Five short stories by a French essayist (1884-1968).

Defying Gravity is a major reassessment of the work of Jean Paulhan within the context of his own times, as well as in the light of contemporary debates in literary theory. Best known for his long-serving editorship of the influential Parisian literary review, La Nouvelle Revue Française, Paulhan is now widely acknowledged as one of the most central yet least understood figures of twentieth-century French intellectual and literary history. Syrotinski's study admirably performs the dual purpose of introducing a genuinely innovative and distinctive writer to a general anglophone readership, while engaging critically with his texts and their reception. Syrotinski's readings of Paulhan are both original and provocative, and firmly establish him as an unavoidable point of reference for twentieth-century French literary history and theory.

Modernity has long been equated with motion, travel, and change, from Marx?s critical diagnoses of economic instability to the Futurists? glorification of speed. Likewise, metaphors of travel serve widely in discussions of empire, cultural contact, translation, and globalization, from Deleuze?s ?nomadology? to James Clifford?s ?traveling cultures.? John Culbert, in contrast, argues that the key texts of modernity and postmodernity may be approached through figures and narratives of paralysis: motionøis no more defining of modern travel than fixations, resistance, and impasse; concepts and figures of travel, he posits, must be rethought in this more static light. ø Focusing on the French and Francophone context, in which paralyzed travel is a persistent motif, Culbert also offers new insights into French critical theory and its often paradoxical figures of mobility, from Blanchot?s pas au-delÄ and Barthes?s därive to Derrida?s aporias and Glissant?s diversions. Here we see that paralysis is not merely the failure of transport but rather the condition in which travel, by coming to a crisis, calls into question both mobility and stasis in the language of desire and the order of knowledge. Paralyses provides a close analysis of the rhetoric of empire and the economy of tourism precisely at their points of breakdown, which in turn enables a deconstruction of master narratives of exploration, conquest, and exoticism. A reassessment of key authors of French modernity?from Nerval and Gautier to Fromentin, Paulhan, Beckett, Leiris, and Boudjedra?Paralyses also constitutes a new theoretical intervention in debates on travel, translation, ethics, and postcoloniality.

What Freud did for dreams, André Breton (1896–1966) does for despair: in its distortions he finds the marvelous, and through the marvelous the redemptive force of imagination. Originally published in 1932 in France, Les Vases communicants is an effort to show how the discoveries and techniques of surrealism could lead to recovery from despondency. This English translation makes available "the theories upon which the whole edifice of surrealism, as Breton conceived it, is based." In Communicating Vessels Breton lays out the problems of everyday experience and of intellect. His involvement with political thought and action led him to write about the relations between nations and individuals in a mode that moves from the quotidian to the lyrical. His dreams triggered a curious correspondence with Freud, available only in this book. As Caws writes, "The whole history of surrealism is here, in these pages."

This volume includes topics on Jean Paulhan as editor and critic, rhetoric and what really happens, rhetoric and politics, and the power of literature, plus two texts by Jean Paulhan.

This is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Italy's most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide fame with such books as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. But he was also an influential literary critic, an important literary editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luciano Berio. This book includes a generous selection of about 650 letters, written between World War II and the end of Calvino’s life. Selected and introduced by Michael Wood, the letters are expertly rendered into English and annotated by well-known Calvino translator Martin McLaughlin. The letters are filled with insights about Calvino’s writing and that of others; about Italian, American, English, and French literature; about literary criticism and literature in general; and about culture and politics. The book also provides a kind of autobiography, documenting Calvino’s Communism and his resignation from the party in 1957, his eye-opening trip to the United States in 1959-60, his move to Paris (where he lived from 1967 to 1980), and his trip to his birthplace in Cuba (where he met Che Guevara). Some lengthy letters amount almost to critical essays, while one is an appropriately brief defense of brevity, and there is an even shorter, reassuring note to his parents written on a scrap of paper while he and his brother were in hiding during the antifascist Resistance. This is a book that will fascinate and delight Calvino fans and anyone else interested in a remarkable portrait of a great writer at work.

Thomas enters a boarding house, but can't seem to leave.