This early work by the landmark Swiss author Robert Pinget is unlike any other he produced over his long career; indeed, there are few books by any writer with which it bears comparison--aside perhaps from the novels of Raymond Roussel or Denis Diderot. Graal Flibuste follows the progress of its narrator and his impudent coachman, Brindon, through a fantastical land peopled by strange creatures and stranger potentates, and filled with tall tales, mysteries, crimes, dilemmas, and deities . . . not least among whom is the terrible god Graal Flibuste himself.

Confessions of a Madman personalizes the struggle of a civil war by following the fragmentation and irreversible separation of a single family. Written in alternating flashbacks and descriptions of a man s present, Sebbar delivers what French critics call a modern fable for adults: a tale of familial disorientation, identity, violence, and morality.

A young man observes his mother go crazy waiting for her murdered husband to return home. Despite his estrangement with his father, the son vows to avenge his father s death by murdering his father s killers. In delving into his father s past,...

The unnamed narrator of Francis Bacon s Armchair has just been released from an extended stay at a psychiatric hospital and now has only one objective: to shut himself away in his apartment and contemplate the best way to restart his life. But his obsession with Cathie, a young woman he met during his convalescence, drives him out of his bedroom one night in search of a telephone which leads him two floors below into the apartment of his morbidly obese neighbor, Sauvage.

Sauvage is a translator overwhelmed by his current project, The Dictionary of Rare and Incurable Diseases, and by the...

The volume explores diverse aspects of French-language travel writing. Arranged chronologically by topic, the essays cover the medieval Anglo-Norman story of the Irish traveller Saint Brendan's fantastical visit to hell; the sixteenth-century French expeditions to Florida; the seventeenth-century Dernieres decouvertes dans l Amerique septentrionale de M. de la Sale mises au jour par le chevalier Tonti, 1697; the eighteenth-century Histoire generale des voyages by l abbe Prevost; the eighteenth-century Impressions d' Orient et d'Arabie written in French by the Polish count...