This delightful collection allows everyone to enjoy firsthand the provocative methods used by the artists and poets of the Surrealist school to break through conventional thought and behavior to a deeper truth. Invented and played by such artists as André Breton, Rene Magritte, and Max Ernst, these gems still produce results ranging from the hilarious to the mysterious and profound.

A shadow is a shadow all the same.
Make two o'clock with one clock.
Never wait for yourself.*

Ditch the Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit this holiday season and instead inflict some spicy Surrealist action on your bourgeois family and friends. Of course everyone knows about the Exquisite Corpse, but how about 'Certain Possibilities Relating to the Irrational Embellishment of a City' where players are asked whether they would 'conserve, displace, modify, transform, or suppress certain aspects of a city' [or other object, system or concept]. Or perhaps 'Would You Open the Door?' where players imagine they are dreaming and there is a knock at the door; after opening it and recognizing the visitor, they must decide immediately if they would let the visitor in or not and why (visitors may be famous, infamous, living or dead, or someone known to all players—answers must be the first thing that comes to mind). The book also includes amusing examples of answers and outcomes from usual Surrealist suspects such as Breton, Péret, and Magritte. All games guaranteed to be even more fun with a glass of absinthe in hand.

*from Proverbs for Today by Paul Eluard and Benjamin Péret ( )

"[T]he game became a system, a method of research, a means of exaltation and stimulus, a mine, a treasure-trove and finally, perhaps, a drug." --Simone Collinet (144)

In this very little volume, editor Mel Gooding describes and compiler Alastair Brotchie demonstrates the centrality of games to the Surrealist enterprise. An inventory of ludic methods indicate how texts, images, discursive events, and other objects are produced through the application of automatism, chance, and the absorption of individual efforts into transpersonal aggregates.

The fourth of the four sections consists primarily of source notes and commentaries, and even includes a list of the "known" Surrealist games which are not represented among the recipes and samples in the collection. There are two useful bibliographies: one an abridgement of Kurt Seligman's 1943 bibliography of Surrealist works (133), the other Brotchie's own pointers for "Further Reading in English." (164) In the very end of the volume, seven pages are occupied by "The Little Surrealist Dictionary."

A Book of Surrealist Games is admirably designed, with a built-in bookplate on the inside front cover, many black-and-white reproductions of Surrealist visual works, and portraits of key 20th-century Surrealists. The game instructions are in most cases perfectly lucid, and ready for practical application.

A little book that I turn to when I'm feeling lousy, sad or stressed. Puts me in another world, gets me outside of myself!