Surreal

These two novellas demonstrate the fragility of the American dream, from two very different perspectives. In 'The Day of the Locust', talented young artist Tod Hackett has been brought to Hollywood to work in the design department of a major studio. He discovers a surreal world of tarnished dreams, where violence and hysteria lurk behind even the most glittering facade. Liberty and freedom have been turned into a bizarre nightmare in 'The Dream Life of Balso Snell', which focuses on the personal despair and disintegration of its protagonist, the poet Balso.

Surreal and splendidly unconventional, The Hearing Trumpet is an apocalyptic fairy tale quest about an occult old ladies' home and the spry nonagenarian who ends up there. After coming into possession of a hearing trumpet, 92-year-old Marian Leatherby discovers her son's plans to send her to a nursing home. But this is no ordinary place.... Here there are strange rituals, orgiastic nuns, levitating abbesses, animalistic humans, humanistic animals, a search for the Holy Grail, and a plan to escape to Lapland and knit a tent.... Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington's novel is an exhilarating journey brimming with laugh-out-loud humor and absurd lunacy.

Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in the city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work—pictures of various surreal people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as not so much a thing as a way things happen, Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.