Paris Peasant is one of Surrealism’s great city books.

Aragon wanders through the soon-to-be-demolished Passage de l’Opéra and the artificial landscapes of the Buttes-Chaumont, treating cafés, shop windows, advertisements, public parks and chance encounters as entrances into a hidden modern mythology. 

Published in French as Le Paysan de Paris in 1926, the book abandons ordinary narrative and character development in favour of drift, description, polemic and dream logic. Aragon pays obsessive attention to places already threatened by disappearance, but this is not quite nostalgia. He is interested in the unstable moment when the everyday becomes marvellous: a shop turns into a seascape, a woman becomes an apparition, and the commercial arcade reveals itself as both physical structure and psychic labyrinth. Its influence runs forward through Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Situationist wandering and later forms of psychogeography, though Aragon’s book remains stranger, more sensuous and less programmatic than most of its descendants.

Translated from the French, with an introduction, by British Surrealist Simon Watson Taylor. This is a foundational modernist work for readers interested in Surrealism, urban space, dream writing, architecture and the secret life of obsolete places.

Picador/Pan paperback, 1980; first UK trade paperback edition. Moderate rubbing, creasing and edgewear; pages age-toned, binding sound.