"This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored." In Miserable Miracle, the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. At once lacerating and weirdly funny, challenging and Chaplinesque, his book is a breathtaking vision of interior space and a piece of stunning writing wrested from the grip of the unspeakable. Includes forty pages of black-and-white drawings.

A wild journey to the East narrated by a writer who is “without equal in the literature of our time” (Jorge Luis Borges) Henri Michaux (1899–1984), the great French poet and painter, set out as a young man to see the Far East. Traveling from India to the Himalayas, and on to China and Japan, Michaux voices his vivid impressions, cutting opinions, and curious insights: he has no trouble speaking his mind. Part fanciful travelogue and part exploration of culture, A Barbarian in Asia is presented here in its original translation by Sylvia Beach, the famous American-born bookseller in Paris.

Three never-before-translated books from Henri Michaux from the period of his mescaline experimentation, with drawings by the author and Matta.

Critics have compared the work of French writer Henri Michaux (1899-1984) to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. This anthology contains substantial selections from almost all of Michaux's major works, most never before published in English, and allows readers to explore the haunting verbal and pictorial landscape of a 20th-century visionary. 30 photos.

Previously available only as a limited editon, Henri Michaux's Ideograms in China is now available as a New Directions paperback. Peerlessly translated by the American poet Gustaf Sobin, this long, beautifully illustrated and annotated prose poem was originally written as an introduction to Leon Chang's La calligraphie chinoise (1971), a work that now stands as an important complement to Pound and Ernest Fenollosa's classic study, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux a genius, and Jorge Luis Borges said that his work is without equal in the literature of our time. Henri Michaux (1899-1984) wrote Ideograms in China as an introduction to Leon Chang’s La calligraphie chinoise (1971), a work that now stands as an important complement to Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s classic study, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Previously available only as a limited edition, Ideograms in China is a long, gorgeously illustrated and annotated prose poem containing a very deep consideration of the world’s oldest living language. Poet Gustaf Sobin’s luminous English version beautifully captures the astounding and strange French original. For Michaux, the Chinese culture ranked as the world’s richest, a culture grounded in its written language, which bound China together through three millennia and across its enormous territories. Ideograms in China presents an oblique history of that culture through the changing variety and beauty of the ideograms: Michaux looks into a dozen scripts––from ancient bronze vessels bearing ku-wen script to running script to standard k’ai-shu characters––and the poem carries the rhythms of someone discovering the soul of a civilization in its impression of ink on paper.

Henri Michaux is both a recognised poet and visual artist, arguably one of the greatest 'double artists' of the twentieth century. This book presents the first detailed examination of a particular interdisciplinary aspect of his production, namely, the innovative experimentation with signs contained in four works: Mouvements, Par la voie des rythmes, Saisir and Par des traits. Questions arise concerning their literary and visual status as, in their attempt to render interior rhythm and dynamism, they occupy an interstitial space between writing and drawing, between the book and the canvas, between the Western alphabet and Chinese characters. This study addresses these questions by analysing the conception, production and reception of Michaux's signs and the literary and artistic contexts in which they were produced.