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Humorous and Dadaistic writings from the original Velvet Gentleman and pioneering composerThis is the largest selection, in any language, of the writings of Erik Satie (1866-1925). Although once dismissed as an eccentric, Satie has come to be seen as a key influence on modern music, and his writings reveal him as one of the most beguiling of absurdists, in the mode of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear--but with a strong streak of Dadaism (a movement in which he participated). The nonconformism of Satie's private life seems deliberately calculated: he assumed various personae at different periods of his life, from the mystical "velvet gentleman" to the Dadaist disguised as quizzical bureaucrat. His poignant, sly and witty writings embody all of his contradictions. Included here are his "autobiographical" "Memoirs of an Amnesic"; gnomic annotations to his musical scores ("For the Shrivelled and the Dimwits, I have written a suitably ponderous chorale ... I dedicate this chorale to those who do not like me"); the publications of his private church; his absurdist play Medusa's Snare; advertising copy for his local suburban newspaper; and the mysterious, calligraphed "private advertisements" found stuffed behind his piano after his death. Satie referred to himself as "a man in the manner of Adam (he of Paradise)" and added: "My humor is reminiscent of Cromwell's.I am also indebted to Christopher Columbus, as the American spirit has sometimes tapped me on the shoulder, and I have joyfully felt its ironically icy bite." He died as he lived: "without quite ceasing to smile."

Anagram play meets psychic crisis in Unica Zürn's acclaimed Surrealist document of mental precarityIn the 25 years since Atlas Press first published this account by Unica Zürn (1916-70) of her long history of mental crises, she has come to be recognized as a great artist at least the equal of her partner, the Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Yet her work is barely comprehensible without the texts printed here--now revised by translator Malcolm Green--in which she demonstrates how Surrealist conceptions of the psyche allowed her to welcome the most alarming experiences as offering access to an inner existence that was the vital source for her artistic output. Green's introduction to this volume was the first study to consider her life and work from this perspective. Zürn's first mental collapse was initiated when she encountered her fantasy figure, "the Man of Jasmine," in the person of the writer and artist Henri Michaux. This meeting plunged her into a hallucinatory world in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. Her greatest works were produced during times of mental crisis, often when confined in asylums, and she tended to encourage the onset of these crises in order to provoke intense creativity. Her description of these episodes reveals how language itself was part of the divinatory method that could aid her recovery or predict a new crisis. Her compulsion for composing anagrams allowed her to release from everyday language an astonishing flood of messages, threats and evocations. This method, and Zürn's eloquent yet direct style, make this book a literary masterpiece, while providing a rare insight into extreme psychological states.

This combination of two key works by the Italian avant-garde writer Giorgio Manganelli (1922-90) is a major addition to the small number of his works available in English. In the 1960s Manganelli was a member, along with Umberto Eco and Eduardo Sanguinetti, of the Gruppo 63 movement, and a close friend of Italo Calvino, who provides an enthusiastic foreword that describes "To Those Gods Beyond" (1972) as a "heraldic bestiary" that "launches into a crescendo of variations on its main theme, the self-aggrandisement of a lucid megalomaniac." Perhaps the best known of his works included here, "An Impossible Love," comprises an epistolary exchange between Hamlet and the Princess of Cleves conducted with a "verbal catapult" as the universes about them descend into oblivion. All is overseen by gods beyond whom an endless array of other gods lie in wait, intent on torment. Everything seemingly finite or known in our world becomes infinite and unknown. The book is prefaced by Manganelli's notorious manifesto "Literature as Deception" (1967), in which he describes the "literary object" as something cynical, corrupt and devoted only to turning human suffering into exquisite figures of speech. This is a major new offering of work by this important writer, heralded by Calvino as an "erudite acrobat who twirls around the trapeze of rhetoric above the timeless void of meaning."

Having spent the early thirties in far-left groups opposing Fascism, in 1937 Georges Bataille abandoned this approach so as to transfer the struggle onto the mythological plane, founding two groups with this aim in mind. The College of Sociology gave lectures attended by major figures from the Parisian intelligentsia - intended to reveal the hidden undercurrents within a society that appeared to be bordering on collapse. The texts in this book comprise lectures given to the College; essays from the Acephale journal and a large cache of the internal papers of the secret society of Acephale.

