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Books Like Nadja by André Breton
The Surrealist novel — 'Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all'
The autobiographical-theoretical novel (1928) about Breton's ten-day encounter with the unstable Nadja on Paris streets — illustrated with photographs, refusing conventional narrative, the most accessible and most disturbing realization of the Surrealist program.
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Buy on AmazonL'Amour fou
by André Breton
The natural successor — where Nadja narrates an encounter, L'Amour fou theorizes it more fully; the concepts of objective chance and convulsive beauty are developed into a complete account of how the Surrealist experience of love works.
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Buy on AmazonManifeste du surréalisme
by André Breton
The theoretical text that Nadja enacts — reading the Manifesto first gives you the program; Nadja gives you the program's creative realization in autobiography and photography.
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Buy on AmazonLe Paysan de Paris
by Louis Aragon
The parallel Surrealist urban experience (1926) — Aragon's irrational traversal of the Paris arcade published two years before Nadja; comparing the two gives the range of what Surrealist urban prose could achieve.
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Buy on AmazonLes Vases communicants
by André Breton
The companion theoretical prose work (1932) — where Nadja is primarily narrative and autobiographical, Les Vases communicants is primarily theoretical and analytical; together they bracket Breton's mature prose style.
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Buy on AmazonAlice in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
Carroll is named in the Surrealist Manifesto as a precursor, and Nadja shares with Alice the quality of a narrative in which the rational and the irrational are suspended in the same space — the Paris street as dreamland, Nadja as the White Queen.
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Buy on AmazonIlluminations
by Arthur Rimbaud
The founding visionary prose poems that the Surrealist project is continuing — reading the Illuminations alongside Nadja shows the tradition and the transformation: Rimbaud's hallucinatory imagery becomes Breton's documentary hallucination of the actual Paris street.
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Buy on AmazonUne saison en enfer
by Arthur Rimbaud
Rimbaud's farewell to the visionary program is the shadow that falls across Nadja — Breton is attempting what Rimbaud declared impossible; the comparison between Rimbaud's renunciation and Breton's persistence is illuminating.
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Buy on AmazonArcades Project
by Walter Benjamin
Benjamin's great unfinished work on Paris arcade culture (written 1927-40) was directly stimulated by Le Paysan de Paris and Nadja — his philosophical reading of the same Paris streets gives the most profound response to what both Surrealist texts were doing.
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