The Magnetic Fields

Praise

“With distance, a sort of unity has established itself, and The Magnetic Fields have become the work of a single author with two heads. This double gaze has made it possible, as nothing else would, for Philippe Soupault and André Breton to push forward on the path where no one had preceded them, into these shadows where they were both speaking aloud.” —Louis Aragon

“Fantastic, disconnected but vivid and poetic as though Breton and Soupault were seeing sea life at the bottom of the ocean’s floor: very few of us have the intensity of spirit to live with that sense of life.” —Kimberly Lyons

“The Magnetic Fields opened the verbal floodgates for the writers aligned first with Dada and then with Surrealism: Breton, Soupault, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Benjamin Peret.” —Christopher Merrill, Los Angeles Times

“Breton and Soupault ushered a freshly new phenomenon of writing into being. Theirs remains the key 20th century collaboration. . . Going forward there was acknowledged precedent for the validity of jointly recording words onto the page as they come, whether borrowed, imagined or otherwise summoned forth from whatever depths.”  —Patrick James Dunagan, Periodicities