Warehouse Stock Clearance Sale

Grab a bargain today!


The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian
By

Rating

Product Description
Product Details

Promotional Information

PRINT GENERAL INTEREST
Bomb, LA Times, NYTBR, Harper's, Bookforum, Chicago Sun Times, Chicago Tribune, SF Chronicle, Miami Herald, Miami Sun Post, New Yorker

LITERARY INTEREST
The American Poetry Review, The Volta, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Fence, New American Writing, Jacket, Carnet de Rouge, Slope, Colorado Review, Verse, jubilat, A Public Space, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, The Massachusetts Review, Boston Review, American Letters and Commentary, Zyzzyva, Electronic Poetry Review, and others.

TRADE PUBLICATIONS
PW, Library Journal, Kirkus, and Booklist

WORLD LIT AND TRANSLATION INTEREST
Complete Review, Context Magazine, Two Lines, Three Percent, Translation Review, World Literature Today

ONLINE AND SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN
Pursue reviews in:
Full Stop Mag, Guernica, Little Star, Molossus, Quarterly Conversation, Words Without Borders

City Lights Facebook (32K+ likes) and Twitter (119K+ followers) will feature a lot of images, quotes, and other tidbits from the rich material in the book. Excerpts on the City Lights Blog as well.

About the Author

Artist, musician, socialist, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, writer, and professor, Eugenio F. Granell (1912-2001) was one of the leading figures of the post-World War II international surrealist movement. He formed close friendships with such figures as Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Wifredo Lam, Benjamin Péret, Toyen, and the revolutionary writer Victor Serge. Upon the defeat of the Republican government in 1939, Granell was exiled from Spain for 46 years, living in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Puerto Rico and New York City where he resided from 1957-1985. Beginning with his participation in the exhibition Surrealism in 1947 (Galerie Maeght, Paris), curated by Duchamp and Breton, Granell participated in every exhibition mounted by the Paris group. He is the author of two novels, short stories, and the poetic treatise Isla Cofre Mítico, among others. Returning to Spain in 1986 Granell exhibited throughout Spain, Portugal, and Europe. In 1995 the Fundación Granell was established in Santiago de Compostela, dedicated to the study of surrealism, mounting exhibitions and performances as well as providing library and archives for research.

David Coulter is an educator, artist, and translator. He has participated in surrealist exhibitions such as Harvest of Evil (Ti Rojo Studio, Columbus, OH 1983); Magnets of the Polar Horn (San Francisco, CA 1984); The Secret Face of Scandal — Group Hydra (New York City 1986); Voyage to Arcturus (Estremoz, Portugal 2007); The Reverse of the Look (Coimbra, Portugal 2008); Men Are Machines for Making Apples (Guimarães, Portugal); Optic Ocultations (Beyond Baroque, Venice, CA 2015); and most recently At the Light of a Glazed Castle (Figueira da Foz, Portugal 2016). His work has appeared in Le Vertebre et le Rossignol (Montreal, Canada 2015 and 2016); Spectra (Los Angeles, CA 2016); The Annual (New York City 2015); A Phala 3 (São Paulo, Brasil 2015); and What Will Be — Almanac of the International Surrealist Movement (2014). He is the illustrator of the novella Targets (Anon Editions 2013) by Allan Graubard. His work is included in the anthology Invisible Heads: Surrealists in North America — An Untold Story (Anon Editions 2011). In the 1980s he was the co-director/publisher of MDS Editions. He currently divides his time between Berkeley, CA and Coimbra, Portugal where he participates with the Cabo Mondego Section of Portuguese Surrealism.

Reviews

"E. F. Granell's The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian, often cited as the most crucial surrealist novel of the Spanish Civil War, is brought to its fullest hallucinatory powers in this exquisite translation by David Coulter. In an ever-shifting world populated by nameless, iconic stock figures—the Priest, the Conquistador, the Bishop, the General, the Grand Turk—the Tupinamba Indian (whose head, slashed off by a conquistador, remains detachable/attachable in a brilliant metaphor for colonialism) wanders, stumbles, and thrives in a war landscape where time and space morph. At once horrific and humorous, the book is gifted by Granell's light touch and dry wit, his natural facility for an unstraining surrealism, unlike any other. A war novel, a political allegory not only of the late '30s but also our current political moment, and prefaced by the brilliant Benjamin Péret (who claims that in Granell's voyage 'chance replaces the compass'), The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian arrives in English, for the first time, and is, most importantly, an absolute delight to read."—Gillian Conoley"Eugenio Granell's The Novel of the Tupinamba Indian exists not unlike an arcane planetary body floating outside the dictation of an over-arching solar gravitas, thereby invoking verbal hallucination via clairaudient spontaneity. Singed by the disruption and scandal that fuels conflict, Granell's Tupinamba Indian magnificently registers the author's experience with the didactic inferno of war and his ability to imaginatively ascend above it. We, in the English-speaking world are now showered with Granell's authentic verbal grace so artfully rendered from the Spanish original by the lingual respiration of David Coulter."—Will Alexander"A man endures a brutal civil war in Spain that turns his life upside down. A former violinist, become journalist and combatant, suffers defeat and exile. Escaping into France, he finds his way to the Americas, settling for a time in Puerto Rico. There, an exceptional sense of humor filters through his war experience, fleecing expectations and convictions, and freeing him to levitate this personal and collective history into a madcap romp through a violated landscape. Where tragedy emerges with the Fascist victory, prologue to World War Two, laughter curdles its edges then burns it up. Where the sentimental gathers tears, magic takes over. With a twist of the wrist this water turns red; a delicious bloody drink to spice an afternoon game. No group is sacrosanct, no one beyond reproach, priests, intellectuals, and leader (aka Franco, our 'tiny Grand Turk'), included. The 'man,' our author, of course, is Eugenio F. Granell, acclaimed surrealist artist and writer. Now his dark, funny, penetrating expose of what the civil war meant, and what other like-wars can mean, comes to us in a fine English translation."—Allan Graubard, co-editor of Invisible Heads: Surrealists in North America - An Untold Story"This extraordinary novel by the last Spanish surrealist is finally available in English, in David Coulter's dazzling translation. Literally inverting the colonial gaze, the beheaded-re-headed Tupinamba Indian has a 360 view of the savageries of western civilization. While the main focus of Granell's parodic travelogue is on Spain's fascism and the brutality of the Civil War, no '-ism' escapes his critique, certainly not Soviet-style communism, and not even surrealism itself. A brilliant, bloody carnivalesque, this novel is most outrageously funny when the history it reflects is at its most devastatingly tragic. Translations into American English often defang the original's sarcasm or dull its critical edge. But David Coulter's translation renders powerfully both the novel's kaleidoscopic multiple perspectives and its deliciously caustic notes."—Chana Kronfeld, author of On the Margins of Modernism; co-translator (with Chana Bloch) of Yehudi Amichai's Open Closed Open (winner of the 2001 PEN Translation Prize)"One of the finest of all novels written by surrealists."—Michael Richardson, editor of The Dedalus Book of Surrealism

Ask a Question About this Product More...
 
Item ships from and is sold by Fishpond.com, Inc.

Back to top