Quilty as charged

"In 1941, as the Vichy regime consolidated its control of France, Andre Breton left the country for the island of Martinique. A poet and the principal founder of surrealism, Breton did not stay long, but his visit inspired the essays and poems of this book. Martinique: Snake Charmer is one of surrealism's most important texts, and it has been called "the most beautiful of all books" about the island. (Martinique: Snake Charmer also includes nine evocative drawings by the surrealist Andre Masson, a companion of Breton's during his stay on the island.) First collected into a single volume in 1948 and in print in France ever since, this is the first English translation of a work that, in series editor Franklin Rosemont's view, seeks "not merely to question the dogmas and platitudes of so-called common sense and 'established facts, ' but to deviate from them, absolutely, in an imaginative quest for new and untried solutions to society's gravest problems.""--Jacket.