This novel, much of it written amidst the horror of the trenches when Louis Aragon (1897-1982) was a medical orderly during the First World War, demonstrates the chasm that separates the works of the artists and writers of what would become Dadaism and those, say, of the English War poets. In a world of moral destitution beyond any rational forbearance, what can remain? How can one write at all, let alone something as absurd as a novel? Anicet or the Panorama is both a roman à clef (Aragon's friends, including André Breton, are recognizable), and a novel of the total liquidation of a culture that had allowed this to come to pass: even literary heroes must be confronted and superseded. As fast-paced, funny and surprising as a Hollywood silent movie, its narrative of fabulous crimes and scandals sweeps through a panorama of Paris society as its protagonist Anicet becomes subordinated to the mysterious Mire, a woman who is the incarnation of "modern Beauty." Anicet is seduced into a life of crime, which he accepts with nonchalance and an ironic integrity that he maintains to the bitter end of his journey of self-immolation. Aragon's precisely crafted, sardonic prose reveals a world that is no more than a tragic puppet show. This furious tempest of a book launched Aragon's career and is one the cornerstones of the Paris Dada movement.

"The present version is based on the Atlas Press edition of 1995"--Preface, page 9.

This book collects the writings of a radical group of writers close to Paris Surrealism--principally René Daumal and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte--as published in their now legendary magazine, Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game). Le Grand Jeu ran to three issues between 1928 and 1930, before collapsing due to its editors' infighting, drug use and vehemently unreasonable aspirations for both art and life. The Grand Jeu is often associated with Surrealism (they were invited to join the group), but their ideas were far more extreme. The magazine was the public face of a group of artists and writers who systematically attacked their perceptions of reality through narcotics, anaesthesia and near-death experiences.Le Grand Jeu describes a politico-mystical outlook which combined a critique of the apathy and repression of contemporary Western society with a quest to take leave of the individual ego and to reconnect with a collective Universal Mind. The group's esoteric program united narcotic and parapsychological practices with asceticism, revolutionary politics (the Russian Revolution was barely a decade old) and a prophetic mode of poetry which they identified in antecedents such as Rimbaud and Mallarmé. In this definitive collection, the theories of the Grand Jeu are presented in the group's own words for the first time, through the essays and articles which formed the bulk of their magazine.

Previous edition: London: Heinemann, 1997.

This volume collects two classics of Surrealist fiction, both long out of print, by the writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris (1901-1990). Close to Georges Bataille, Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre and Francis Bacon, and a director of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, Leiris was a pivotal figure in postwar France. He wrote important works in the fields of ethnology and anthropology, as well as a sequence of autobiographical works regarded as classics of modern French literature (most famously Manhood [1939]). "There is scarcely a literary opus today that can compare in authenticity and stature to that of Michel Leiris," Maurice Nadeau wrote of him. In Aurora, Leiris pursues his eponymous heroine through a visionary landscape shot through with catastrophe. His lucid yet baroque language, with its rich descriptions and ever more extravagant metaphors, is only just able to keep pace. Looking back on this novel, Leiris described its tone: "despite the 'black' or 'frenetic' style of its blustering prose, what I like about this work is the appetite it expresses for an unattainable purity, the faith it places in the untamed imagination, the horror it manifests with regard to any kind of fixity." Cardinal Point is Leiris' first prose work. Written in 1925, soon after he had joined the Surrealist movement, it employs "automatic writing" to excavate the hidden meanings of ordinary words, a procedure that was to underpin his most vital future works.

Originally concieved in 1992, this graphic novel from Grayson Perry is presented as a beautiful case-bound edition.

"In those days, my door was open to mystery". So speaks the hero of Desnos' novel: Sanglot the Corsair. Mystery, the marvellous, a city transmuted by love, Sanglot's pursuit of the siren Louise Lame, such are the essential ingredients of this the last masterpiece of early Surrealism to remain untranslated into English. It was originally published in 1924 to immediate and lasting acclaim - except from the public authorities who immediately censored whole sections (here restored). Impossible to describe a novel of such virtuosity and bravura, and one which consistently refuses to behave as one expects, characters appear and vanish according to whim or desire, they walk underwater, nonchalantly accept astounding coincidences. It's a hymn to the erotic, an adventure story darkly illumined by the shades of Sade, Lautreamont and Jack the Ripper, a dream both violent and tender, an obsession, in fact the perfect embodiment of the Surrealist spirit: at once joyful, despairing, and effortlessly scandalous.

In 1979, Georges Perec (1936-1982) wrote a brief entertainment called "The Winter Journey" for a publisher's catalogue. It quickly became his most frequently reprinted short story. Set on the eve of World War II, it recounts the discovery of a great literary masterpiece that conceals a scandalous secret at the heart of the whole of modern French literature. Every aspect of literary history will have to be rewritten. However, the War intervenes, and the work is lost forever. The present volume, a kind of "hyper-novel," includes and then extends this brief parable, which turns out to be so resonant with possibilities. Georges Perec was perhaps the most celebrated member of the Oulipo group of writers in France, and over the years members of the group have written 20 sequels to this tale, between 1992 and January of this year. The result is a novel of digressions, gradual elaboration and bizarre forays into the totally unexpected. Winter Journeys has become one of the most extended and congenial literary experiments of recent times; it includes meditations on the literary tastes of worms, book-burning in the Nazi period, the delights of plagiarism and the twisted rationality of bibliophilia. First published as a limited paperback edition in 2001, this new volume is twice the length of its predecessor. Please note that pages 136-140 are intentionally printed upside down, as part of the narrative on those pages (François Caradec's "The Worm's Journey," which describes a bookworm's path through a book).

