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.

Before psychogeography, the Situationists and dream urbanism, there was Paris Peasant, a pioneering Surrealist excavation of the twentieth century's capital city

Paris Peasant (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism, yet Exact Change's edition is the first US publication of Simon Watson Taylor's authoritative translation, completed after consultations with the author. Unconventional in form--Aragon consciously avoided recognizable narration or character development--Paris Peasant is, in the author's words, a mythology of the modern. The book uses the city of Paris as a stage or framework, and Aragon interweaves his text with images of related ephemera: caf menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments and newspaper clippings. A detailed description of a Parisian arcade (nineteenth-century precursor to the mini-mall) and another of the Buttes-Chaumont park, are among the great set pieces within Aragon's swirling prose of philosophy, dream and satire. Andr Breton wrote of this work: no one could have been a more astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by such intoxicating reveries about a sort of secret life of the city....

Pessoa's trenchant complement to The Book of Disquiet

I transferred to Teive my speculations on certainty, which lunatics have in greater abundance than anyone. Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was a multitude of writers: his works were composed by heteronyms, alter egos with distinct biographies, ideologies, influences, even horoscopes. The Education of the Stoic is the only work left by the Baron of Teive, who, having destroyed all his previous attempts at literary creation, and about to destroy himself, explains the impossibility of producing superior art. The baron's manuscript is found in a hotel-room drawer--not unlike editor and translator Richard Zenith's own discovery, while conducting research in the Pessoa archives, of a small black notebook whose contents had never been transcribed. In it he found the missing pieces of this short but trenchant complement to Pessoa's major prose work, The Book of Disquiet. Pessoa himself noted that despite their dialectical differences, the middle-class author of The Book of Disquiet (assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares) and the aristocrat Teive, are two instances of the very same phenomenon--an inability to adapt to real life.

There are in Pessoa echoes of Beckett's exquisite boredom; the dark imaginings of Baudelaire (whom he loved); Melville's evasive confidence man; the dreamscapes of Borges -Voice Literary Supplement

The humorist who never smiles and makes our blood run cold, the inventor of other poets and self-destroyer, the author of paradoxes clear as water, and like water, dizzying, the mysterious one who doesn't cultivate mystery, mysterious as the moon at noon, the taciturn ghost of the Portuguese midday--who is Pessoa? -Octavio Paz

Frequently quoted but never before translated in its entirety, The Book is a visual poem about its own construction

The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) was modernism's great champion of the book as both a conceptual and material entity: perhaps his most famous pronouncement is everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book. A colossal influence on literature from Huysmans to Ashbery, art from Manet to Broodthaers, music from Debussy to Boulez and philosophy from Blanchot to Rancière, Mallarmé spent more than 30 years on a project he called Le Livre. This legendary, unfinished project is now translated into English for the first time.

The Book was Mallarmé's total artwork, a book to encompass all books. His collected drafts and notes toward it, published only posthumously in French in 1957, are alternately mystical, lyrical and gloriously banal; for example, many concern the dimensions, page count and cost of printing this ideal book. Resembling sheet music, the lines are laid out like a musical score, with abundant expanses of blank space between them. Frequently quoted, sometimes excerpted, but never before translated in its entirety, The Book is a visual poem about its own construction, the scaffolding of a cosmic architecture intended to reveal all existing relations between everything.

The founding text of pataphysics (the science of imaginary solutions), and one of the most quietly influential novels of the 20th century

Alfred Jarry is best known as the author of the proto-Dada play Ubu Roi, but this anarchic novel of absurdist philosophy is widely regarded as the central work to his oeuvre. Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll recounts the adventures of the inventor of Pataphysics ... the science of imaginary solutions.

Morton Feldman wrote as he composed music, carefully placing one element after another, producing some of the avant-garde's most lucid considerations of what it means to make music

Morton Feldman (1926-87) is among the most influential American composers of the 20th century, a man whose music is known for its extreme quiet and delicate beauty (while Feldman himself was famously large and loud). Karlheinz Stockhausen once asked the composer what his secret was: I don't push the sounds around, Feldman replied. His writings resemble his music in their quiet steadiness, their oscillations between assertion and doubt. They are also funny and illuminating, not only about his own music but about the entire New York School of painters, poets and composers that coalesced in the 1950s, including Feldman's friends Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank O'Hara and John Cage. Give My Regards to Eighth Street is an authoritative collection of Feldman's writings, culled from published articles, program notes, LP liners, lectures, interviews and unpublished writings. It is one of those rare books from which anyone can draw inspiration, no matter what the vocation or discipline.

Equal parts dark, destructive and brilliant, Maldoror blazed the way for the 20th century's boldest adventures in art, music and literature

André Breton described Maldoror as the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential. Little is known about its pseudonymous author, aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846) and early death in Paris (1870). Lautréamont bewildered his contemporaries, but the Surrealists modeled their efforts after his black humor and poetic leaps of logic, exemplified by the oft-quoted line, As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. Maldoror 's shocked first publisher refused to bind the sheets of the original edition--and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book, which warns the reader, Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger. This is the only complete annotated collection of Lautréamont's writings available in English, in Alexis Lykiard's superior translation. For this latest edition, Lykiard updates his introduction to include recent scholarship.

