Biblioklept on Patience (After Sebald)
Stealing from Conversational Reading
If you’re looking to send an ambiguous message to your loved one tomorrow, this book might just do it. From the University of Chicago press blog:
Editor and translator Mary Ann Caws brings together sixty poems—many of them translated into English for the first time—by Surrealists who charged their work through with all forms of eroticism. Within these pages you will read the magnificent love poems of Desnos, which rank among the greatest in twentieth-century poetry, and hear the voices of lesser known "poets" such as Salvador Dalí and Frida Kahlo. Poems by familiar Surrealists such as Breton, the movement’s leader, and Paul Eluard join work by Octavio Paz and Philippe Soupault. Interspersed with the poetry are photographs by Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Claude Cahun. Surrealist Love Poems seeks to demonstrate the truth of Breton’s words, that "the embrace of poetry like that of bodies/As long as it lasts/Shuts out all the woes of the world."
The University of Chicago Press has also made available three poems from the book, including the no-nonsense entry "I want to sleep with you."
More from Conversational Reading:
- Conjugal Love For reasons that remain unknown to me, most the works of Italian neo-realist Alberto Moravia seem to have fallen out of print in English....
- The Love and Lechery of the Polyglot The Guardian on My Unwritten Books: The next chapter is riskier still. "What is the sexual life of a deaf-mute?" it begins. "To what incitements...
- Layoffs Hit University Presses In other news from beyond the sphere of Random House et al., Publisher’s Lunch tells me that some university presses are now experiencing layoffs. Cambridge...
- Jack Spicer Feature Amidst the recent (and ongoing) controversy surrounding the publication of Nabokov’s last, unfinished manuscript, The Original of Laura, Boston Review brings us this interesting piece...
- King Cophetua Review We’ve published a review of King Cophetua by Julien Gracq at The Quarterly Conversation. The review is by Jordan Anderson. Although Gracq isn’t too...
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I just bought “Disavowals” book in the Fort Mason, at the Friends of the Library bookstore, for $2, since it was an advanced page proof. I was looking at it at least 10 times before during the past 10 visits to that bookstore, and nobody, during the last 2-3 months bought it. Claude Cahun is still only for the very few readers whose taste is refined by the “Conversational Reading.” Not to mention that now I’m reading “Sayonara: Gangsters,” preparing for my short trip to Japan, and I love it, I love it, I love it. Thanks, “Conversational Reading”!