Carefully packed and quickly sent. 201512256 These 51 essays and short pieces by French surrealist poet/art critic Leiris include incandescent tributes to such writers as Tristan Tzara, Max Jacob, Hans Arp, Paul Eluard, Pierre Reverdy, Andre Masson and Aime Cesaire. Leiris, who has a Gallic fondness for complex sentences and ratiocination, intelligently fathoms Eric Satie's music, Alberto Giacometti's lean statues and Pablo Picasso's drawings of centaurs and fauns. A wonderful one-page essay, "Metaphor," prepares the reader for his analysis of filmic "talkies" and his ruthless decoding of dancer Fred Astaire ("slightly macabre clown") as a symbol of our time. Anthropological excursions touch on the symbolic significance of human saliva and Haitian voodooists' use of Catholic holy images. This miscellany includes reviews of plays by Jean-Paul Sartre and Federico Garcia Lorca, along with appreciations of Joan Miro, Arnold Schonberg, Raymond Queneau, Michel Butor. As poet, art critic, anthropologist, and essayist, Leiris has had a considerable presence in the expression of French culture and its interpretation. These 51 essays, written throughout his long career (he was born in 1901), reflect the density and richness of his thought on a variety of artists, well known and lesser known, from different fields and on a wide range of subjects (e.g, Fred Astaire, Claude Levi-Strauss, Picasso, Bataille, Miro, opera, civilization, ethnography, and the Fox Movietime Follies). We recommend selecting Priority Mail wherever available. (No shipping to Mexico, Brazil or Italy.)

Hide more