Three never-before-translated books from Henri Michaux from the period of his mescaline experimentation, with drawings by the author and Matta.

A wild journey to the East narrated by a writer who is “without equal in the literature of our time” (Jorge Luis Borges) Henri Michaux (1899–1984), the great French poet and painter, set out as a young man to see the Far East. Traveling from India to the Himalayas, and on to China and Japan, Michaux voices his vivid impressions, cutting opinions, and curious insights: he has no trouble speaking his mind. Part fanciful travelogue and part exploration of culture, A Barbarian in Asia is presented here in its original translation by Sylvia Beach, the famous American-born bookseller in Paris.

Critics have compared the work of French writer Henri Michaux (1899-1984) to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. This anthology contains substantial selections from almost all of Michaux's major works, most never before published in English, and allows readers to explore the haunting verbal and pictorial landscape of a 20th-century visionary. 30 photos.

Henri Michaux is both a recognised poet and visual artist, arguably one of the greatest 'double artists' of the twentieth century. This book presents the first detailed examination of a particular interdisciplinary aspect of his production, namely, the innovative experimentation with signs contained in four works: Mouvements, Par la voie des rythmes, Saisir and Par des traits. Questions arise concerning their literary and visual status as, in their attempt to render interior rhythm and dynamism, they occupy an interstitial space between writing and drawing, between the book and the canvas, between the Western alphabet and Chinese characters. This study addresses these questions by analysing the conception, production and reception of Michaux's signs and the literary and artistic contexts in which they were produced.

Previously available only as a limited editon, Henri Michaux's Ideograms in China is now available as a New Directions paperback. Peerlessly translated by the American poet Gustaf Sobin, this long, beautifully illustrated and annotated prose poem was originally written as an introduction to Leon Chang's La calligraphie chinoise (1971), a work that now stands as an important complement to Pound and Ernest Fenollosa's classic study, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.

A bilingual edition of the most famous of Henri Michaux's poetry collections, now in a new translation from the French. The figure of Plume preoccupied the great Belgian poet Henri Michaux throughout his career. Plume, meaning feather or pen, is a character who drifts from one thing to another, losing shape, taking new forms, at perpetual risk from reality. He is a personification of the imagination as subject to innumerable pratfalls and disgraces, and yet indestructible for all that. In this new bilingual edition, with translations by Richard Sieburth, the entire Plume cycle appears for the first time in English in the form in which Michaux originally published it.