459 novels and three centenarians. The new school year is full! After having covered some of our contemporary novelists in recent weeks, let’s “rest” a little and take a look at these anniversaries. For the first of these, the 100th anniversary of Manifesto of Surrealism by André Breton, released on October 15, 1924, Gallimard editions were already at work, publishing, among others, a Pléiade Manifestos of Surrealism and at the same time texts by Paul Eluard, Max Jacob, Drieu La Rochelle, Annie Lebrun… But let’s leave it at that, our colleague Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld discusses these “combat texts” at length in L’Express of September 19 and on the site.
Of a completely different nature is the centenary of the death of Joseph Conrad, born Korzeniowski in Polish Ukraine in December 1857 and died on August 3, 1924. A cabin boy from Marseilles at 17 and a captain in the British merchant navy in 1886, he sailed the world’s seas for twenty years before becoming one of the greatest English novelists of his generation. To celebrate the author of Almayer’s Folly (1894), From Heart of Darkness (1899), from Lord Jim (1900), Gallimard launches a abridged edition of Tribute to Joseph Conrad published in the NRF in December 1924 with a preface by Yann Brunel and, among other praisers, André Gide, Paul Valéry, André Maurois and Joseph Kessel.
A fair return for this great Francophile whose L’Aube editions are publishing two short stories in his Mikros pocket collection, Because of dollars, followed by He tells, which takes us to the China Sea and the grueling Neapolitan night of a Bohemian nobleman; while Points is releasing a collection of his articles and travel stories written between 1912 and 1923, Geography and some explorers, presented here by Michel Desforges.
He too was a great lover of France, James Baldwin, born on August 2, 1924, one day before Conrad’s disappearance, and died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1987. To celebrate this Harlem native, an immense author committed to fighting racial and societal injustices, Folio is bending over backwards and publishing Chronicles of a local boy (new translation by Marie Darrieussecq), Blues for Sonny (about the fate of two children from Harlem), Next time the fire (in a bilingual version, an essay on the place of Blacks in the United States) and an unpublished biography by Yannick M. Blec, doctor of foreign languages and literature at the University of Paris-Est. Enough to take a breather before diving back into the cauldron of new releases.