A harrowing document of a descent into madness, by France's defining poet of bohemian romanticism

Aurelia is French poet and novelist G rard de Nerval's account of his descent into madness--a condition provoked in part by his unrequited passion for an actress named Jenny Colon. One of the original self-styled bohemians, Nerval was best known in his own day for parading a lobster on a pale blue ribbon through the gardens of the Palais-Royal, and was posthumously notorious for his suicide in 1855, hanging from an apron string he called the garter of the Queen of Sheba. This hallucinatory document of dreams, obsession and insanity has fascinated artists such as Joseph Cornell, who cited passages from it to explain his own work; Antonin Artaud, who saw his own madness mirrored by Nerval's; and Andr Breton, who placed Nerval in the highest echelon of Surrealist heroes. Geoffrey Wagner's translation of Aur lia was first published by Grove Press in 1959, but has remained out of print for nearly 20 years. Also included in this volume are previously untranslated stories by Marc Lowenthal, and poet Robert Duncan's version of the sonnet cycle Chimeras, making this the most complete collection of Nerval's influential oeuvre ever published in English.

This dark, autobiographical coming-of-age novel reads more like an exorcism than a memoir

In Dark Spring, author Unica Zürn traces the roots of her obsessions: The exotic father she idealized, the impure mother she detested, the masochistic fantasies and onanistic rituals which she said described the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood. Dark Spring is the story of a young girl's simultaneous introduction to sexuality and mental illness, revealing a different aspect of the mad love so romanticized by the (predominantly male) Surrealists.

Unica Zürn (1916-70) emigrated in 1953 from her native Berlin to Paris in order to live with the artist Hans Bellmer. There she exhibited drawings as a member of the Surrealist group and collaborated with Bellmer on a series of notorious photographs of her nude torso bound with string. In 1957, a fateful encounter with the poet and painter Henri Michaux led to the first of what would become a series of mental crises, some of which she documented in her writings. She committed suicide in 1970--an act foretold in this, her last completed work.

Pessoa's most famous work depicts a vast interior landscape laced with daily minutiae and aphoristic brilliance

The eternal mystique of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) stems largely from his practice of writing under heteronyms. More than just nom de plumes, Pessoa's heteronyms came with distinct biographies, careers, life spans, even horoscopes. In The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa came as close as he ever would to autobiography. Left on disordered scraps of paper in a trunk, the fragments that make up The Book of Disquiet record in disjunct entries a vast interior landscape and daily minutiae, making for a discontinuous, gently unhinged monologue in daybook form.

A fascinating oral history of one of American indie rock's most enduring and influential acts

Slow, deliberate and deceptively simple, the music of Boston-based band Galaxie 500 was wonderfully at odds with the prevailing underground sounds of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Formed in 1987, the band split up in 1991 after releasing three acclaimed albums--Today, On Fire and This Is Our Music--as well as a Peel Sessions recording.
The primary contributors to this long-unavailable history of the band are the three band members--bassist/vocalist Naomi Yang, drummer Damon Krukowski and guitarist/vocalist Dean Wareham--but dozens of people were interviewed in all, including fellow musicians, record business folks, music critics and scenesters.
Galaxie 500: Temperature's Rising provides a complex, sometimes contentious account of the band's rise to indie stardom and their acrimonious breakup. It also includes dozens of rare and never-before-seen photographs, as well as posters and other ephemera from the personal collection of Naomi Yang, who provides a running commentary to the images. This is the definitive book about Galaxie 500 and a crucial chapter in the story of indie rock.

A tender and fierce account of boyhood and nascent homosexual desire

First published in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure is a beautiful and unassuming coming-of-age novel by the English writer and painter Denton Welch (1915-48). Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is 15 years old, and this novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at private school--but as in all of Welch's work, what is most important are the details of his characters' surroundings. Welch is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation who, as William S. Burroughs wrote, makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes. Film director John Waters includes this novel as one of his Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life If Something Is Basically the Matter with You, and writes: Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger. Also included in this edition is the first US publication of I Left My Grandfather's House. This first-person account of an idyllic walking tour in the British countryside undertaken when Welch was 18 makes a fascinating companion piece to the fictionalized, though no less autobiographical, In Youth Is Pleasure.

John Cage's poetical statement on indeterminacy, Duchamp, art, life and more

Written in his characteristic mesostics (lines of prose poetry linked by a central vertical acrostic), Composition in Retrospect is a statement of methodology in which composer John Cage examines the central issues of his work: indeterminacy, imitation, variable structure and contingency. Finished only shortly before his death in 1992, Composition in Retrospect completes the documentation of Cage's thought that began with his classic book Silence (1961), but it is an introduction and invitation to his work as much as a summary or conclusion. Also included in this volume (at Cage's request) is Themes and Variations, a piece written in 1982 about friends and heroes such as Jasper Johns, Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Duchamp and Erik Satie. Together these pieces form a book that is both a testament to the artists Cage admired and a clear statement of his own ars poetica.

