Books with author Blaise Cendrars

Shadow lives in the forest... It goes forth at night to prowl around the fires. It even likes to mingle with the dancers... Shadow... It waves with the grasses, curls up at the foot of trees... But in the African experience Shadow is much more. The village storytellers and shamans of an Africa that is passing into memory called forth for the poet Blaise Cendrars an eerie image, shifting between the beliefs of the present and the spirits of the past. Shadow... It does not cry out, it has no voice... It can cast a spell over you... It follows man everywhere, even to war... Marcia Brown's stunning illustrations in collage, inspired by her travels in Africa, evoke the atmosphere and drama of a life now haunted, now enchanted by Shadow.

Unlike the malicious bravado of Dan Yack, Confessions is a bittersweet memoir of love and loss in which the typically earthy, reckless Blaise Cendrars surface is shot through with profound melancholy and a palpable sense of psycho-sexual disturbance. Yack tells the story of his tender love for the young Mireille (daughter of one of his many mistresses) whom he meets in a Paris gone mad on Armistice night, 1918. This love transforms him; he abandons his women, gives up fast cars and debauchery to marry this convent-educated girl of his dreams. To indulge her fantasies he launches her as a film star by creating films for her and casting her in wraith-like roles inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. But she's struck by a mysterious and fatal illness that raises some disturbing questions about the nature of their relationship. Poet, lover, war hero, and adventurer, Cendrars led a life as glamorous as Hemingway tried to make his seem, and this novel reads like the original black-and-white original of which A Moveable Feast was the glossy re-make.""--Michael Dibdin