Nadja

A new translation of one of the defining works of the French surrealist movement, an energetic autobiographical novel that is at once both a tumultuous romance story and an initiation into the surrealism of everyday life. The most renowned of all surrealist literary works, Andr Breton's Nadja has been stirring passions and imaginations since its first publication in 1928. At once a poignant romance, an autobiography, a philosophical inquiry into questions of identity, and a lively illustration of the surrealist belief in life-changing chance, Nadja relates the fortuitous meeting and brief, tumultuous relationship between Breton, surrealism's founder and primary theorist, and the 'wandering soul' who called herself Nadja, 'because in Russian it's the beginning of the word for hope, and because it's only the beginning.' Over the course of a single breathless week, recounted with scrupulous precision and a poet's sense of drama, Breton and Nadja pursue an adventure that stands outside of