The legendary French filmmaker's labyrinthine memoir, first published by Exact Change in 2002 as a CD-ROM, now reconfigured into book form after a laborious process initiated by the artist before his death in 2012

Filmmaker, photographer and writer Chris Marker never adhered to the conventions of a particular art form. Each of his films, from La Jetée to Sans Soleil, pushes the boundaries of its medium, merging at times with the essay, political manifesto, personal letter, art installation and even, finally, a computer game.
For Immemory, first published in 1998 (French) and 2002 (English), Marker used a CD-ROM to create a multi-layered, mixed-media memoir. The reader investigates zones of travel, war, cinema and poetry, navigating through image and text as if physically exploring Marker's memory itself. The result is a veritable 21st-century Remembrance of Things Past, an exploration of the state of memory in our era. With it, Marker both invented a literary form and perfected it, just before the digital format he chose for the experiment was quickly rendered obsolete.
Immemory: Gutenberg Version reinvents this unique work for the printed page, a project the author dreamed up, titled, and began working on with Exact Change before his death. Now finally realized, it brings this seminal work into the present and future through a time-tested, durable format of the past: the book.
Chris Marker (1921-2012) served in the French Resistance, and then the US Air Force, during World War II and worked as a journalist while honing his film career. He received international acclaim with La Jetée in 1962, and became a critical voice in film theory and production as well as a widely admired cult artist, a filmmaker's filmmaker.

Including the fabled text To Have Done with the Judgment of God, this collection compiles the scatalogical writings of Artaud's final years

Clayton Eshleman's translations are the finest and most authentic which have yet been made from Artaud's writing. Artaud's final work is his strongest and most enduring, and this collection has been wisely selected and magnificently realized. Artaud is being taken into the 21st century. -Stephen Barber

Among Antonin Artaud's most brilliant works are the scatological glossolalia composed in the final three years of his life (1945-48), during and after his incarceration in an asylum at Rodez. These represent some of the most powerful outpourings ever recorded, a torrent of speech from the other side of sanity and the occult. In this collection, the most complete representation of this period of Artaud's work ever presented in English, and the first new anthology of Artaud published in the US since Helen Weaver's 1976 Selected Writings, cogent statements of theory are paired with the raving poetry of such pieces as Artaud the Momo, Here Lies and To Have Done with the Judgment of God. These are translated with drama and accuracy by Clayton Eshleman, whose renditions of Vallejo and Césaire have won widespread acclaim, including a National Book Award.

One of the most revered and acclaimed products of Surrealism, de Chirico's sole novel provides a uniquely literary analogue to his painterly scenarios

The artist Giorgio de Chirico's novel, Hebdomeros is a dream-like book of situations and landscapes reminiscent of his paintings. In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book the finest work of Surrealist fiction, noting that de Chirico invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel ... his long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom of narration ... his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality. Hebdomeros is accompanied by an appendix of previously untranslated or uncollected writings, including M. Dudron's Adventure, a second, fragmentary novel translated by John Ashbery.

A selection of dream epiphanies and reveries from Joseph Cornell's voluminous diaries

Joseph Cornell is well known for the oneiric quality of his art and films. Many have tried, often in vain, to put into words the strange power of his boxes--toy-like constructions whose playfulness and humor are anchored in a profound melancholy and loneliness. Slot machines of visions, said Octavio Paz. Cornell himself is said to have enjoyed children's responses to his work; perhaps because nothing prepares one better for viewing a Cornell box than having an unbiased mind. Catherine Corman has combed through the voluminous diaries that Cornell kept throughout his life, now in the care of the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, in search of the artist's own dreams. What she found are brief flashes of images, and short, enigmatic narratives of illumination--the verbal equivalent of Cornell boxes. In 1993, Mary Ann Caws edited a large portion of Cornell's diaries for publication by Thames & Hudson, an invaluable sourcebook for Cornell studies. This new, shorter volume is a poetic addition to that literature, equally indispensible to those interested in Cornell as it contains previously unpublished writings, but also because it is as intriguing and mysterious to the uninitiated as the magical boxes themselves.

Dalí's meditations on art and the paranoid-critical method, plus poems and more

Salvador Dalí's writings from the period in which he was most closely allied with the Surrealists have never before been translated into English. These short fictions, essays and poems contain all the egotistic brio one might expect from Dalí, but they also reveal an earnest and even sentimental artist. They document Dalí's friendships with fellow Spaniards Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca, his entry into the world of the Parisian Surrealists, his passion for the emerging arts of photography and cinema, and the development of his Paranoid-Critical Method, the theoretical basis for Dalí's work throughout his life. In 1934, Dalí and André Breton would break forever--The only difference between me and a Surrealist is that I am a Surrealist, he later said--but in the period 1927-33, such distinctions were unnecessary.