FAUSTROLL is all of these at the same time.' - Roger Shattuk'

Andre Breton wrote that MALDOROR is the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential.' First published in 1869, MALDOROR is the work of a mysterious genius about whom little is known aside from his birth in Uruguay, 1846, and his early death in Paris, 1870. His writings, published under the pseudonym Comte de Lautreamont, bewildered his contemporaries but have since taken their place alongside other French classics of transgression such as Sade, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. A unique translation.'

A beautiful and unassuming coming-of-age novel. Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is fifteen, and the novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school. As in all of Welch's work, what is most important are the details of Orville's surroundings, as reflected through his remarkable perception. Includes a foreword by William Burroughs, who said of Welch's work 'It is time Denton received the attention he deserves.'

Dali is the most famous artist associated with the Surrealist movement, but his official association with the movement was brief, following his expulsion by Andre Breton after five years.Oui was first published in French in 1971, and elicited a reassessment of Dali. Here through short fictions, essays and poems, Dali shows his love for his Spanish comrades, Bunuel and Lorca, his passion for the emerging arts of photography and cinema (UN CHIEN ANDALOU), his Catalan roots and subsequent entry into the cosmopolitan world of Parisian Avant Garde.

The French poet Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) was modernism's great champion of the book as both a conceptual and material entity: probably his most famous pronouncement is 'everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.' The Book was Mallarme's total artwork, a book to encompass all books. Frequently quoted, sometimes excerpted, but never before translated in its entirety, The Book is a visual poem about its own construction, the scaffolding of a cosmic architecture intended to reveal 'all existing relations between everything.'

One of the most revered and acclaimed products of Surrealism, de Chirico's sole novel provides a uniquely literary analogue to his painterly scenariosThe artist Giorgio de Chirico's novel, Hebdomeros is a dream-like book of situations and landscapes reminiscent of his paintings. In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book “the finest work of Surrealist fiction,” noting that de Chirico “invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel ... his long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom of narration ... his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality.” Hebdomeros is accompanied by an appendix of previously untranslated or uncollected writings, including M. Dudron's Adventure, a second, fragmentary novel translated by John Ashbery.

The 1937 Sequel to THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B TOKLAS, is Stein's account of her triumphant return to the U.S, and a meditation of the meaning of identity, success and America. I used to be fond of saying that America was a land of failure. Most of the great men in America had a long life of early failure and a long life of later failure'. A darker work than TOKLAS, but written in a similarily engaging manner, this is Stein at her most accessible and her most serious; it should be amongst her most popular books.'

Admired by both Proust and Breton, this nineteenth century book was also the favourite of artist Joseph Cornell. An account of the author's passion for an actress and subsequent descent into madness, AURELIA is a document of dreams, obsessions, and insanity. One of the original bohemians, Nerval was well known in his day for parading a lobster on a blue ribbon through the gardens of the Palais-Royal, and for his suicide (1855), hanging from an apron string he called the garter of the Queen of Sheba.

A superb introduction to the work of John Cage, celebrated minimalist composer, who died in 1992, aged 79 years. Printed in the style requested by the author, this book summarises his major works in one volume.

Translated by Clayton Eschleman A collection of writings ranging from cogent theoretical works to scatological glossolalia written during and after Artaud's incarceration in an aslum at Rodez creating one of the most powerful outpourings ever recorded.

Pessoa's most famous work depicts a vast interior landscape laced with daily minutiae and aphoristic brillianceThe eternal mystique of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) stems largely from his practice of writing under "heteronyms." More than just nom de plumes, Pessoa's heteronyms came with distinct biographies, careers, life spans, even horoscopes. In The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa came as close as he ever would to autobiography. Left on disordered scraps of paper in a trunk, the fragments that make up The Book of Disquiet record in disjunct entries a vast interior landscape and daily minutiae, making for a discontinuous, gently unhinged monologue in daybook form.

With wit, erudition and venom, Apollinaire concocts a Rabelaisian Parallel universe and slyly tells his own life story, from illegitimate birth to literary fame in the process. The novella recounts the life and death of Croniamantal, whose birth is 'saluted' by the Eiffel Tower's 'beautiful erection,' who rises through the Parisian literary world to proclaim himself 'the greatest of living poets' and who is promptly torn to pieces by a mob.

Protean, erotic, scatological and experimental, Picasso's poetry is finally compiled in this essential anthologyPablo Picasso is arguably the most famous and influential artist of the 20th century. What few in the English-speaking world know is that in 1935, at age 54, an emotional crisis caused Picasso to halt all painting and devote himself entirely to poetry. Even after resuming his visual work, Picasso continued to write, in a characteristic torrent, until 1959, leaving a body of prose poems that André Breton praised as “an intimate journal, both of the feelings and the senses, such as has never been kept before.” Similarly struck by the poems' originality, Michel Leiris wrote, “If we must compare him, despite his fierce singularity, in order to try and situate him on the literary map, I see only James Joyce.” Near the end of his life, Picasso himself was quoted as having “told a friend that long after his death his writing would gain recognition and encyclopedias would say: 'Picasso, Pablo Ruiz—Spanish poet who dabbled in painting, drawing and sculpture.'“ For the past five years, poets Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris have overseen a project to translate the majority of this writing into English for the first time. Working from Picasso's original Spanish and French (he wrote in both languages), they enlisted the help of over a dozen contemporary poets in order to mark, as they note in their introduction, “Picasso's entry into our own time.” This is indeed a new Picasso for most of us, or rather, a renewed Picasso: the poems are as protean, erotic, scatological and experimental in form as his visual art has always been described. But amid the ubiquitous posters, t-shirts and tchotchkes, how many of us have truly felt the impact of Picasso's visual work as powerfully as it was perceived in the first half of the 20th century? The poems give us a 21st-century Picasso, free of cliché. Perhaps they will even spark a revival of interest in his “dabblings.”

In 1999, translator Richard Zenith made a new find in the Pessoa archive in Lisbon: a group of prose writings by a previously unknown heteronym, the Baron of Teive.' The Portuguese volume of these writings has been received by scholars as a crucial piece of the puzzle that is Pessoa's oeuvre. The Education of the Stoic is the unique work left by the Baron of Teive, who, after destroying all his previous literary attempts and before destroying himself, explains 'the impossibility of producing superior art.' It is the dark companion piece to The Book of Disquiet.'