Aragon, Louis

(1897-1982) French writer. Louis Aragon was a poet, novelist, and essayist, a political activist and spokesman for communism. He was a co-founder of Surrealism.

Works by Louis Aragon

Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon, Simon W. Taylor (Translator)

Paris Peasant (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism, a work that helps define the movement itself; yet this is the first U.S. publication of Simon Watson Taylor's authoritative translation, completed after consultations with the author. Unconventional in form - Aragon self-consciously avoided any recognizable narration or character development - but fiercely lyrical, Paris Peasant is, in the author's words, "a mythology of the modern." The book uses the city of Paris as a framework, and Aragon interlaces his text with the city's ephemera: café menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments, newspaper clippings, as well as the lives of its citizens. A detailed description of a Parisian passage, nineteenth-century precursor to the mini-mall, and another of the Buttes-Chaumont park, are the great set pieces within Aragon's swirling prose of philosophy, dream, and satire.

The Adventures of Telemachus by Louis Aragon, Renee Riese Hubert (Translator), Judd D. Hubert (Translator), Renee Hubert Riese

From Publishers Weekly
Poet and novelist Aragon (1897-1982) helped launch the dada and surrealist movements. In Telemachus, written in 1922 and newly translated for this first English edition, he does an irreverent spoof of the 17th century moralist Fenelon, who rewrote Homeric epic as a guide for princes and schoolboys. Along with MentorMinerva in dragTelemachus quests for his father Ulysses, who is dawdling amorously on the way back from Troy. But where Fenelon warns against women, Aragon indulges Telemachus in the erotic delights offered by petulant nymphs Calypso and Eucharis. Minerva and Calypso have a lesbian interlude. An amusing sequence takes place in Neptune's underwater brothel. Instead of fleeing temptation by diving in the sea to seek wisdom on a distant shore, Aragon's Telemachus tastes pleasure and wrestles with his identity in the here-and-now of Calypso's isle. His final act is Aragon's invention. The highly academic introduction discusses Telemachus as a dada/surrealist document, with its fracturing of language and bourgeois values. Most non-specialist readers will skim over the novel's tortured talkiness, savoring Aragon's passages of sensuous lyricism, his playful tactics with myth and his obvious delight in the power of words.

Flesh Unlimited by Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon

Book Description
Flesh Unlimited is a compendium edition of three classic erotic/ surrealist novellas: Les Onze Mille Verges and Les Mémoires d'un Jeune Don Juan by Guillaume Appollinaire and Le Con d'Irène by Louis Aragon.
Dadaist poet Guillaume Apollinaire fine-tuned his uniquely poetic and surreal vision to produce these two materpieces of the explicit erotic imagination at the turn of the century, works which compare with the best of the Marquis de Sade. In Les Onze Milles Verges, debauched aristocrat Mony Vibescu and a circle of fellow sybarites blaze a trail of uncontrollable lust, bloody cruelty and depravity across the streets of Europe. Whilst in Les Mémoires d'un Jeune Don Juan, a young man reminisces his sexual awakening at the hands of his aunt, his sister and their friends as he is utterly corrupted in a season of carnal excess.

Louis Aragon's Le Con d'Irène is the intense story of a man's torment when he becomes fixated upon the genitalia of an imaginary woman and is reduced to voyeuristically scoping her erotic encounters in-between describing various events in brothels and other sexual adventures.

Translated from the original, complete and unexpurgated versions by Alexis Lykiard (translator of Lautréamonts Maldoror), Flesh Unlimited has a general introduction and notes section.