A Season in Hell is the first-person account of a teenager who honestly believed he could transform reality—reinvent life—through the magic of his imagination. The spiritual victory of which he speaks can only be achieved through a potentially deadly battle with the self. Yet if one believes in something strongly enough, passionately enough, and possesses the requisite faith in possibility, it can be brought about through sheer focus of will. The book itself, the implications of its very title, are testament to this. The tale is characterized by mellifluous language, vivid imagery, adolescent sarcasm and an almost religious belief in the redemptive power of art, all rolled into one. The Drunken Boat, written earlier, is a 25 stanza poem of 100 lines with the boat itself as the speaker. An allegory of liberation and the intoxication of vision (“I have seen what men have thought they saw!”) which ends with the return to the humble confines of everyday existence. “I am the master of phantasmagoria,” Rimbaud contends in A Season in Hell and equals the claim. MDG

Publisher: New Directions
Paperback: 103 pages

“A brother and sister, orphaned in adolescence, build themselves a private world out of one shared room and their own unbridled fantasies. What started in games and laughter became for Paul and Elisabeth a drug too magical to resist. The crime which finally destroyed them has the inevitability of Greek tragedy. Includes 20 of Cocteau’s drawings.”

Publisher: New Directions
Paperback: 183 pages
Illustrated

“Five full-length plays: Orpheus, The Infernal Machine, The Knights of the Round Table, Bacchus, The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party, plus the speaker’s text from Oedipus Rex, the Stravinsky-Cocteau opera.”

Publisher: New Directions
Paperback: 409 pages
Illustrated

“Surrealism is a secret society that will introduce you to death.” Thus spake André Breton, the main focus of this easygoing and highly personal overview of the movement he is credited with founding. The author, who has written over 16 books on many topics (including a cultural history of Nazism called Siegfried’s Curse and, as Montague O’Reilly, the surrealist novels Pianos of Sympathy and Who’s Been Tampering With These Pianos?), knew most of his subjects personally, which makes for a lively read. Although he died before completing the last chapter, if that information weren’t right there on the back cover, no one would be the wiser. Besides an extremely detailed portrait of Breton, Andrews’ “little insider’s history of Surrealism” is a curious pastiche of what the afterword correctly labels “caustic yet admiring sketches” of all the major surrealists—Dali, Ernst, Eluard, Buñuel, Picabia, Roussel—”illuminating their achievements with choice examples of their eccentricities and obstinacies.” At 178 pages (including the afterword and index) it’s hardly a definitive reference source, but it’s not like there’s a shortage of that sort of thing in the literature of art history. Besides, as Voltaire once said, “To tell everything is to bore.” DB

Publisher: New Directions
Paperback: 178 pages