Twenty four delirious narratives from the highpoint of Surrealist
automatic writing
A foundational classic of Surrealist literature, The Leg of Lamb
brings together the arch-Surrealist Benjamin Péret's short prose: a
smorgasbord of automatic writing and fantastical narratives employing
everything from the cinematic antics of Buster Keaton and slapstick
animation to the storytelling devices of detective novels, alchemical
operations and mythology. The Leg of Lamb consists of 24 delirious
narratives, including the novella-length works And the Breasts Were
Dying and There Was a Little Bakeress. Péret's adult fairy tales bear
equal allegiance to Lewis Carroll and the Marquis de Sade, and present
one of the clearest examples of Surrealist humor, in which the
boundaries between character and object blur, and where a coat rack,
artichoke or a pile of manure is just as likely as Napoléon, El Cid or
Pope Pius VII to take on the role of hero and adventurer. Péret himself
edited this collection toward the end of his life. Originally published
in French in 1957, almost all of the stories in this collection had been
written in the 1920s, half of them even preceding André Breton's
Manifesto of Surrealism. The Leg of Lamb offers not only a highpoint
of Surrealist automatic writing, but a key chapter in the genesis of the
Surrealist movement.
