This pataphysical journey up a mountain whose summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings depicts an allegorical landscape akin to Alice in Wonderland

A beloved cult classic of surrealism, pataphysics and Gurdjieffian mysticism, René Daumal's Mount Analogue is the allegorical tale of an expedition to a mountain whose existence can only be deduced, not observed. As its numerous editions (most now rare) over the decades attest, the book has been highly influential: Alejandro Jodorowsky's visionary 1973 film The Holy Mountain is a loose adaptation of the book, and John Zorn based an eponymous album on it.

This edition, a gorgeous addition to the Exact Change list, brings the original 1959 English translation by Roger Shattuck--widely considered the best--back into print.

Left unfinished after Daumal's death from tuberculosis in 1944--in mid-sentence, as he broke from writing to receive a visitor--Mount Analogue offers a compelling and philosophically resonant chronicle of a group of travelers seeking the titular mountain, based on the symbolic calculations of one Father Sogol (Logos spelled backward) and his students. As Daumal writes, Mount Analogue is the symbolic mountain--the way that unites Heaven and Earth, a way which must exist in material and human form, otherwise our situation would be without hope.

Translator Roger Shattuck, author of many volumes, is perhaps best known for his important book The Banquet Years, a history of the turn-of-the-century French avant-garde.

René Daumal (1908-44) was a literary prodigy in his teens, publishing poetry that attracted the attention of André Breton and the surrealists. Forging his own path instead of joining the group, he co-created and edited the influential literary journal Le Grand Jeu (1927-32), before turning his attentions to Eastern philosophy under the influence of Gurdjieff and Alexandre de Salzmann (model for the character Father Sogol in Mount Analogue). His early death from tuberculosis in 1944 left his masterpiece, Mount Analogue, unfinished; nonetheless it became his best-loved and most famous work.

Essays reflecting on the science of imaginary solutions, from an influential figure in pataphysical thought

Pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions, of laws governing exceptions and of the laws describing the universe supplementary to this one. Alfred Jarry's posthumous novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, first appeared in 1911, and over the next 100 years, his pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. In 1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers would found the College of 'Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic René Daumal was the first to elaborate upon Jarry's unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished novel Mount Analogue and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse of often overlooked Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician. Pataphysical Essays collects Daumal's overtly pataphysical writings from 1929 to 1941, from his landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay, The Pataphysics of Ghosts. Daumal's Treatise on Patagrams offers the reader everything from a recipe for the disintegration of a photographer to instructions on how to drill a fount of knowledge in a public urinal. This volume also includes Daumal's column for the Nouvelle Revue Française, Pataphysics This Month. Reading like a deranged encyclopedia, Pataphysics This Month describes a new mythology for the field of science, and amply demonstrates that the twentieth century had been a distinctly pataphysical era.

Le commencement de tout ce que je vais raconter, ce fut une écriture inconnue sur une enveloppe. Il y avait dans ces traits de plume qui traçaient mon nom et l'adresse de la Revue des Fossiles, à laquelle je collaborais et d'où l'on m'avait fait suivre la lettre, un mélange tournant de violence et de douceur. Derrière les questions que je me formulais sur l'expéditeur et le contenu possibles du message, un vague mais puissant pressentiment m'évoquait l'image du pavé dans la mare aux grenouilles . Et du fond l'aveu montait comme une bulle que ma vie était devenue bien stagnante, ces derniers temps. Aussi, quand j'ouvris la lettre, je n'aurais su distinguer si elle me faisait l'effet d'une vivifiante bouffée d'air frais ou d'un désagréable courant d'air.