This book contains three vital texts from the German faction of the Dadaist movement as it developed in Zurich during World War I. Here’s Tenderenda the Fantast, the first Dada novel written by Hugo Ball; Richard Huelsenbeck’s Fantastic Prayers, the first collection of Dada poetry; and the little-known Last Loosening, a manifesto written by Walter Serner which provoked numerous brawls at the Cabaret Voltaire and was the source for many of Tzara’s literary provocations (which may be the reason it was suppressed at the time). An interesting layout keeps true to the Dada spirit. MDH

Publisher: Atlas
Paperback: 176 pages
Illustrated

“Published in Berlin in 1920, The Dada Almanac, the only anthology edited by the Dadaists themselves at the time, is still the most immediate and comprehensive document of the Dada movement. It was published to coincide with the end of the First International Dada Fair, an event that galvanized the Berlin Dadaists and underlined their internationalism. And like the fair, which was simultaneously the Berlin group’s high point and last joint venture, it is also the last Dada publication from the Berlin group—or at least from the ‘Central Committee of the German Dada Movement.’… The Almanac is a broad forum for the expected primitivism, provocation, politics, iconoclasm, bluff and humor, but perhaps more unexpectedly it also contains a number of lengthy articles and manifestoes concerned with art and literary theory, which (even if they are often perched on the knife edge between humor and seriousness) give a deep insight into the many divergent preoccupations and contradictions on which the ‘movement’ thrived and ultimately foundered.” Contributors include Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Hugo Ball, Philippe Soupault, Hans Arp, and others.

Publisher: Atlas
Paperback: 176 pages
Illustrated

This automatic writing, originally published in 1919, has been recognized as the first work of literary Surrealism. “Can you have forgotten that the police force is neutral and that it has never been able to arrest the sun? No thanks, I know what time it is. Have you been shut up in this cage for long? What I need is the address of your tailor.”

Publisher: Atlas
Paperback: 192 pages

“In 1970, Unica Zürn, the companion and lover of the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, threw herself from the sixth-floor window of their apartment in Paris. Her suicide was the culmination of 13 years of mental crises which are described with disarming lucidity in The Man of Jasmine, subtitled Impressions From a Mental Illness. Zürn’s mental collapse was initiated when she encountered in the real world her childhood fantasy figure, ‘the man of jasmine’: he was the writer Henri Michaux, and her meeting him plunged her into a world of hallucination in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. Her return to ‘reality’ was constantly interrupted by alternate visionary and depressive periods. Zürn’s compelling narrative also reveals her uneasy relationship with words and language, which she attempted to resolve by the compulsive writing of anagrams. Anagrams allowed her to dissect the language of the everyday, to personalize it and to make it reveal hidden at its core astonishing messages, threats and evocations. They formed the basis of her interpretation of the split between her inner and outer lives and underpin the texts included in this selection… Zürn’s familiarity with Surrealist conceptions of the psyche and her extraordinary self-possession during the most alarming experiences are allied with her vivid descriptive powers to make this a literary as well as a psychological masterpiece.”

Publisher: Atlas
Paperback: 205 pages
Illustrated

“Assembles three sets of texts written by a number of writers associated with Georges Bataille, some of whom were members of his Acéphale group, others being members, or ex-members, of the Surrealist groups in Paris and New York. Apart from the presence of Bataille and his concerns, what unites these texts is their form, which derives from that of dictionaries or encyclopedias… The Critical Dictionary appeared in the magazine Documents, edited by Bataille. The second series of texts, the Da Costa Encyclopedia was published anonymously by members of the Acéphale group and writers associated with the Surrealists after the liberation of Paris in 1947. Both cover the essential concepts of Bataille and his associates: sacred sociology; scatology, death and the erotic; base materialism; the aesthetics of the formless; sacrifice, the festival and the politics of tumult, etc.: a new description of the limits of being human. Humor, albeit sardonic, is not absent from these remarkable redefinitions of the most heterogeneous objects or ideas: ‘Camel,’ ‘Church,’ ‘Dust,’ ‘Museum,’ ‘Spittle,’ ‘Skyscraper,’ ‘Threshold,’ ‘Work’—to name but a few.”

Publisher: Atlas
Paperback: 173 pages
Illustrated