"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 Andre 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.

Originally published in France in 1934, Break of Day is André Breton’s second collection of critical and polemical essays, following The Lost Steps (Nebraska 1996). In fewer than two hundred pages, it captures the first full decade of the surrealist movement. The collection opens with an essay composed in 1924 that examines key elements of surrealism and concludes with Breton’s harsh revaluation in 1933 of automatic writing. Among the other essays in the volume are “Burial Denied� and “In Self-Defense,� two pieces that, in translator Mark Polizzotti’s words, “mark surrealism’s conscious break from the mainstream and the beginning of its attempts to work alongside the French Communist Party.� Also included are “Psychiatry Standing before Surrealism,� which addresses Breton’s complex, ambivalent views on mental illness and the emerging psychiatric establishment; “Introduction to Achim von Arnim's Strange Tales,� which reveals surrealism’s debt to such precursors as the German romantics and delineates a surrealistic aesthetic of the macabre; and “Picasso in His Element,� in which Breton demonstrates his formidable talents as a critic of the visual arts.