“Marinetti’s writings—manifestoes, fictions, political writings, memoirs and his own inimitable parole in liberta—speak to our time with a sort of science fiction prescience. Marinetti foresaw what it would be like to live in an electrical, and, by extension, a digital universe, what role advertising would play, what values would henceforth be assigned to the medium as message. As such his predictions are sometimes childish and frequently irritating: Marinetti was, in many ways, a hard-headed materialist who knew that there was no return, in our century, to the bucolic world of the Fathers. He also knew that art could no longer insulate itself from the experience of the masses, that kitsch was not so much the antithesis of art as it was a condition of its production… His manifestoes, a major selection of which is included here, whether on poetry or painting, city planning (‘Down with Past-Loving Venice’) cinema, music, dance or social life, are superb artworks in their own right, combining, as they do, a hyperbolic rhetoric and violent imagery with witty, common-sense aphorism and comic self-deprecation.” Includes “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” “The New Religion-Morality of Speed,” “Electrical War (A Futurist-Vision Hypothesis)” and “The Pleasure of Being Booed.”

Publisher: Sun and Moon
Paperback: 285 pages

This is a novel beyond categorization. It’s symbolic poetry, science fiction, fable, or perhaps a philosophical social vision. Written in a free-form style, The Untameables relates the adventures of Mirmofim and the Untameables, who are engaged in loony combat in the world of the paper people. It makes for hilarious reading while exploring the modern world of bayonets, electronic lights, sign boards, gear shifts, and spotlights inscribing acetylene words. SC

Publisher: Sun and Moon
Paperback: 228 pages

A collection of poems from the controversial director and engineer of the Surrealist movement dating from 1919 to 1936, spanning Breton’s involvement with Dadaism, Cubism and his founding and development of Surrealism. Written to such friends and fellow Surrealists as Picasso, André Derain, Robert Desnos, Picabia, Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob, Earthlight displays Breton’s range of poetic forms, from the early collage compositions (“Five Dreams”) to the incantatory, feverish love poem “Free Union.” At times pretentious, contorted, tangled and strained; at other times gorgeous, wild and unexpected. In the best of these poems the reader gets to watch Breton follow his own mind: a compelling and finely tuned instrument of metaphor capable of fluidity and simplicity. MDG

Publisher: Sun and Moon
Paperback: 213 pages