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.'

Introduction by John Ashberry The most eccentric writer of the twentieth century. His unearthly style fascinated Surrealists such as Breton, Duchamp and Cocteau but also Gide, Robespierre, Foucault and John Ashberry. The title essay is the key to Roussel's methods and is joined by selections from his major fiction, drama, and poetry pieces superbly translated by his New York School admirers, which include Ashberry, Winkfield, Harry Matthews and Kenneth Koch.

Selected Correspondence, Edited with a Biographical Essay by Ruth Bernard Yeazell Alice James, 1848-1892, was the sister of Henry and William James, as literary as her brothers bu but never formally educated. Here Yeazell argues that Alice James instead made a career of her lifelong neurastenic illness and anticipation of death. With many of the letters written from her sick bed, she is alternatively witty, lyrical and occasionally bitter, but always deeply morbid.

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.'

The legendary French filmmaker's labyrinthine memoir, first published by Exact Change in 2002 as a CD-ROM, now reconfigured into book form after a laborious process initiated by the artist before his death in 2012Filmmaker, photographer and writer Chris Marker never adhered to the conventions of a particular art form. Each of his films, from La Jetée to Sans Soleil, pushes the boundaries of its medium, merging at times with the essay, political manifesto, personal letter, art installation and even, finally, a computer game.For Immemory, first published in 1998 (French) and 2002 (English), Marker used a CD-ROM to create a multi-layered, mixed-media memoir. The reader investigates ""zones"" of travel, war, cinema and poetry, navigating through image and text as if physically exploring Marker's memory itself. The result is a veritable 21st-century Remembrance of Things Past, an exploration of the state of memory in our era. With it, Marker both invented a literary form and perfected it, just before the digital format he chose for the experiment was quickly rendered obsolete.Immemory: Gutenberg Version reinvents this unique work for the printed page, a project the author dreamed up, titled, and began working on with Exact Change before his death. Now finally realized, it brings this seminal work into the present and future through a time-tested, durable format of the past: the book.Chris Marker (1921–2012) served in the French Resistance, and then the US Air Force, during World War II and worked as a journalist while honing his film career. He received international acclaim with La Jetée in 1962, and became a critical voice in film theory and production as well as a widely admired "cult" artist, a filmmaker's filmmaker.

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.

Afterword by Frank O'Hara Morton Feldman (1926-1987) is among the most influential American composers of the 20th Century. While his music is known for its exteme quiet and delicate beauty, Feldman himself was famously large and loud. His writings are both funny and illuminating, not only about his own music but about the entire New York School of painters, poets and composers that coalesced in the 1950s, including his friends Jackson Pollack, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank O Hara, and John Cage.

A landmark anthology of Dada artist Kurt Schwitter's rejuvenating works: radical, humourous and explosively lyrical writings that embrace and undo every genre, prefiguring sound, concrete and abstract poetry, and laying the groundwork for performance art. Schwitter's passion was for juxtaposition, a breaking down of boundaries not for the sake of shock, but in the service of creative hilarity. Using visual nad verbal material drawn from teh debris of culture, Schwitters offers us a Gesamtkunstwerk for the common man.

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.'