The Heresiarch & Co.

The French writer known as Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm Apollinairs Kostrowicki, b. 1880 in Rome to a Polish mother and an unknown Father), is most widely remembered as a groundbreaking modernist poet, author of the internationally influential collections Alcools and Calligrammes. But in France, Apollinaire's prose has always been equally well regarded. This volume of short stories about heretics, provincial romantics, and adventurers in crime was Apollinaire's literary debut in 1910, and only just lost the Prix Goncourt that year to Colette's La Vagabonde. Making full use of the author's knowledge of obscure historical, ecclesiastical, and geographical information, these stories rely neither on the dream, nor on juxtaposition, but nonetheless represent a technique that Andr Breton would later call a "formula" for Surrealism - producing a "music... like gold pebbles rolled in a torrent." Book jacket.