"Not only one of the frankest of autobiographies, but also a brilliantly written book, Leiris' Manhood mingles memories, philosophic reflections, sexual revelation, meditations on bullfighting, and the life-long progress of self-discovery."—Washington Post Book World "Leiris writes to appall, and thereby to receive from his readers the gift of a strong emotion—the emotion needed to defend himself against the indignation and disgust he expects to arouse in his readers."—Susan Sontag, New York Review of Books

Manhood;: Preceded by, The autobiographer as torero; (Cape editions, 11)

LEIRIS, MICHEL

CAPE.

"Not only one of the frankest of autobiographies, but also a brilliantly written book, Leiris' Manhood mingles memories, philosophic reflections, sexual revelation, meditations on bullfighting, and the life-long progress of self-discovery."—Washington Post Book World "Leiris writes to appall, and thereby to receive from his readers the gift of a strong emotion—the emotion needed to defend himself against the indignation and disgust he expects to arouse in his readers."—Susan Sontag, New York Review of Books

Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

University of Chicago Press

A dazzling translation by Lydia Davis of the first volume of Michel Leiris’s masterwork, perhaps the most important French autobiographical enterprise of the twentieth century Michel Leiris, a French intellectual whose literary works inspired high praise from the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Claude Lévi-Strauss, began the first volume of his autobiographical project at the age of 40. It was the beginning of an endeavor that ultimately required 35 years and three additional volumes. In Volume 1, Scratches, Leiris proposes to discover a savoir vivre, a mode of living that would have a place for both his poetics and his personal morality. “I can scarcely see the literary use of speech as anything but a means of sharpening one’s consciousness in order to be more—and in a better way—alive," he declares. He begins the project of uncovering memories, returning to moments and images of childhood—his father’s recording machine, the letters of the alphabet coming to life—and then of his later life—Paris under the Occupation, a journey to Africa, and a troubling fear of death.

Scratches: The Rules of the Game, Volume 1 (Volume 1) (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Yale University Press

The second volume of Michel Leiris’s hugely influential four-volume autobiographical essay, available to English-language readers in a brilliant and sensitive translation by Lydia Davis One of the most versatile and beloved French intellectuals of the twentieth century, Michel Leiris reconceives the autobiography as a literary experiment that sheds light on the mechanisms of memory and on the way the unconnected events of a life become connected through invented narrative. In this volume, the second in his four-volume epic autobiographical enterprise, Leiris merges quotidian events with profound philosophical self-exploration. He also wrangles with the disillusionment that accompanies his own self-reflection. In the midst of struggling with his own motives for writing an autobiographical essay, he comes to the revelation that life, after all, has aspects worth remembering even if moments of beauty are bookended by misery. Yet what can be said of human life, of his own life, when his memory is unreliable, his eyesight is failing, and his mood is despairing?

Scraps: The Rules of the Game, Volume 2 (Volume 2) (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

A major publishing event: the third volume of Michel Leiris’s renowned autobiography, now available in English for the first time in a brilliant translation by Lydia Davis A beloved and versatile author and ethnographer, French intellectual Michel Leiris is often ranked in the company of Proust, Gide, Sartre, and Camus, yet his work remains largely unfamiliar to English-language readers. This brilliant translation of Fibrils, the third volume of his monumental autobiographical project The Rules of the Game, invites us to discover why Lévi-Strauss proclaimed him “incontestably one of the greatest writers of the century.” Leiris’s autobiographical essay, a thirty-five-year project, is a primary document of the examined life in the twentieth century. In Fibrils, Leiris reconciles literary commitment with social/political engagement. He recounts extensive travel and anthropological work, including a 1955 visit to Mao’s China. He also details his suicidal “descent into Hell,” when the guilt over an extramarital affair becomes unbearable. A ruthless self-examiner, Leiris seeks to invent a new way of remembering, probe the mechanisms of memory and explore the way a life can be told.

