A classic novel in the tradition of The Tin Drum, The Sorrow of Belgium is a searing, scathingly funny portrait of a wartime Belgium and one boy's coming of age-emotionally, sexually, and politically. Epic in scope, by turns hilarious and elegiac, The Sorrow of Belgium is the masterwork of one of the world's greatest contemporary authors."

In this novel/allegory the narrator/author sets sail in the yacht Impossible to search for Mount Analogue, the geographically located, albeit hidden, peak that reaches inexorably toward heaven. Daumal's symbolic mountain represents a way to truth that -cannot not exist, - and his classic allegory of man's search for himself embraces the certainty that one can know and conquer one's own reality.

A Night of Serious Drinking is among Rene Daumal's most important literary works. Like Daumal s Mount Analogue it is a classic work of symbolic fiction. An unnamed narrator spends an evening getting drunk with a group of friends; as the party becomes intoxicated and exuberant, the narrator embarks on a journey that ranges from seeming paradises to the depths of pure hell. The fantastic world depicted in A Night of Serious Drinking is actually the ordinary world turned upside down. The characters are called the Anthographers, Fabricators of useless objects, Scienters, Nibblists, Clarificators,...

For this early 20th century French poet-philosopher, life, in its most dynamic sense, can only be experienced after the facade of self-identity has been systematically negated through a kind of metaphysical suicide. In Le Contre-Ciel, Daumal invites us, his readers, to go through this process of regeneration-through-negation with him in order to revive in ourselves a knowledge and understanding of our primordial sources.