Empty Mirror

a literary magazine

  • About
    • About Empty Mirror
    • Get in Touch
    • Support EM
    • Colophon
  • Submit
  • Contributors
  • Essays
  • On Literature
  • Poetry
  • Reviews
  • Art
  • Interviews
  • Beat
    • Beat Generation
    • Ted Joans Lives!
  • +
    • Fiction
    • Music & Film
    • News
    • On Writing
    • Book Collecting

Book Review – Michel Leiris’ Nights as Day, Days as Night

Denise Enck

Nights as Day, Days as Nights - Spurl Editions
Nights as Day, Days as Nights – Spurl Editions

Nights as Day, Days as Night by Michel Leiris / Spurl Editions / 196 pages / $17.50 / Translated by Richard Sieburth, with a foreword by Maurice Blanchot

Spurl Editions has republished this long-out-of-print collection of Michel Leiris’ dreams.

In the way that dreams can reflect and shine light upon one’s waking life, these dream recollections are at once fantastical and autobiographical.

Collected over a period of forty years and translated from the French by Richard Sieburth, together they form an intimate portrait of the dreamer.

Leiris presents his dreams as short scenes. Some are only a few sentences, none are longer than about two pages, and all but a few contain no analysis.

As Sieburth notes in his introduction, Leiris considered these pieces among his poems.

Were these pieces solely works of the imagination these would be fascinating to read. But there’s no artifice in dreams so, recounted candidly, these sketches allow the reader to see what makes Leiris tick. The details of his everyday life in France, anxieties, and pleasures subsumed with half-awake visions and the deep matrix of the Surrealist’s dreaming subconscious.

Dreams are by nature collage-like and this book itself is like a collage of nightly adventures and absurdities.

Read a sample of Nights as Day, Days as Night.

Share on X (Twitter)Share on Facebook

Denise Enck

Denise is Empty Mirror's founder and editor. She's edited several other literary magazines and small-press publications since the 1990s. When not at Empty Mirror, you can probably find her reading or writing -- or out exploring the back roads and beaches of Washington State.

Author: Denise Enck Tags: book reviews, surrealism Category: Book Reviews August 4, 2017

You might also like:

Hammond Guthrie’s AsEverWas: Memoirs of a Beat Survivor
splake’s Magic Box
TC Boyle - Stories II
Book Review – T.C. Boyle Stories II
ted joans interview teducated
The Teducated Mouth: John Barbato interviews Ted Joans

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Privacy Policy

 

DONATE TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The EM newsletter

Receive fresh poetry, reviews, essays, art, and literary news every Wednesday!


Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

Subscribe Submissions Support

Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

Books

Biblio
© 2000–2025 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures