Free Reign

André Breton

Essays by Breton, leader of the French Surrealists, that cover a broad spectrum of his interests including philosophical and literary topics as well as his arguments for the autonomy of art and poetry. Here are insights into his personal character, and his humor, obsessions and unique way of thought. Writings reflect on cinema, music and contain major statements on Surrealism. DW

Publisher: University of Nebraska
Hardback: 288 pages

Mad Love

André Breton

This book is not the dogmatic Surrealist stream of consciousness satire of romantic love you might expect. It is actually a deeply sentimental treatment of the chivalrous search for the biggest love possible. A love that explodes with “convulsive beauty” and represents from the depths of “the human crucible” a preordained demonstration at its most ecstatic and passionate vibrancy, decanted directly from the joy of memory.
So we move anecdotally between Breton’s passionate search for ideal love, ideal art and ideal chance as a unifying factor and valediction of everything. This is dense and charming, clarifying and inspiring. So refreshing to see romantic love included in the philosophy of revelation through “random chance.”
I always wondered about the artistic lineage of the cut-up for I felt sure there truly must be an essential missing link between Gysin’s cut-ups and Breton’s Surrealist “fortuitous” automatism. Well, here, at long, long last we have it confirmed. Mad Love, therefore, absolutely insists that it is filed, well-thumbed, on your cut-up reference bookshelves right next to Brion Gysin’s The Third Mind, Let the Mice In and Here To Go. These are the foundation stones of any and all credible past, present and future investigations of romantic art, romantic life and romantic love, which incontrovertibly and sacredly insist that they are one and the same quest and process.
Anything built from or for less than total love, total gender and total war on anything habituated as culture or character by our mindlessly billowing species is simply littering existence with cheap distractions that pointlessly extol built-in obsolescence with the sole, paltry function of consuming forever the last traces of nobility and purpose.
Brion Gysin, André Breton and the debacle of contemporary semantics so invitingly invite us to… “Let’s cut it up, to see what it really says.” FOREVER! GPO

Publisher: University of Nebraska
Paperback: 129 pages
Illustrated

Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

Friedrich Nietzsche

This work marked for Nietzsche a new “positivism” and skepticism with which he challenged his previous metaphysical and psychological assumptions.

Publisher: University of Nebraska
Paperback: 312 pages