Short list of early French Avant-Garde fiction
Explore a curated short list of early French Avant-Garde fiction books, featuring groundbreaking works that redefined modern literature. Discover iconic titles and authors from this revolutionary movement.
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Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire
by Guillaume Apollinaire
A bilingual, illustrated edition of The Selected Writings of Apollinaire, the only representative collection in English translation, with a comprehensive critical Introduction by the translator, Roger Shattuck.
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The Poet Assassinated
by Guillaume Apollinaire
The poet Apollinaire was modernism's first champion, and after his early death in 1918, he became its first saint.
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The Supermale
by Alfred Jarry
The act of love is of no importance, since it can be performed indefinitely.' With that remark, the gentleman adventurer Andre Marcueil sets into motion an outrageous plot of scientific experiments nd technological heroism focused on author Alfred Jarry's trinity of obsessions: sex, alcohol, and bicycles. Like a mock Jules Verne, Jarry describes the manner in which the 'Supermale' ultimately proves his claim; after 82 times with a woman, attending doctors hooks him up to a machine instead with whom he merges in the book's final climax.'
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The Ubu Plays
by Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry is regarded as one of the founders of modern avant-garde theatre-- "Dada, Surrealism, Pataphysics, Theatre of Cruelty, the Absurd--all owe a debt to Jarry." (Encore) This volume contains his three classic Ubu texts: Ubu Roi, Ubu Cocu and Ubu Enchaîné. Through the lucid translations of Connolly and Taylor, the reader comes to realize that the violent and loathsome Ubu is Jarry's dark metaphor for man in the modern age. As Ubu himself said, "We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well."
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Complete Poems
by Blaise Cendrars
"At last! A superb translation of one of the great and greatly neglected Modernist poets! The map of Modernist poetry will never be quite the same."—Marjorie Perloff "Padgett's sparkling translations do marvelous justice to the eccentric and exciting poetry of Blaise Cendrars."—John Ashbery
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Exploits & Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician
by Alfred Jarry
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'
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The Adventures of Telemachus
by Aragon
This is the first paperback edition in English of one of the most important and entertaining works of Surrealist fiction. Aragon's 1922 novel boldly appropriates the titles and plot of a 17th century epic, recounting the adventures of Odysseus' son Telemachus but the moralistic underpinnings of the original are replaced by a Surrealist's dedication to the strange, the contrary. A wryly self-conscious book, full of the kinds of intertextual games associated with writers such as Borges and Calvino.