The nineteenth-century French writer and publisher Léon Genonceaux (1856--?) is as much of an enigma as those two legendary enfants terribles whom he was the first to publish: Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. After he had done so, a conviction for publishing indecent literature followed, and Genonceaux fled to London, returning to Paris around 1900 and then disappearing forever around 1905, leaving behind a wild, stupefying masterpiece called The Tutu. The Tutu is one of those mythical beasts--a great lost book; a book that, if it had been published when it was written (in 1891), would have been one of the defining works of late nineteenth-century French literature. In fact it was published, but was never distributed to bookstores, and today only six copies of the original edition survive. Willfully scatological, erotic and gleefully Nietzschean in its dismemberment of fin-de-siecle morality, The Tutu is at once a sort of ultimate Decadent delirium and also a proto-modernist novel in the vein of Ulysses. Its existence was first posited in 1966 by a famous literary hoaxer, and until a handful of copies turned up some years later, in the early 1990s, it was presumed to be a fabrication. This is the first English translation.

Three New York Dadas and The Blind Man relates the story of the triangular relationship between Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, told in the words of two of its protagonists; and also reprints in facsimile the Dadaist magazine they produced together in New York in 1917: The Blind Man. The principal text is the first English translation of Roché's novel Victor, an account of his friendship with Duchamp (nicknamed Victor by his close friends in those days). Although unfinished, Roché's text offers a unique account of New York Dada, all of whose principal characters and events make an appearance: Francis Picabia, Arthur Cravan, the Arensbergs and their soirées, the Blind Man's Ball and the scandal of Duchamp's "Fountain" at the Independents exhibition, a pivotal moment in modern art. The novel offers interesting insights into the sexual politics of the period, when a woman could be arrested or blackmailed for spending the night with a man to whom she was not married. Roché, a lifelong friend of Duchamp, appears to have been something of a devotee of triangular relationships, and went on to write a more famous novel on the topic (also autobiographical), Jules et Jim--later made into a film by François Truffaut. Beatrice Wood's account of these events is taken from her memoirs; she went on to become a celebrated ceramicist, dying in 1998 aged 105. The introduction and commentary is by Dawn Ades, the well-known scholar of Dada and Surrealism.

This collection has the dubious distinction of being one of the most pirated books of all time. Since its first appearance in 1928, illegal editions have appeared with remarkable regularity. The reason? Once considered obscene - it reprints a large number of the most ''savoury'' limericks known - it is also very, very funny due in great part to the author''s dead-pan commentaries and ''geographical index''. Douglas'' erudition effortlessly traverses topics as diverse as the mudflats of Leigh-on-Sea, the dahlias of Central America and the habitat of the Silesian tapeworm.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is best known for his early novels Journey to the End of the Night (1932)--which Charles Bukowski described as the greatest novel of the past 2,000 years--and Death on the Installment Plan (1936), but this delirious, fanatical "biography" predates them both. The astounding yet true story of the life of Ignacz Semmelweis provided Céline with a narrative whose appalling events and bizarre twists would have lain beyond credibility in a work of pure fiction. Semmelweis, now regarded as the father of antisepsis, was the first to diagnose correctly the cause of the staggering mortality rates in the lying-in hospital at Vienna. However, his colleagues rejected both his reasoning and his methods, thereby causing thousands of unnecessary deaths in maternity wards across Europe. This episode, one of the most infamous in the history of medicine, and its disastrous effects on Semmelweis himself, are the subject of Céline's semi-fictional evocation, one in which his violent descriptive genius is already apparent. The overriding theme of his later writing--a caustic despair verging on disgust for humanity--finds its first expression here, and yet he also reveals a more compassionate aspect to his character. Semmelweis was not published until 1936, after the novels that made Céline famous. "It is not every day we get a thesis such as Céline wrote on Semmelweis!" wrote Henry Miller of this volume.

Illustrations by Andre Raffray A must for Duchamp devotees everywhere, this little introduction to the life and works of Marcel Duchamp was originally published to accompany a Duchamp retrospective at the Pompidou Centre. Modelled on a children''s book, it contains 12 delicious dead-pan full-page colour illustrations of events in Duchamp''s life with an equally tongue-in-cheek, but entirely accurate, biography.