Novels & Poetry

Exquisite Dreams is the first full account of the art and life of Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012). Rather than only focusing on her well-known surrealist paintings, this book gives equal weight to Tanning’s lesser-known but equally powerful sculptures,...

An updated, expanded edition of Remedios Varo’s translated writings, including pieces never before published in any language. With the 2018 publication of Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings, Wakefield Press introduced the writings of Surrealist painter...

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...

First discovered, celebrated and published by the Surrealists at the age of 14 (they declared her the “new Alice”), Gisèle Prassinos quickly found herself established in the literary world as a fount of automatic tales freighted with transgressive humor...

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...

This seminal 1929 surrealist novel by the painter Giorgio de Chirico merges the realms of dream and reality. In the artist’s only novel, de Chirico invites the reader into a world where language, time, space, and meaning are fluid, highlighting...

An exciting collection of the essential writings of surrealism, the European avant-garde movement of the mind’s deepest powers Originating in 1916 with the avant-garde Dada movement at the famous Café Voltaire in Zurich, surrealism aimed to unleash the...

A lively history of the Surrealists, both known and unknown, by one of the last surviving members of the movement—artist and bestselling author Desmond Morris. Surrealism did not begin as an art movement but as a philosophical strategy, a way of life,...

Why does Surrealism continue to fascinate us a century after André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism? How do we encounter Surrealism today? Mark Polizzotti vibrantly reframes the Surrealist movement in contemporary terms and offers insight into why it...

Art museums have played a vital role in our culture, drawing on Enlightenment ideals in shaping ideas, advancing learning, fostering community, and providing spaces of beauty and permanence. In this thoughtful and often personal volume, Daniel H. Weiss...

 A nonfiction graphic novel that tells the story of a century of revolutionary contemporary art. How did a urinal become art? And a can of tomato soup, a tent, a pickled shark. . . . How did what seemed like a prank at the New York Armory Show of...

Jackson Pollock, the towering American artist who was to revolutionize twentieth-century art with his “dripping” painting technique, grew up between the late 1920s and the late 1940s, the youngest of five boys born in the American West. Though often...

Jean-Claude Lebensztejn’s history of the urinating figure in art, Pissing Figures 1280–2014, is at once a scholarly inquiry into an important visual motif, and a ribald statement on transgression and limits in works of art in general...

The Arena Chapel in Padua was completed in 1303; Giotto, then considered the preeminent painter in Italy, was commissioned to paint it in 1306. The resulting fresco cycle, detailing the history, birth, life, and death of Christ, ranks among the greatest...

Charles Baudelaire, considered a father of modern poetry, wrote some of the most daring and influential prose of the nineteenth century. Prior to publishing the international bestseller Les Fleurs du mal (1857), he was already notable as a forthright...

Written between 1913 and 1929, revolutionary years in art history, Dix Portraits conveys the deep human engagement between an artist and her subject. The artist book unites Stein’s ten portraits in prose with sketches by five artists: Pablo...

Derek Jarman's Blue weaves a sensory tapestry that serves as both a political call to action and a meditation on illness, dying, and love.   “For Blue there are no boundaries or solutions.” —Derek Jarman   Originally...

“Criticism is our censorship . . .” So begins one of the greatest invectives against criticism ever written by an artist. Paul Gauguin wrote “Racontars de rapin” only months before he died in 1903, but the essay remained...

Long overlooked in Proust’s posthumously published writings, Chardin and Rembrandt, written when he was only twenty-four years old, not only reemphasizes the importance of visual art to his development, but contains the seeds of his later work...

Translated into English for the first time, On Contemporary Art, a speech by the renowned novelist César Aira, was delivered at a 2010 colloquium in Madrid dedicated to bridging the gap between writing and the visual arts.   On...