Eric Robertson, Professor of Modern French Literary and Visual Culture, has published a major new book exploring the work of innovative French author Blaise Cendrars.

In 1912 the young Frédéric-Louis Sauser arrived in France, carrying an experimental poem and a new identity: Blaise Cendrars was born. Over the next half-century, Cendrars wrote innovative poems, novels, essays, film scripts and autobiographical prose. His ground-breaking books and collaborations with artists such as Sonia Delaunay and Fernand Léger remain astonishingly modern today. Cendrars’s writings reflect his insatiable curiosity, his vast knowledge, which was largely self-taught, and his love of everyday life.

In this new account Eric Robertson examines Cendrars’s work against a turbulent historical background and reassesses his contribution to twentieth-century literature. Cendrars is as relevant today as ever before and deserves a wider readership in the English-speaking world. 

Blaise Cendrars: The Invention of Life is published by Reaktion Books (328pp., 40 illustrations). Full details on the publisher's website:

http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/display.asp?ISB=9781789145205 

The book is distributed in North America by the University of Chicago Press: 

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/B/bo157942587.html