{"title":"Books by André Breton","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780472061822","title":"Manifestoes of Surrealism","description":"Manifestoes of Surrealism is an essential text by André Breton, a French writer and poet, and co-founder of the Surrealist movement. This volume includes Breton’s 1924 surrealist manifesto, his second manifesto from 1930, and extracts from other letters and works. Drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis, dream logic, and automatic writing, Breton rejects rationalism and embraces the unconscious as a path to artistic and social liberation.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56290184724853,"sku":"9780472061822","price":17.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780472061822_2f8434c4-c56f-4d2a-b378-f5da8944bd59.jpg?v=1786013946"},{"product_id":"9780803260726","title":"Mad Love","description":"Mad Love has been acknowledged an undisputed classic of the surrealist movement since its first publication in France in 1937. Its adulation of love as both mystery and revelation places it in the most abiding of literary traditions, but its stormy history and technical difficulty have prevented it from being translated into English until now. \"\"There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine,\"\" writes André Breton, leader of the surrealists in Paris in the 1920s and '30s. Mad Love is dedicated to defying \"\"the widespread opinion that love wears out, like the diamond, in its own dust.\"\" Celebrating breton's own love and lover, the book unveils the marvelous in everyday encounters and the hidden depths of ordinary things.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294972359029,"sku":"9780803260726","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780803260726_a12b03ed-4079-4236-981c-eeddfcb3b833.jpg?v=1786033079"},{"product_id":"9781681379364","title":"Nadja","description":"\u003cb\u003eA new translation of one of the defining works of the French surrealist movement, an energetic autobiographical novel that is at once both a tumultuous romance story and an initiation into the surrealism of everyday life.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Paris, during the fall of 1926, André Breton met a young woman from the provinces who called herself Nadja because, she said, \"in Russian it's the beginning of the word for hope, and because it's only the beginning.\" Their love affair was brief, intense, and intensely self-conscious. They both talked exuberantly of the book that Breton would make out of their days and nights. And indeed a year later (after Nadja was institutionalized and Breton had moved on to other love affairs) he began to write \u003ci\u003eNadja\u003c\/i\u003e—a book of memory and analysis taking its cue in part from Freud's case studies, but also a book of ingeniously intercut images, drawing on Surrealist ideas to portray a soul whose very way of being approaches, in Breton's words, \"the extreme limit of the Surrealist aspiration.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this, the first new translation of \u003ci\u003eNadja \u003c\/i\u003ein more than sixty years, Mark Polizzotti captures the youthful excitement, the abiding strangeness, and above all the freshness of Breton's prose. He also provides an illuminating introduction about the fate of the real Nadja, whose identity remained jealously guarded until the twenty-first century.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA gripping tale of infatuation and a meditation on the surrealism of everyday life, \u003ci\u003eNadja \u003c\/i\u003eis still a thing of convulsive beauty, impossible to pin or put down, a precursor to works of Julien Gracq, Julio Cortázar, and W.G. Sebald.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis edition of \u003ci\u003eNadja \u003c\/i\u003econtains 44 images, which Breton “conceived from the outset as an integral element of the narrative,\" as Mark Polizzotti writes in his introduction.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302853030261,"sku":"9781681379364","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781681379364_79fd461b-5eb1-452f-a4d3-bed0f75e7de2.jpg?v=1786024628"},{"product_id":"9780141180892","title":"Nadja","description":"NADJA is a Surrealist romance, and has come to be known as a book which defined that movement's attitude towards life.   With its blend of intimate confession and sense of the marvellous, NADJA weaves a myterious and compelling tapestry of daily life as seen through a magical perspective.  Combining autobiographical fact with memory and imagination, Breton spins one of the most unusual love stories in modern literature.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311568957813,"sku":"9780141180892","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780141180892_02ed5d6d-c7b9-4f1e-bd70-1c12c18e24b1.jpg?v=1786011202"},{"product_id":"9781681374604","title":"The Magnetic Fields","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn indispensible classic of French poetry, this is a new translation of Breton and Soupault's experiment with automatic writing, and also the first known work of literary surrealism. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the spring of 1919, two young men, André Breton and Philippe Soupault, both in a state of shock after World War I, embarked on an experiment. Sick of the literary cultivation of “voice,” sick of the “well-written,” they wanted to unleash the power of the word and to create “a new morality” to replace “the prevailing morality, the source of all our trials and tribulations.” They had a plan. They would write for a week on every day of the week and they would write fast, as fast as possible, in complete secrecy. When the week was over, the writing would be done. No touching up. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis was how \u003ci\u003eThe Magnetic Fields\u003c\/i\u003e, the first sustained exercise in automatic writing, came to be. Charlotte Mandell’s brilliant new translation reveals a key work of twentieth-century literature. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis English-only edition does not include the poems in their original language.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312749949301,"sku":"9781681374604","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781681374604_5f649bcd-81dc-41f8-87c8-33060cb684ce.jpg?v=1786024535"},{"product_id":"cavalier-perspective","title":"Cavalier Perspective","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe final book by the founder of Surrealism, translated into English for the first time.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"\u003cem\u003eCavalier Perspective\u003c\/em\u003e shows us the lion in winter, André Breton near the end of his life, trying to reconcile all the contradictions of his extraordinary career. It is unexpectedly moving to watch him wrestling with his ghosts, aiming for magic, fitting himself uneasily into the new alien landscape of the 1960s.\"\u003cstrong\u003e—Lucy Sante, author of\u003cem\u003e I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs leader and chief theoretician of Surrealism, director of myriad publications from the 1920s through the 1960s, poet André Breton was a prolific writer of prose. Author of numerous books, essays, and manifestoes, Breton periodically collected his most significant short essays into carefully arranged volumes. His last such collection, \u003cem\u003eCavalier Perspective\u003c\/em\u003e, appeared posthumously in 1970; in it, editor Marguerite Bonnet assembled \"articles, prefaces, responses to surveys, interviews,\" written between 1952 and 1966. Modeled on its predecessors, \u003cem\u003eCavalier Perspective\u003c\/em\u003e is considered Breton's final book.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOver 50 years after its initial publication, its appearance in English today is a crucial cultural event; here we encounter Breton writing on topics nearest to our present day and most relevant to current social and political issues. \u003cem\u003eCavalier Perspective\u003c\/em\u003e finds Breton steadfastly pursuing his anti-fascist, anti-colonialist revolutionary aims in the age of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and space exploration, concerns largely unknown during Surrealism's more notorious interwar period. Far from conceding the movement's claim to contemporary relevance, and pointedly refusing the imposition of \"strict temporal limits,\" Breton insists on Surrealism's dynamic and dialectical position in the book's titular manifesto, asserting its continuity through its perpetual capacity to respond to the needs of the hour.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMore than simply a poet and theoretician, Breton is best considered an \"inaugurator of discourse\" on the level of a Marx or Freud, and \u003cem\u003eCavalier Perspective\u003c\/em\u003e is an essential capstone to his lifetime as the guiding hand behind the worldwide surrealist movement.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481573007733,"sku":"9780872869394","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780872869394.jpg?v=1786089847"},{"product_id":"nadja","title":"Nadja","description":null,"brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492207894901,"sku":"9782070360734","price":14.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9782070360734.jpg?v=1786529035"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-andre-breton.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}