Maldoror and Poems » (Reprint)

One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, Lautreamont's fantasy unveils a world -- half-vision, half-nightmare -- of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and pederasts, lunatics and strange children. The writing is drenched with an unrestrained savagery and menace, and the startling imagery - delirious, erotic, blasphemous and grandiose by turns -- possesses a remarkable hallucinatory quality.

The writer's mysterious life and death, no less than the book itself, captured the imagination os surrealists. Jarry, Modigliani, Verlaine and others hailed it as a work of genius. Andre Gide wrote, 'Here is something that excites me to the point of delirium,' and Andre Breton described the book as 'the expression of a total revelation which seems to surpass human capacities'.

This volume also contains a translation of the epigrammatic Poesies.