"Nadja, " originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life.
The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in teh city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. "The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen, " Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.

Nadja, André Breton’s most frankly autobiographical book, is the quintessential Surrealist romance. With its blend of intimate confession and sense of the marvellous, Nadja weaves a mysterious and compelling tapestry of daily life as seen through a uniquely magical perspective.

The core of Nadja is Breton’s complex relationship with an unpredictable and unconventional young woman, ‘the extreme limit of the Surrealist aspiration’. Combining autobiographical fact with memory and imagination, Breton both spins one of the most unusual love stories in modern literature and illustrates the notion of ‘petrifying coincidence’, a cornerstone of Surrealist thought.

First published in 1928, Nadja has long been regarded as the most important and influential work to emerge from Surrealism. This edition features Richard Howard’s masterful translation and a new introduction by Breton biographer Mark Polizzotti that details the circumstances of the book’s composition.

Presents the essential ideas of the founder of French surrealism

In 1932, at the peak of French colonialism, a group of Martiniquan students at the Sorbonne established a Caribbean Surrealist Group, and published a single issue of a journal called Legitime defense. Immediately banned by the authorities, it passed almost unnoticed at the time. Yet it began a remarkable series of debates between surrealism and Caribbean intellectuals that had a profound impact on the struggle for cultural identity. In the next two decades these exchanges greatly influenced the evolution of the concept of negritude, initiated revolution in Haiti in 1946, and crucially affected the development of surrealism itself. This fascinating book presents a series of key texts-most of them never before translated into English-which reveal the complexity of this relationship between black anti-colonialist movements in the Caribbean and the most radical of the European avant-gardes. Included are Rene Menil's subtle philosophical essays and the fierce polemics of Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, appreciations of surrealism by Haitian writers, lyrical evocations of the Caribbean by Andre Breton and Andre Masson, and rich explorations of Haiti and voodoo religion by Pierre Mabille and Michel Leiris.

Nadja (1928) es una obra compleja en la que se encuentran todas las claves del surrealismo en la etapa de su desarrollo inmediatamente posterior a la publicacion del primero de sus "Manifiestos," es decir, en pleno dinamismo conceptual. Muy densa en significados, puede ser considerada una de las obras mas importantes de Breton y del movimiento del que es, sin duda, su quintaesencia.

"The Lost Steps" ("Les Pas perdus") is Andre Breton's first collection of critical and polemical essays. Composed between 1917 and 1923, these pieces trace his evolution during the years when he was emerging as a central figure in French (and European) intellectual life. They chronicle his tumultuous passage through the Dada movement, proclaim his explosive views on Modernism and its heroes, and herald the emergence of Surrealism itself. Along the way, we are given Breton's serious commentaries on his Modernist predecessors, Guillaume Apollinaire and Alfred Jarry, followed by his not-so-serious Dada manifestoes.

Also included are portraits of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Breton's mysterious friend Jacques Vache, as well as a crisis-by-crisis account of his dealing with Dada's leader, Tristan Tzara. Finally, Breton offers a first glimpse of Surrealism, the movement that was forever after identified with his name and that stands as a defining force in twentieth-century aesthetics.

What Freud did for dreams, Andre Breton (1896-1966) does for despair: in its distortions he finds the marvelous, and through the marvelous the redemptive force of imagination. Originally published in 1932 in France, "Les Vases communicants" is an effort to show how the discoveries and techniques of surrealism could lead to recovery from despondency. This English translation makes available "the theories upon which the whole edifice of surrealism, as Breton conceived it, is based."

In "Communicating Vessels" Breton lays out the problems of everyday experience and of intellect. His involvement with political thought and action led him to write about the relations between nations and individuals in a mode that moves from the quotidian to the lyrical. His dreams triggered a curious correspondence with Freud, available only in this book. As Caws writes, "The whole history of surrealism is here, in these pages."

'Nadja' is a surrealist romance and has come to be known as a book which defined the movement's attitude towards life. With its blend of intimate confession and sense of marvellous, Nadja weaves a mysterious and compelling tapestry of daily life.

"This is a kind of "essence of Breton," variously translated by some of our finest writers, each of whom highlights different facets of Breton's complex work. Mark Polizzotti's useful introduction provides context and a brief analysis of the artist and his times."--Diane di Prima, author of "Recollections of My Life as a Woman

"Mark Polizzotti, who is a poet, a translator, and the author of the definitive biography of Andre Breton, has chosen stellar translations of Breton's dazzling poetry and placed it in its lively context. This shapely introduction to the life and work of Andre Breton is smart, concise, and exciting. I cannot imagine a better one."--Ron Padgett, poet and translator of "The Complete Poems of Blaise Cendrars

"The Poets for the Millennium Series generally and Andre Breton's "Selected Works specifically offers a workable image of an author and the work and the conjuncture, all at once. What comes across is a vivid presentation of Andre Breton not just as an art czar, a manifesto merchant, but a serious, haunted, inventive and strangely profound poet of the imagination, who invented or archeologized new ways of dreaming, but insisted on bearing witness with them in the actual world. Polizzotti does justice--as I think no other writer has--to the double burden of Breton's work."--Robert Kelly

"A superbly chosen selection of Breton's poetry and prose, translated in every case with an elegant intelligence, and preceded by an unusually thorough introduction showing quite exactly how the poet's life informed each epoch of his work. It proves again the remarkable un-boringness of Breton, and how important he is now to our own poetry and to us.--Mary Ann Caws, author of"The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter and editor of "The Surrealist Painters and Poets

"Free Rein" is a gathering of seminal essays by Andre Breton, the foremost figure among the French surrealists. Written between 1936 and 1952, they include addresses, manifestoes, prefaces, exhibition pamphlets, and theoretical, polemical, and lyrical essays. Together they display the full span of Breton's preoccupations, his abiding faith in the early principles of surrealism, and the changing orientations, in light of crucial events of those years, of the surrealist movement within which he remained the leading force.

Having broken decisively with Marxism in the mid-1930s, Breton repeatedly addresses the horrors of the Stalinist regime (which denounced him during the Moscow trials of 1936). He argues for the autonomy of art and poetry and condemns the subservience to "revolutionary" aims exemplified by socialist realism. Other articles reflect on aesthetic issues, cinema, music, and education and provide detailed meditations on the literary, artistic, and philosophical topics for which he is best known. "Free Rein" will prove indispensable for students of Breton, surrealism, and modern French and European culture.