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Working from the 1960s on, the French writer, artist and illustrator Roland Topor (1938-97) was an all-round maverick known for his paintings and drawings as much as for his novels (such as The Tenant, filmed by Roman Polanski), plays and short stories, all dominated by a sense of irrational, everyday menace. He was also a filmmaker, actor (appearing as Renfield in Herzog's Nosferatu) and the cofounder, with Arrabal and Jodorowsky, of the Panic performance art movement. The tone of Topor's fiction and art could be interpreted as humorous, but it's a humor pushed deep into discomfort, almost to the point of total horror. From the collision of these factors, rooted in the author's experiences and his irrepressible personality, come works increasingly seen as unique in European art and writing of the late 20th century. Head-to-Toe Portrait of Suzanne tells of an isolated, misanthropic narrator and his encounter with the beautiful Suzanne, an old flame from his past. It is at once a fable, a love story of enormous tenderness and a tale of increasingly unpleasant events that culminate in horror and atrocity. With its distinct blend of sympathetic cynicism and grotesquerie, Head-to-Toe Portrait of Suzanne--Topor's first work to be translated into English in half a century--offers an ideal introduction to the work and worldview of an artist currently undergoing a major reassessment and rediscovery in his home country and beyond.

Written in early 1922, this is the first prose work by Surrealist poet and exemplary practitioner of automatic writing Robert Desnos (preceding Mourning for Mourning and Liberty or Love!, also published by Atlas Press).Its protagonists are swept into violent journeys through Paris by train and steamship; fabulous events consume their everyday lives; oracles spout nonsense or wisdom. All of Desnos' friends in the Paris Dada movement--André Breton, Louis Aragon and Benjamin Péret, among others--make an appearance, and all find a grave in the "cemetery" toward the end of the book, for the past must be buried (even though most of these now legendary names were then in their 20s and had barely made their mark).By the time this book was written, the Dada movement seemed played out, killed off by a mixture of public success, internal dissent and boredom with the predictability of its scandals. The Punishments of Hell lies between Dada and Surrealism, harking back to the belligerent obfuscation of, say, Tristan Tzara and overwhelming it with the savage lyricism for which Desnos would become known. Robert Desnos (1900-45) was one of the most celebrated and celebratory of the writers allied to the Paris Dada and Surrealist groups. He effortlessly combined mystery, eroticism and an irrepressible joi de vivre in a flood of poetry, prose fiction, radio plays and even children's verse. An active member of the French resistance, he died of typhoid just days after his liberation from the Terezin concentration camp.

A masterpiece that effortlessly takes its place among the classics of travel writingVictor Segalen (1878-1919) was a French doctor, archaeologist, explorer and author who traveled extensively in Polynesia and China. Journey to the Land of the Real (Equipée in French) is the summation of the author's life as traveler and poet, and a summation that is all the more surprising since he could know nothing of his imminent and mysterious death: Journey appeared posthumously. In part, it recounts an actual expedition through China to the borders of Tibet in the last years of the First World War; there are real adventures in a country now lost to time, but more mysterious events too. Segalen describes this work as lying "between what one dreams of and what one does, between what one desires and what one obtains; between the summit conquered by a metaphor and the altitude reached on foot by exertion; between the winged dance of the idea and the tough march along the road." Here is a masterpiece that effortlessly takes its place among the classics of travel writing precisely because it is so much more than that; among its brief chapters are consummate prose poems that reveal a lucid, eloquent and very likable author at the height of his powers.

"'Sam Dunn is Dead' was described by its author as a 'Futurist novel', yet one will search in vain for any mention of this work in anthologies or histories of Futurism. Sam Dunn's erasure is doubtless because it is so unlike anything else produced by Futurism (so ardent, so masculine, so positive and so absurdly serious). 'Sam Dunn' is none of these, being, above all else, a great small masterpiece of black humour. Not only is [it] at once funny, despairing, cerebral and ludicrous, it also traces a history in miniature of the modern spirit." --