Alfred Jarry’s Ubu and Alain Resnais’s Nim. Bob Dylan’s tightrope walks and Alfred Hitchcock’s vertigo. Flaubert’s kicks against idiocy and Cocteau’s embrace of death. The enduring appeal of Surrealism and the failures of intellectual culture. In these thirteen essays, Mark Polizzotti brings fresh readings to topics both mainstream and esoteric. Drawing on three decades of critical writings, Jump Cuts ranges across a broad swath of subjects—film, music, literature, translation, the pitfalls of biography, the current dilemma of the humanities—to map the creative act as it strains to fulfill our eternal, unrequited yearning for transcendence. 

"As I read Mark Polizzotti's Jump Cuts I kept wanting to talk back to the book —not because there was anything wrong; I just wanted to engage further. Polizzotti's understanding of Surrealism and its consequences—of an enormous amount of twentieth-century culture—is exceptionally broad and deep, and his prose is clear and sharp. His book is a gas, a vibe, an argument, and a conversation."  Lucy Sante

"Mark Polizzotti is an omnivorously curious writer, bringing a translator’s perspective to much of what he discusses in his essays; his ear picks up on the intended meaning in the work of artists long-ago, lost in historical decontextualization. Polizzotti, in effect, retranslates how to see these artists, correcting beloved Apocrypha if he must, in the act of repositioning them among their contemporaries and predecessors. He took me to school on Surrealism, a movement I thought I knew well. I’m now more alive than ever to its wonders. I’m staggered by how much Polizzotti knows and by the gorgeous leap of his prose, which gets airborne fast. Anecdotally rich, astonishing, galvanizing and utterly unacademic, Jump Cuts goes down like chilled aperol in a hot summer chugging contest!"  Guy Maddin

"To read Mark Polizzotti’s Jump Cuts is to be a delighted flâneur strolling through obscure passageways in Surrealism, overhearing songs by Robert Johnson and Bob Dylan, slipping into movie houses to watch, as if for the first time, Last Year at Marienbad, Vertigo, and Cocteau’s Orphée. Erudite, witty, light on his feet, Polizzotti is the perfect guide to these shadowlands where art and freedom embrace. A Modernist Book of Revelation." Rosanna Warren

Mark Polizzotti’s books include Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Highway 61 Revisited, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, and Why Surrealism Matters. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Apollo, The Nation, Bookforum, and elsewhere. His translations, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, Scholastique Mukasonga, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, and André Breton, have won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the International Booker Prize, and the NBCC/Gregg Barrios Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. He directs the publications program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Heavy Feather Review

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