Essential City Lights publications
Explore the best books from City Lights Publications. Discover essential reads, iconic titles, and must-have literature from this legendary publisher.
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Listen! Early Poems
by Vladimir Mayakovsky
“Nathaniel Mackey's poem is a brilliant renewal of and experiment with the language of our spiritual condition and a measure of what poetry gives in trust-'heart's/meat' and the rush of language to bear it.” —Robin Blaser “Mackey’s raspy rebus-like cultural resurfacings are both beautiful to read and worthy of repeated efforts at comprehension.” —Publishers Weekly
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The Shadow and Its Shadow
by Paul Hammond
The Shadow and Its Shadow is a classic collection of writings by the Surrealists on their mad love of moviegoing. The forty-odd theoretical, polemical, and poetical re-visions of the seventh art in this anthology document Surrealism's scandalous and nonreductive take on film. Writing between 1918 and 1977, the essayists include such names as AndrĂ©eacute; Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Salvador DalĂiacute;, Luis Buñntilde;uel, and man Ray, as well as many of the less famous though equally fascinating figures of the movement. Paul Hammond's introduction limns the history of Surrealist cinemania, highlighting how these revolutionary poets, artists, and philosophers sifted the silt of commercial-often Hollywood-cinema for the odd fleck of gold, the windfall movie that, somehow slipping past the censor, questioned the dominant order. Such prospecting pivoted around the notion of lyrical behavior-as depicted on the screen and as lived in the movie house. The representation of such behavior led the Surrealists to valorize the manifest content of such denigrated genres as silent and sound comedy, romantic melodrama, film noir, horror movies. As to lived experience, moviegoing Surrealists looked to the spectacle's latent meaning, reading films as the unwitting providers of redemptive sequences that could be mentally clipped out of their narrative context and inserted into daily life-there, to provoke new adventures. "Hammond's book is a reminder of the wealth and range of surrealist writings on the cinema. . . . [T]he work represented here is still challenging and genuinely eccentric, locating itself in an 'ethic' of love, reverie and revolt." --Sight & Sound "Hammond, who is the author of the invaluable anthology The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writing on the Cinema (1978), writes about cinema independently of the changing academic and cultural fashions of film theory and abhors the dogmas of contemporary border-patrol thought. His magnetically appealing free-wheeling form of erudite film-critical writing is recognisable for its iconoclastic humour, non-authoritarian verve and playful witty discursivity." --John Conomos, Senses of Cinema Paul Hammond is a writer, editor, and translator living in Barcelona. He is the author of Constellations of MirĂłoacute;, Breton which was published by City Lights.
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Constellations of Miro, Breton
by Paul Hammond
In Constellations of Miro, Breton Paul Hammond unravels some of the mysteries of the call-and-response of these two Surrealists by reading the pictures against the poetry, the poetry against the pictures, and both against the madness of a history that none of us has left that far behind."--BOOK JACKET.
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Anthology of Black Humor
by Andre Breton
This is the first publication in English of the anthology that contains Breton's definitive statement on l'humour noir, one of the seminal concepts of Surrealism, and his provocative assessments of the writers he most admired. While some of the authors featured in the Anthology of Black Humor are already well known to American readers-Swift, Kafka, Rimbaud, Poe, Lewis Carroll, and Baudelaire among them (and even then, Breton's selections are often surprising)-many others are sure to come as a revelation. The entries range from the acerbic aphorisms of Swift, Lichtenberg, and Duchamp to the theatrical slapstick of Christian Dietrich Grabbe, from the wry missives of Rimbaud and Jacques Vache to the manic paranoia of Dali, from the ferocious iconoclasm of Alfred Jarry and Arthur Craven to the offhand hilarity of Apollinaire at his most spontaneous. For each of the forty-five authors included, Breton has provided an enlightening biographical and critical preface, situating both the writer and the work in the context of black humor-a partly macabre, partly ironic, and often absurd turn of spirit that Breton defined as "a superior revolt of the mind." Andre Breton (1896-1966), the founder and principal theorist of the Surrealist movement, is one of the major literary figures of the past century. His best-known works in English translation include Nadja, Mad Love, The Manifestoes of Surrealism, The Magnetic Fields (with Philippe Soupault), and Earthlight. Mark Polizzotti is the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton.
