Living in a run-down boardinghouse, Baton spends his days searching working-class Paris for the modest comforts of warmth, cheap meals, and friendship, but he finds little. And despite his situation, Baton remains vain and unsympathetic, a Bovian antihero to the fullest. Bove himself called My Friends, published in France in 1923, a "novel of impoverished solitude." The book drew praise from such writers as Rilke, Gide, and, later, Beckett, and is to this day perhaps the author's most celebrated work.

    

    Aragon's extraordinary prose-poem-essay A Wave of Dreams (Une vague de reves), is a compelling, lyrical, first-hand account of the early days of surrealist experimentation in Paris. Writing in 1924, Aragon vividly describes, and philosophically evaluates, the inner adventures, the hallucinations and encounters with the 'Marvellous' which took the young surrealists to the brink of insanity as a revolutionary new era in Art History was born."

    S. Eliot. In this definitive edition, French and English texts appear on facing pages. Preface by T. S. Eliot.

    “Desnos more than any of us got closest to the Surrealist truth,” wrote André Breton in the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924): “He speaks Surrealist at will.” Mourning for Mourning was published the same year, it was Desnos’s first book. This was during the early experimental period of Surrealism - the period of Sleeping-fits, of the investigation of the subconscious through dream and trance states and through automatic writing. Robert Desnos proved to be the most gifted practitioner. So gifted, indeed, that the trance sessions had to be discontinued after various disturbing incidents: on one occasion he tried to stab Paul Eluard, on another he was discovered attempting to persuade other members of the group to hang themselves.This is the first English translation of Deuil pour Deuil.