Fibrils: The Rules of the Game, Volume 3 (Volume 3) (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

The fourth and final volume of Michel Leiris's renowned autobiography, now available in English for the first time, translated by Richard Sieburth &nbsp; Ex-surrealist and maverick anthropologist Michel Leiris (1901-1990) crafted his multivolume autobiography over the course of thirty-five years, profoundly influencing generations of French writers, from Sartre and Beauvoir to Modiano and Ernaux. In this fourth and final volume, Richard Sieburth completes the project of bringing Leiris's monumental experiment in self-portraiture into English. &nbsp; With wit and playfulness, Leiris assembled a scrapbook of fragments--journal extracts, travel notes, transcriptions of dreams, poems--to document the vagaries of a life committed to the difficult marriage of poetry and revolutionary politics, which he witnessed firsthand in Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, and on the Paris streets in May '68. &nbsp; Frail Riffs is a jazz improvisation on the twilight of a life, at once a painstaking self-examination and a chronicle of a century. As Leiris wrote, it is "neither a private diary nor a formal work, neither an autobiographical narrative nor a work of the imagination, neither prose nor poetry, but all this at the same time. . . . A perpetual work in progress."

Frail Riffs: The Rules of the Game, Volume 4 (Volume 4) (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Wifredo Lam

H. N. Abrams, Inc.

One of the towering classics of twentieth century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man’s compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal—by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic, and morose—as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition to visit sub-Saharan Africa. In 1930, Michel Leiris was an aspiring poet drifting away from the orbit of the Surrealist movement in Paris when the anthropologist Marcel Griaule invited him to serve as the “secretary-archivist” for the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, a major collecting and ethnographic journey that traversed the African continent between May 1931 and February 1933. Leiris, while maintaining the official records of the Mission, documenting the team’s acquisitions, and participating in the research, also kept a diary where he noted not only a given day’s activities and events but also his impressions, his states of mind, his anxieties, his dreams, and even his erotic fantasies. Upon returning to France, rather than compiling a more conventional report or ethnographic study, Leiris decided simply to publish his diary, almost entirely untouched aside from minor corrections and a smattering of footnotes. The result is an extraordinary book: a day-by-day record of one European writer’s experiences in an Africa inexorably shaded by his own exotic delusions and expectations, on the one hand, and an unparalleled depiction of the paradoxes and hypocrisies of conducting anthropological field research at the height of the colonial era on the other. Never before available in English translation, Phantom Africa is an invaluable document. If the book is “a stone marking a bend on a path that is entirely personal,” as Leiris himself described it years later, it is also a book whose broad canvas bears witness to the full range of social and political forces reshaping the African continent in the period between the World Wars.

Phantom Africa (The Africa List)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Seagull Books

Product Description \nOne of the towering classics of twentieth century French literature, 
Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man’s compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal—by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic, and morose—as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition to visit sub-Saharan Africa.\nIn 1930, Michel Leiris was an aspiring poet drifting away from the orbit of the Surrealist movement in Paris when the anthropologist Marcel Griaule invited him on an ethnographic journey that traversed the African continent from 1931 to 1933. Leiris, while maintaining the official records of the Mission, also kept a diary where he noted not only a given day’s activities and events but also his impressions, his states of mind, his anxieties, his dreams, and even his erotic fantasies. Upon returning to France, rather than compiling a more conventional report or ethnographic study, Leiris decided simply to publish his diary. The result is an extraordinary book: a day-by-day record of one European writer’s experiences in an Africa inexorably shaded by his own exotic delusions and expectations, on the one hand, and an unparalleled depiction of the paradoxes and hypocrisies of conducting anthropological field research at the height of the colonial era on the other.\nFirst published in English by Seagull Books in 2017, 
Phantom Africa is an invaluable document. Now available in paperback, this important book bears witness to the full range of social and political forces reshaping the African continent in the period between the World Wars.\nAbout the Author \nMichel Leiris (1901–90) was one of the most influential French intellectuals and writers of the twentieth century and the author of 
Manhood. 
Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His translations include works by Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, and Jacques Derrida. His own books include 
The Practice of Diaspora and 
Epistrophies.

Nights as Day, Days as Night

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Eridanos Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by LEIRIS, MICHEL. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by LEIRIS, MICHEL

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by LEIRIS, MICHEL. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Manhood;: Preceded by, The autobiographer as torero; (Cape editions, 11)

Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility

Scratches: The Rules of the Game, Volume 1 (Volume 1) (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Scraps: The Rules of the Game, Volume 2 (Volume 2) (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Fibrils: The Rules of the Game, Volume 3 (Volume 3) (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Frail Riffs: The Rules of the Game, Volume 4 (Volume 4) (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Wifredo Lam

Phantom Africa (The Africa List)

Phantom Africa (The Africa List)

Nights as Day, Days as Night