Book picks similar to
The Big Game by Benjamin Péret


poetry
surrealism
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Tarumba: The Selected Poems


Jaime Sabines - 1979
    He is considered by Octavio Paz to be instrumental to the genesis of modern Latin American poetry and “one of the best poets” of the Spanish language. Toward the end of his life, he had published for over fifty years and brought in crowds of more than 3,000 to a readings in his native country. Coined the “Sniper of Literature” by Cuban poet Roberto Fernández Retamar, Sabines brought poetry to the streets. His vernacular, authentic poems are accessible: meant not for other poets, or the established or elite, but for himself and for the people.In this translation of his fourth book, Tarumba, we find ourselves stepping into Sabines’ streets, brothels, hospitals, and cantinas; the most bittersweet details are told in a way that reaffirms: “Life bursts from you, like scarlet fever, without warning.” Eloquently co-translated by Philip Levine and the late Ernesto Trejo, this bilingual edition is a classic for Spanish- and English-speaking readers alike. Secretive, wild, and searching, these poems are rife with such intensity you’ll feel “heaven is sucking you up through the roof.” Jaime Sabines was born on March 25, 1926 in Chiapas, Mexico. In 1945, he relocated to Mexico City where he studied Medicine for three years before turning his attention to Philosophy and Literature at the University of Mexico. He wrote eight books of poetry, including Horal (1950), Tarumba (1956), and Maltiempo (1972), for which he received the Xavier Villaurrutia Award. In 1959, Sabines was granted the Chiapas Prize and, in 1983, the National Literature Award. In addition to his literary career, Sabines served as a congressman for Chiapas. Jaime Sabines died in 1999; he remains one of Mexico’s most respected poets.  Philip Levine (translator) was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1928. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently Breath (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). His other poetry collections include The Mercy (1999); The Simple Truth (1994), which won the Pulitzer Prize; What Work Is (1991), which won the National Book Award; New Selected Poems (1991); Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American Book Award for Poetry; 7 Years From Somewhere (1979), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Names of the Lost (1975), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry, the Frank O'Hara Prize, and two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. Philip Levine lives in New York City and Fresno, California, and teaches at New York University.

Witt


Patti Smith - 1973
    The Assírio e Alvim edition is a bilingual edition, starting with the translation to Portuguese and then with the original version. It contains photos and drawings.

The Romance of the Rose


Guillaume de Lorris
    In the hands of Jean de Meun, who continued de Lorris's work, it assumed vast proportions and embraced almost every aspect of medieval life from predestination and optics, to the Franciscan controversy and the right way to deal with premature hair-loss.

Eden, Eden, Eden


Pierre Guyotat - 1970
    Published in France in 1970 (Gallimard), Eden, Eden, Eden was immediately banned and remained a proscribed text for the next 11 years. The orginal edition featured a preface by Michel Leiris, Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers.Set in a polluted and apocalyptic zone of the Algerian desert in a time of civil warfare, this delirious, lacerating novel brings scenes of brutal carnage into intimate collision with relentless acts of prostitutional sex and humiliation.

The Misanthrope


Molière - 1666
    The play differs from other farces at the time by employing dynamic characters like Alceste and Célimène as opposed to the traditionally flat characters used by most satirists to criticize problems in society. It also differs from most of Molière's other works by focusing more on character development and nuances than on plot progression. The play, though not a commercial success in its time, survives as Molière's best-known work today. Much of its universal appeal is due to common undercurrents of misanthropy across cultural borders.

Yvain, or The Knight with the Lion


Chrétien de Troyes
    The creator of the Arthurian romance as a genre, Chrétien is revealed in this work as a witty, versatile writer who mastered both the soaring flight of emotion and the devastating aside and was as skillful a debater of the finer points of love as he was a describer of battles.

