"The menace of surrealism was so frequently advertised that any reader of this book should be allowed the impudence of demanding my credentials." So opens Wayne Andrews's The Surrealist Parade, a portrait of the movement in literature and art by a man who, at the age of nineteen, began to correspond with its major figures and afterward came to know them well. Under the name of Montagu O'Reilly, Andrews wrote the surrealist fiction Pianos of Sympathy (1936), the very first New Directions book. In later years, Andrews became a social historian, art archivist, and scholar of architectural history, publishing no less than sixteen books, among them his well-known study of the cultural roots of Nazism, Siegfried's Curse, and a pungent biography of Voltaire (meanwhile, Montagu O'Reilly had made a reappearance on the ND list in 1948 with Who Has Been Tampering with These Pianos?). When Andrews died in 1987, he had completed all but the last chapter of The Surrealist Parade, his portrait of a movement in art and literature that took in such disparate temperaments as Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and Salvador Dali. The book is, in the words of his lifelong friend and publisher, James Laughlin, a "little insider's history... Montagu is very much behind Wayne in these caustic yet admiring sketches."

From Dada to the Automatists, and from Max Ernst to Andre Breton, Gerard Durozoi provides the most comprehensive and fascinating history of the Surrealist movement to date. Tracing the movement from its origins in the 1920s to its decline in the 1950s and 1960s, Durozoi tells the history of Surrealism through its activities, publications and reviews, demonstrating its close ties to some of the most explosive political, as well as creative, debates of the 20th century. Unlike other histories, which focus mainly on the pre-World War II years of the movement in Paris, Durozoi covers a wider chronological and geographic range, treating in detail the postwar years and Surrealism's colonization of Latin America, the United States, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Italy and North Africa. Drawing on a staggering amount of documentary and visual evidence - including more than 1,000 illustrations, many of them in colour - he illuminates all the intellectual and artistic aspects of the movement, from literature and philosophy to painting, photography and film. All the Surrealist stars and their most important works are here - Aragon, Borges, Breton, Bunuel, Cocteau, Crevel, Dali, Desnos, Ernst, Man Ray, Soupault and many more - for all of whom Durozoi has provided brief biographical notes in addition to featuring them in the main text. For anyone who wants to know more about practically any aspect of Surrealism, from its vexed relations with communism to its exquisite corpses, Durozoi's "History of the Surrealist Movement" should be a valuable reference.