John Ashbery is known as America’s foremost poet, but his prose writing and his engagement with prose writers – through translations, essays and criticism – have had a profound impact on the cultural landscape of the past half-century. This book, the companion volume to Collected French Translations: Poetry, presents his version of the classic French fairytale ‘The White Cat’ by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, alongside works by innovative masters such as Raymond Roussel and Giorgio de Chirico. Here are Roussel’s Documents to Serve as an Outline and extracts from his Impressions of Africa; selections from Georges Bataille’s darkly erotic novella L’Abbé C; Antonin Artaud’s correspondence with Jacques Rivière; Salvador Dalí on Willem de Kooning; Jacques Dupin on Alberto Giacometti; and key theoretical texts by Odilon Redon and others.

Several of these twenty-eight prose pieces, by seventeen writers, artists, musicians and critics, are previously unpublished or have been long unavailable. Many, such as Pierre Reverdy’s Haunted House, are modern classics. This book provides new insight into the range of French cultural influences on John Ashbery’s life and work in literature and the arts.