Last Nights Of Paris by Phillip Soupault

Last Nights Of Paris by Phillip Soupault

Written in 1928 by one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, and translated the following year by William Carlos Williams (the two had been introduced in Paris by a mutual friend), Last Nights of Paris is related to Surrealist novels such as Nadja and Paris Peasant, but also to the American expatriate novels of its day such as Day of the Locust. The story concerns the narrator's obsession with a woman who leads him into an underworld that promises to reveal the secrets of the city itself ... and in Williams' wonderfully direct translation it reads like a lost Great American Novel. A vivid portrait of the city that entranced both its native writers and the Americans who traveled to it in the 20s, Last Nights of Paris is a rare collaboration between the literary circles at the root of both French and American Modernism.

A key poet of Parisian modernism, Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) served in the French army during WWI and subsequently joined the antirationalist Dada movement under the leadership of Tristan Tzara. With friends Andrü¾Ž–”¼ Breton and Louis Aragon, Soupault co-founded the Dada journal Littü¾Ž–”¼rature. In 1919, Soupault collaborated with Breton on the automatic text Les Champs magnü¾Ž–”¼tiques, widely considered the foundation of the surrealist movement. He would remain with the movement until 1929, resigning over its increasing politicization. In the years that followed, he wrote novels and journalism, and directed Radio Tunis in Tunisia, where he was imprisoned by the Vichy government during WWII. After the war, he resumed his journalistic activities and also worked for UNESCO. In 1972 he was awarded the Grand Prix de Poü¾Ž–”¼sie by the French Academy and he lived long enough the assist with the first complete translation of Breton and his Magnetic Fields in 1985.

Poet Alan Bernheimer's most recent collection is The Spoonlight Institute, published by Adventures in Poetry in 2009. He has lived in the Bay Area since the late 1970s, where he was active in Poets Theater and produced a radio program, In the American Tree, of new writing by poets. He has translated works by Robert Desnos and Valery Larbaud.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781878972057
ISBN 10	1878972057
Title	Last Nights Of Paris
Author	Phillip Soupault
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Exact Change,U.S.
Year published	2008-02-28
Number of pages	182
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.