Novels

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,...

Back in print after over a decade: the playful and genre-shattering memoir of a beloved surrealist known for her gender-bending portraiture First published in 1930 by anti-fascist, avant-garde publisher Éditions du Carrefour in Paris as Aveux non Avenus,...

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...

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,...

An absorbing group biography revealing how exiles from war-torn France brought surrealism to America, sparking the movement that became abstract expressionism. In 1957 the American artist Robert Motherwell made an unexpected claim: "I have only known...

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...