Claude Cahun: Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals)

Back in print after over a decade: the playful and genre-shattering memoir of a beloved surrealist known for her gender-bending portraiture

First published in 1930 by anti-fascist, avant-garde publisher Carrefour in Paris as Aveux non Avenus, Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is Claude Cahun's wildly radical answer to an invitation to write a memoir. It shatters the very premise of the memoir--the singularity of identity--into sharp and prismatic fragments that she reassembles into an ever-mutating inquiry into "self" and the many masks it wears. Using a multitude of forms (fables, jokes, aphorisms, letters, dialogues, hymns, pronouncements, prophecies, etc.), Cahun's admixture of art and life interrogates, meditates and muses on sex, gender, love, fear and numerous other of her preoccupations.
Long unavailable and obsessed over, Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) was originally published in English by MIT in 2008. The original (and only) English translation returns in a new, revised and redesigned edition, illustrated by large, sumptuous reproductions of the photocollages made in collaboration by Cahun and her partner, Marcel Moore. It also features the original introduction by Pierre Mac Orlan, as well as new essays by Lauren Elkin, Amelia Groom and the translator Susan de Muth. Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is a tour-de-force act of resistance; it provokes the reader to enter the capacious, subversive, playful and deeply imaginative space constructed by Cahun in her defiance of all categorization, in her repudiation of a delimited, censured world.
Claude Cahun (1894-1954) was a surrealist photographer, artist and writer born in Nantes, France. Most well known for her performative and gender-bending self-portraiture, her remarkable, multiform oeuvre has received renewed interest in recent decades as a pioneer of queer expression.