I Remember


Georges Perec - 1978
    Consisting of 480 numbered statements, all beginning with "I remember," and all limited to pieces of public knowledge--brand names and folk wisdom, actors and illnesses, places and things--the book represent s a secret key to the world of Perec's fiction. As Perec biographer David Bellos notes in his introduction, since original publication, "It's hardly possible to utter the words 'je me souviens' in French these days without committing a literary allusion." As playful and puzzling as the best of Perec's novels, I Rememeber began as a simple writing exercise and grew into an expansive, exhilarating work of art: the image of one unmistakable and irreplaceable life, shaped from the material of our collective past. For this edition, Perec's 480 memories, sometimes obvious, sometimes obscure, have been elucidated and explained by Bellos.

Château d'Argol


Julien Gracq - 1938
    The gothic setting of a lonely castle in the middle of thick, dense woods, not far from a wild and inaccessible seashore, contrasts with the contemporaneity of the characters who inhabit it: a dissolute, rich and aimless young man who invites his best friend to stay in his newly-acquired château. The friend arrives not alone, but with a beautiful woman whose detached amorality disturbs both men.

The Book of Monelle


Marcel Schwob - 1894
    A carefully woven assemblage of legends, aphorisms, fairy tales and nihilistic philosophy, it remains a deeply enigmatic and haunting work more than a century later, a gathering of literary and personal ruins written in a style that evokes both the Brothers Grimm and Friedrich Nietzsche. The Book of Monelle was the result of Schwob's intense emotional suffering over the loss of his love, a "girl of the streets" named Louise, whom he had befriended in 1891 and who succumbed to tuberculosis two years later. Transforming her into the innocent prophet of destruction, Monelle, Schwob tells the stories of her various sisters: girls succumbing to disillusionment, caught between the misleading world of childlike fantasy and the bitter world of reality. This new translation reintroduces a true fin-de-siècle masterpiece into English.A secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño, Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman (whom he translated into French). Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and he was the uncle of Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun.

Yann Andréa Steiner


Marguerite Duras - 1992
    The sentences lodge themselves slowly in the reader’s mind until they detonate with all the force of fused feeling and thought—the force of a metaphysical contemplation of the paradoxes of the human heart.”—The New York Times Book Review (for The Lover)Yann Andréa Steiner is a haunting dance between two parallel loves; the love between Marguerite Duras and the young Yann Andréa, and a love witnessed (or imagined) through the narrator’s window—a seaside romance between a camp counselor and a camper. The summer of 1980 flows into 1944 in this enigmatic journey through history, creation, and raw emotion.The daughter of French schoolteachers, Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) was born in Vietnam. At 17 she moved to France where she studied law and politics. She is the author of a great many novels, plays, films, and short narratives, including her internationally best-selling, ostensibly autobiographical work, The Lover (1984).

Fires


Marguerite Yourcenar - 1936
    As such, the book does not require any commentary.From the preface by Marguerite Yourcenar.

Fields of Glory


Jean Rouaud - 1990
    Awarded the prestigious Goncourt Prize, this novel vaulted author Jean Rouaud from anonymity to acclaim as the freshest literary voice in France in decades.

Wildlives


Sarah Jean Alexander - 2015
    In her debut collection, Sarah Jean Alexander asks (and answers) the hardest questions about love and loneliness and 21st century human survival. Wildlives excavates the depths of heartbreak, hope, and helplessness that can exist between two people in a small, human world.http://biglucks.bigcartel.com/product...

Last Nights of Paris


Philippe Soupault - 1928
    The story concerns the narrator's obsession with a woman who leads him into an underworld that promises to reveal the secrets of the city itself... and in Williams' wonderfully direct translation it reads like a lost Great American Novel. A vivid portrait of the city that entranced both its native writers and the Americans who traveled to it in the 20's, Last Nights of Paris is a rare collaboration between the literary circles at the root of both French and American Modernism.

Imprinted


Andrea Michelle - 2015
    You paint with words and that is beautiful." "Your words capture a truth some may feel but be unable to word." "Definitely a skilled tongue." Join over 10,000 people who follow and enjoy Andrea Michelle's poetry. Download now for free!