The literary adventure of D.A.F. (1740-1814) is unique and paradoxical. He was widely read in the nineteenth century, but his books disappeared almost completely from circulation in the century. Meanwhile the exegesis of Sade poured from the presses of the Western world in a flood of words in which the writer, the novelist, and the exceptional pet disappeared.
In France today, J. J. Pauvert, who considers Sade “the greatest French writer,” is publishing a new edition of the complete works with a new introduction by Annie Le Brun. Sade: A Sudden Abyss is the translation of this introduction, which shows Sade as the inventor of an entirely new language through which he fathoms human nature, desire, and relationships of power.
In this fresh and authoritative survey of Sade’s work as a whole, Le Brun frees it from such critics as Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, and Barthes (who see Sade’s language as a metaphor for history, society, or writing itself). She asks, Where is Sade himself in these texts? What exactly does Sade tell us? What is obscured when Sade’s writing is placed in a “universe of discourse” rather than understood as a manifestation of a life spent in eleven prisons over twenty-seven years? Like a powerful laser beam, her reflections cut through two centuries of intellectual hide-and-seek and let Sade for the first time be seen and read in his own light.
Annie Le Brun is a French poet and literary theorist. Her books include Lâchez tout, a critique of the French neofeminist movement; A distance; and Les chateaux de la subversion, a study of the Gothic tradition.

Sade: A Sudden Abyss

Annie Le Brun

Biographies & Memoirs

City Lights Publishers

Bon vent, mal vent, je vous présente la Mariée du Vent. Qui est la Mariée du Vent ? Sait-elle lire ? Sait-elle écrire le français sans fautes ? De quel bois se chauffe-t-elle ? Elle se chauffe de sa vie intense, de son mystère, de sa poésie. Elle n'a rien lu, mais elle a tout bu. Elle ne sait pas lire. Pourtant, le rossignol l'a vue, assise sur la pierre du printemps, en train de lire. Et bien qu'elle lût en silence, les animaux et les chevaux l'écoutaient avec admiration. C'est qu'elle lisait La Maison de la peur , cette histoire écrite dans un langage beau, vrai et pur. Préface de Max Ernst à La Maison de la peur de Leonora Carrington, 1938. Leonora Carrington, née en 1917, peintre et écrivain anglaise devenue mexicaine, a été célébrée par le grand écrivain Octavio Paz, qui voyait en elle «une somnambule échappée d'un poème de Yeats», et André Breton qui l'a parée des deux dons que Michelet attribuait à la sorcière : celui de «l'Illuminisme de la folie lucide» et «la sublime puissance de la conception solitaire».

Leonora Carrington: La mariee du vent (French Edition)

Homero Aridjis

OCTAVIO PAZ

André Breton

Delmari Romero Keith

max-ernst

French and European Publications Inc

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Books by Annie Le Brun