The Custom House of Desire

The Custom-House of Desire: A Half-Century of Surrealist Stories is an intriguing anthology that explores the breadth and depth of surrealist storytelling over a fifty-year period. Through the lens of both imagination and desire, the collection reveals how surrealist writers challenge conventional narrative forms and literary genres to uncover the marvelous—a perspective on reality that transcends ordinary perception. This anthology presents stories written in French by authors from diverse national and cultural backgrounds, such as Fernando Arrabal, Joyce Mansour, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues, showcasing the movement’s global influence and thematic diversity. The selected works range from fully structured tales to experimental narratives, reflecting surrealism’s disdain for traditional literary conventions and its relentless pursuit of the ineffable. The book invites readers to engage with surrealist writing on their own terms, offering a flexible arrangement of stories that encourage exploration based on curiosity, themes, or the appeal of individual authors. Themes such as humor, terror, eroticism, and the surrealist marvelous weave through the collection, each serving as an entry point into the movement’s radical reimagining of storytelling. Through these narratives, readers encounter the surrealist’s rejection of literary orthodoxy and aesthetic formalism in favor of a poetic vision driven by imagination and boundless desire. Whether exploring the disorienting humor of Marianne van Hirtum or the evocative eroticism of Markale, the anthology underscores surrealism’s enduring ambition: to redefine human experience and transform our understanding of reality. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.