Nadja

A new translation of one of the defining works of French Surrealism, Nadja is an autobiographical novel that is at once a tumultuous love story and an exploration of the surreal in everyday life.

In Paris, fall 1926, André Breton met a young provincial woman who called herself Nadja — “the beginning of hope,” in Russian, she said. Their brief, intense affair became the seed for this extraordinary book, written a year later after Nadja was institutionalized and Breton moved on. Part memoir, part Freudian analysis, part visual experiment, Nadja interweaves images and words to capture a soul approaching “the extreme limit of the Surrealist aspiration.”

In this first new English translation in over sixty years, Mark Polizzotti conveys the vibrancy, strangeness, and youthful intensity of Breton’s prose, with an illuminating introduction revealing the real Nadja’s story. Featuring 44 images that Breton conceived as integral to the narrative, Nadja remains a convulsive, unforgettable meditation on love, obsession, and the surreal textures of everyday life — a precursor to the works of Julien Gracq, Julio Cortázar, and W.G. Sebald.