Paris Peasant - Louis Aragon

Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon, translated by Simon Watson Taylor / ISBN 9781878972101 / 228-page paperback from Exact Change Another long-time favorite from Exact Change. *** Before psychogeography, the Situationists, and dream urbanism, there was Paris Peasant, a pioneering Surrealist excavation of the twentieth century's capital city Paris Peasant (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism, yet Exact Change's edition is the first US publication of Simon Watson Taylor's authoritative translation, completed after consultations with the author. Unconventional in form--Aragon consciously avoided recognizable narration or character development--Paris Peasant is, in the author's words, “a mythology of the modern.” The book uses the city of Paris as a stage or framework, and Aragon interweaves his text with images of related ephemera: café menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments and newspaper clippings. A detailed description of a Parisian arcade (nineteenth-century precursor to the mi