Raymond Roussel, one of the most outlandishly compelling literary figures of modern times, died in mysterious circumstances at the age of fifty-six in 1933. The story Mark Ford tells about Roussel's life and work is at once captivating, heartbreaking, and almost beyond belief. Could even Proust or Nabokov have invented a character as strange and memorable as the exquisite dandy and graphomaniac this book brings to life? Roussel's poetry, novels, and plays influenced the work of many well-known writers and artists: Jean Cocteau found in him "genius in its pure state," while Salvador Dalí, who died with a copy of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique on his bedside table, believed him to be one of France's greatest writers ever. Edmond Rostand, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Michel Foucault, and Alain Robbe-Grillet all testified to the power of his unique imagination. By any standards, Roussel led an extraordinary life. Tremendously wealthy, he took two world tours during which he hardly left his hotel rooms. He never wore his clothes more than twice, and generally avoided conversation because he dreaded that it might turn morbid. Ford, himself a poet, traces the evolution of Roussel's bizarre compositional methods and describes the idiosyncrasies of a life structured as obsessively as Roussel structured his writing.

Roussel's poetry, novels and plays have had a huge influence on the work of many of the 20th century's writers. This account of Roussel's life and oeuvre traces the evolution of his bizarre compositional methods, and shows the idiosyncracies of his life.

Compulsive writer and exquisite dandy Raymond Roussel was one of the most extraordinary literary figures of all time. He was born in 1877 and died in mysterious circumstances in 1933; his life was as strange as his work. His bizarre poetry, novels and plays - all disastrous commercial flops - have had a monumental influence on many of the century's best-known writers and artists. Jean Cocteau declared him 'genius in its pure state,' while Salvador Dali died with one of his books on his bedside table. Marcel Duchamp, Andreacute; Breton, Michel Foucault, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Harry Mathews have all testified to the haunting power of Roussel's imagination. The poet Mark Ford traces the evolution of Roussel's eccentric compositional methods, and describes the idiosyncrasies of a life that was at once enchanting, heart-breaking and scarcely credible.

Introduction by John Ashberry The most eccentric writer of the twentieth century. His unearthly style fascinated Surrealists such as Breton, Duchamp and Cocteau but also Gide, Robespierre, Foucault and John Ashberry. The title essay is the key to Roussel's methods and is joined by selections from his major fiction, drama, and poetry pieces superbly translated by his New York School admirers, which include Ashberry, Winkfield, Harry Matthews and Kenneth Koch.

A new translation of a masterpiece of modernist poetry Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess enthusiast, Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the French belle époque's most compelling literary figures. During his lifetime, Roussel's work was vociferously championed by the surrealists, but never achieved the widespread acclaim for which he yearned. New Impressions of Africa is undoubtedly Roussel's most extraordinary work. Since its publication in 1932, this weird and wonderful poem has slowly gained cult status, and its admirers have included Salvador Dalì—who dubbed it the most "ungraspably poetic" work of the era—André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Roussel began writing New Impressions of Africa in 1915 while serving in the French Army during the First World War and it took him seventeen years to complete. "It is hard to believe the immense amount of time composition of this kind of verse requires," he later commented. Mysterious, unnerving, hilarious, haunting, both rigorously logical and dizzyingly sublime, it is truly one of the hidden masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism. This bilingual edition of New Impressions of Africa presents the original French text and the English poet Mark Ford's lucid, idiomatic translation on facing pages. It also includes an introduction outlining the poem's peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.

The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter. A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.

An intoxicating sui generis novel by “the greatest mesmerist of modern times” (André Breton) The wealthy scientist Martial Canterel guides a group of visitors through his expansive estate, Locus Solus, where he displays his various deranged inventions, each more spectacular than the last. First, he introduces a machine propelled by the weather, which constructs a mosaic out of varying hues of human teeth, then shows a hairless cat charged with a powerful electric battery, and next a bizarre theater in which corpses are reanimated with a special serum to enact the most important movements of their past lives. Wondrously imaginative and narrated with Roussel’s deadpan wit, Locus Solus is unlike anything else ever written.