The Hundred Headless Woman is Ernst's first collage novel. It features a loosely narrative sequence of uncanny Surrealist collages, made by cutting up and reassembling nineteenth-century illustrations, accompanied by Ernst's equally strange captions. Ernst's French title, La Femme 100 têtes, is a double entendre; when read aloud it can be understood as either "the hundred-headed woman" or "the headless woman." Along with this enigmatic title character, the book marks the introduction of Ernst's favorite alter ego, Loplop, "the Bird Superior." Ernst was deeply engaged with illustrated books during the 1930s; in addition to collage novels, he created many etchings and lithographs to complement the poems and stories of Surrealist writers with whom he was closely associated.

A comprehensive look at the life and work of a pioneering 20th-century artist

The great surrealist's collage masterpiece was printed in 1934 in a limited edition of five now-priceless pamphlets. This single-volume edition contains all of the original publication's 182 bizarre, darkly humorous scenes of violent dreams and erotic fantasies. "One of the clandestine classics of our century." — The New York Times.

Alongside Salvador Dalí and André Breton, Max Ernst (1891-1976) remains one of the most famous names to be associated with Surrealism, and must now be regarded as one of the most original, prolific and best-known artists of the 20th century. Assembled in 1947, when Ernst had attained the height of his artistic powers, BEYOND PAINTING is a definitive autobiographical document of the painter and the creative processes behind his work, enhanced by testaments by many of his friends including fellow Surrealists André Breton, Paul Éluard, Roberto Matta and Hans Arp, as well as others such as New York art dealer Julien Levy. BEYOND PAINTING also contains Ernst's revolutionary experiment in collage, The Lion of Belfort, as well as a preface by New York artist Robert Motherwell and a chronology of Ernst's life written by the artist himself.

Robert Seydel's Book of Ruth presents an assemblage of collages, letters, journal entries and other artifacts from the life of Seydel's fictional alter-ego, Ruth Greisman--spinster, Sunday painter and friend to Joseph Cornell. Drawing on the inherent seductiveness and intrigue of archives, the volume is conceived as a gathering of fragmented materials by Greisman unearthed from a storage space in the Smithsonian and a suburban family garage, which are presented as a mosaic portrait of a reclusive artist. The New Yorker described the project thus: "Burrowing into the pop-detritus archive somewhere between Ray Johnson's mail art and Tom Phillips' Humument project, Seydel's serial collage Book of Ruth describes an allusive fantasy about his aunt and alter ego Ruth Greisman, her brother Saul, and their escapades with Joseph Cornell... unfold[ing] in novelistic rhythms." Over the past decade or so, working almost exclusively in notebook form, Seydel has produced hundreds of works in multiple ongoing and interrelated series that move freely between lyric and narrative modes. (Poet Peter Gizzi notes that "so many of his tools are a writer's: whiteout, pencil and pen, erasers, tape, type and newsprint.") Book of Ruth constitutes his masterpiece to date. In Seydel's hands the detritus from which Ruth makes her art and narrates her inner life shines like pages from an illuminated manuscript.