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State of Siege
by Juan Goytisolo
Set during the siege of Sarajevo these fictionalized reflections bear witness to the universal cry for freedom.
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San Francisco Beat
by David Meltzer
"In these intimate, free-wheeling conversations, a baker's dozen of the poets of San Francisco talk about the scene then and now, the traditions of poetry, and about anarchism, globalism, Zen, the Bomb, the Kabbalah, and the Internet."--Page 4 of printed paper wrapper.
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Lunch Poems
by Frank O'Hara
Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places. Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti...
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Roman Poems
by Pier Paolo Pasolini
The Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini was first and always a poet-the most important civil poet, according to Alberto Moravia, in Italy in the second half of this century. His poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on charges of "moral and political unworthiness," Pasolini fled to Rome. This selection of poems from his early impoverished days on the outskirts of Rome to his last (with a backward longing glance at his native Frill) is at the center of his poetic and filmic vision of modern Italian life as an Inferno. Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna. In addition to the films for which he is world famous, he wrote novels, poetry, and social and cultural criticism. He was murdered in 1975.
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Poems of Fernando Pessoa
by Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa is Portugal's most important contemporary poet. He wrote under several identities, which he called heteronyms: Albet Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Bernardo Soares. He wrote fine poetry under his own name as well, and each of his "voices" is completely different in subject, temperament, and style. This volume brings back into print the comprehensive collection of his work published by Ecco Press in 1986.
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Delirium
by Jeremy Reed
Delirium, an intuitive and original interpretation of the poet Arthur Rimbaud's life and genius, brings into close focus the crucial period of 1873, when Rimbaud left school and the provinces and lived his "season in hell." Jeremy Reed brings his...
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Sleeping, Sinning, Falling
by Mutsuo Takahashi
Sleeping Sinning Falling is a generous volume of selected and new poems, written over the last twenty-five years by one of the major voices in twentieth century Japanese poetry. The translations are by Hiroaki Sato, who has published over twelve books in English translation. One of them, From the Country of Eight Islands, an anthology of Japanese poetry which he translated and edited with Burton Watson, won the American P.E.N. translation prize for 1982.
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The Unknown Poe
by Edgar Allan Poe
"An anthology of fugitive writings by Edgar Allan Poe, with appreciations by Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Paul Valery, J.K. Huysmans.
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Erotism
by Georges Bataille
Reprint. Originally published: Death and sensuality. New York: Walker, 1962.
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Resisting the Virtual Life
by James Brook
A variety of contributors gauge the impact of the new video, computer, and networked communications on the ways of life in a restructured world, exposing relations of power and dependence and offering strategies of resistance.
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Pomes All Sizes
by Jack Kerouac
A collection of poems by beat generation author Jack Kerouac, written between 1954 and 1965 about Mexico, Tangier, Berkeley, the Bowery, God, drugs, and other topics.
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Save Twilight
by Julio Cortazar
The power of Eros, the enduring beauty of art, a love-hate nostalgia for his Argentine homeland, the bonds of friendship and the tragic folly of politics are some of the themes of Save Twilight. Informed by his immersion in world literature, music, art, and history, and most of his own emotional geography, Cortazar's poetry traces his paradoxical evolution from provincial Argentinean sophisticate to cosmopolitan Parisian Romantic, always maintaining the sense of astonishment of an artist surprised by life.
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The Powers of the Word
by René Daumal
Since his death in 1944, Rene Daumal has come to be recognized as one of the original minds of the twentieth century French letters. Poet, essayist, philosopher and translator, Sanscrit scholar and pupil of Gurdjieff, Daumal was a founder of the...