It’s worth announcing two new French books for 2018 (and that will shortly be available in Québec):
To start, the first ever reprint of surrealist poet Pierre Peuchmaurd’s Plus Vivants Que Jamais, (with an introduction by Joël Gayraud) published when he was 20 years old shortly after May ’68:
“Just between two cobblestones passed from one hand to another, amid the swirling of our sweat, we come to understand that what we are doing is serious, that this night is unparalleled, that we have not really lived until now, that we hold the dream between our fingers: it is cubic and gray, it is red and black, it has the necessary weight, it is reality. And it is true, this night, that we have remade the Commune. It’s to the commune that all of our thoughts turn.”
And we should of course mention the new book of aphorisms from Joël Gayraud himself, La Paupière auriculaire:
“Harassed by the noise and cacophony of the media, contemporary man is threatened with mental and emotional deafness. He has the greatest need to interpose a protective eyelid between his ear and the deluge of information that assails him. Only then can he filter what makes sense and deserves to be considered. Practicing this selective listening, the author questions, in the form of fragments ranging from aphorism to small essay, all that, one day at a time, solicits his vigilance or his reverie: among other topics addressed are the meaning of the myth, utopian projection, the passion of love, our relationship to animals and nature, the status of the object, language and the book, artistic expression, from Corot to Street art, from Kafka to Rimbaud , not without some philological and philosophical excursus on the side of Spinoza, Leopardi and Levinas. An ironic and critical drift that targets the increasingly numerous impostures on the market and exalts the opportunities for wonder that unfold in the interstices of a life led under the sign of poetry.”
Joël will be presenting both books on May 5th at the André Breton house in Saint-Cirq La Popie.
