Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Aurora and Cardinal Point

Aurora and Cardinal Point

Leiris, Michel
Warby, Anna

Hardcover

Literary Fiction

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1900565463
ISBN13: 9781900565462
Publisher: Atlas Press LLC
Published: Jan 31 2014
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.90
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.90 Depth: 7.70
Language: English
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.

Also in

Literary Fiction

View All