René Crevel occupies a peculiar place in twentieth-century literature: a surrealist, a communist sympathiser, a fierce critic of bourgeois morality, and one of the most tragic figures of the Parisian avant-garde.

Dead by suicide at just thirty-four, his work burns with the intensity of someone writing against every available form of certainty. Babylon, first published in 1927, is perhaps his most delirious achievement. The novel unfolds through a series of dreamlike episodes, shifting identities, impossible conversations and hallucinatory transformations. Family life becomes grotesque theatre. Desire slips into absurdity. Logic bends and fractures. Throughout, Crevel treats reality less as a stable condition than as a surface continually ruptured by fantasy, obsession and revolt.

Beneath the surrealist spectacle sits a deeply serious project. Crevel is not interested in strangeness for its own sake; he uses it to attack convention, morality, nationalism and the comfortable hypocrisies of modern life. The result feels at times like a collision between Kafka, Cocteau, Lautréamont and early Buñuel, while remaining unmistakably his own.

This Quartet edition includes Kay Boyle's translation and afterword, preserving one of the most important English-language gateways into a writer whose work remains criminally underread outside specialist surrealist circles. Paperback. Quartet Books, 1988. Very good condition with light shelf wear and a clean, bright interior.