Michel Leiris

The fourth and final volume of Michel Leiris's renowned autobiography, now available in English for the first time, translated by Richard Sieburth. "Reading Frail Riffs, appearing in English nearly fifty years after its initial French publication, I realize how much our attraction to autobiography owes to Leiris...a quiet virtuoso of French prose." — Alice Kaplan, New York Review of Books...

A dazzling translation by Lydia Davis of the first volume of Michel Leiris’s masterwork, perhaps the most important French autobiographical enterprise of the twentieth century. Michel Leiris, a French intellectual whose literary works inspired high praise from the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Claude Lévi-Strauss, began the first volume of his autobiographical project at the age of 40. It...

Including a number of short essays by Bataille and Leiris on aspects of the other's work as well as excerpts on Bataille from Leiris' diaries, this collection of correspondence throws new light on two of Surrealism's most radical dissidents. In the autumn of 1924, just before André Breton published the Manifeste du surréalisme, two young men met in Paris for...