Apollinaire’s first book: a collection of outrageous short stories about heretics, renegade mystics and criminal religious fanatics,

The Heresiarch & Co. was Apollinaire’s first book, and reportedly remained his favorite. Making full use of his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure historical, ecclesiastical and geographic information, Apollinaire’s stories rely neither on the dream nor on unlikely juxtaposition, but instead represent an approach that Andre Breton called a formula for Surrealism; its music, Breton famously wrote, is like gold pebbles rolled in a torrent. Apollinaire himself wrote of The Heresiarch & Co., This is a book for those who love literature, powerful and disturbing, strange and logical … The author, amid so many fantastic, tragic and sometimes sublime inventions, intoxicates himself with a charming erudition with which he also intoxicates his readers.