Insel, the only novel by the surrealist master Mina Loy, is a book like no other--about an impossible friendship amid the glamorous artistic bohemia of 1930s Paris.

Mina Loy's technique and subjects - prostitution, menstruation, destitution, and suicide - shock even some modernists and she vanished from the poetry scene as dramatically as she had appeared on it. Roger Conover has resuced the key texts from the pages of forgotten publications, and has included all of the futurist and feminist satires, poems from Loy's Paris and New York periods, and the complete cycle of "Love Songs," as well as previously unknown texts and detailed notes.

Foregrounding Loy's critical interrogation of Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, and "Degenerate" artisthood, and exploring her poetic legacies today, Curious Disciplines reveals Loy's importance in an entirely novel way.

"Mina Loy (1882-1966) was one of the most inscrutable artists and poets of the twentieth century. Born in London and formally trained as an artist in London, Munich, and Paris, Loy was elected as a member of the Salon d'Automne in Paris at the age of 23. Her modernist enlightenment came through her introduction to the Italian Futurists, and her subsequent structurally startling and provocative poetry and manifesto-writing brought her immediate notoriety and the embrace of the American avant-garde. Upon her arrival in New York in 1916 she was featured as the prototype of the "Modern Woman" in a profile in the New York Evening Sun. Her writings were published in Camera Work, Little Review, Rogue, and elsewhere, and her art was included in the groundbreaking 1917 Independents' Exhibition. She was Marcel Duchamp's date for the Blind Man's Ball-a friendship that lasted throughout their lives, as Duchamp organized Loy's final exhibition in 1955. Today, Loy is remembered primarily as a poet. Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable is the first book to examine the full scope of her career, including her visual work. The book follows Loy on her transatlantic passage to America as an immigrant in 1936 and features over 50 of her paintings, drawings, and constructions alongside a selection of her poetry and writings, all of which reveal her omnivorous creativity as an image-maker, author, and cultural arbiter. These works are complemented by extensive, never-before-assembled archival materials that provide context for her art within the arc of her extraordinary life. Contributing authors will show how indispensable of a force she was in introducing Italian futurism to America, radicalizing the aspirations of feminism, expanding the aesthetics of surrealism, and presaging American pop art through her assemblage constructions. Introducing the full breadth of Loy's creative expression-painting, drawing, poetry, prose, art criticism, and fashion design-Mina Loy presents the remarkable vision of this iconoclast"--