“He has an evening suit, but never an occasion to wear it, so he puts it on when he paints his pictures.” Insel, the only novel by the surrealist master Mina Loy, is a book like no other — about an impossible friendship amid the glamorous artistic bohemia of 1930s Paris. German painter Insel is a perpetual sponger and outsider — prone to writing elegant notes with messages like “Am starving to death except for a miracle — three o’clock Tuesday afternoon will be the end”—but somehow writer and art dealer Mrs. Jones likes him. Together, they sit in cafés, hatch grand plans, and share their artistic aspirations and disappointments. And they become friends. But as they grow ever closer, Mrs. Jones begins to realize just how powerful Insel’s hold over her is. Unpublished during Loy’s lifetime, Insel—which is loosely based on her friendship with the painter Richard Oelze — is a supremely surrealist, deliberately excessive creation: baroque in style, yet full of deft comedy and sympathy. Now, with an alternate ending only recently unearthed in the Loy archives, Insel is finally back in print, and Loy’s extraordinary achievement can be appreciated by a new generation of readers

Stories and Essays of Mina Loy is the first book-length volume of Mina Loy’s narrative writings and critical work ever published. This volume brings together her short fiction, as well as hybrid works that include modernized fairy tales, a Socratic dialogue, and a ballet. Loy’s narratives address issues such as abortion and poverty, and what she called “the sex war” is an abiding theme throughout. Stories and Essays of Mina Loy also contains dramatic works that parody the bravado and misogyny of Futurism and demonstrate Loy’s early, effective use of absurdist technique. Essays and commentaries on aesthetics, historical events, and religion complete this beguiling collection, cementing Mina Loy’s place as one of the great writers of the twentieth century