Insolent and defiant, the Chants de Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont (1846-70), depicts a sinister and sadistic world of unrestrained savagery and brutality. One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, it follows the experiences of Maldoror, a master of [...]

Le Comte de Lautreamont was the nom de plume of Isidore Ducasse (1846-70), a Uruguayan-born French writer and poet whose only surviving major work of fiction, Les Chants de Maldoror, was discovered by the Surrealists, who hailed the work as a dark progenitor of their movement. It was in Les Chants d[...]

Named in homage to Isidore Ducasse, the Uruguayan-French poet who wrote Maldoror under the name Comte de Lautreamont, and with a knowing nod to John Ashbery's book of the same title, this is the first major English-language survey of contemporary Uruguayan poetry for some 40 years, and features the [...]