Businessman Georges Gerfaut witnesses a murder--and is pursued by the killers. His conventional life knocked off the rails, Gerfaut turns the tables and sets out to track down his pursuers. Along the way, he learns a thing or two about himself. . . . Manchette--masterful stylist, ironist, and social critic--limns the cramped lives of professionals in a neoconservative world.

"Manchette has appropriated and subverted the classic thriller with] descriptions of undiluted action, violence and suspense and] a perspective on evil, a disenchanted world of manipulation and fury . . . ."...

This unsettling novel inspired Pedro Almodovar's acclaimed film "The Skin I Live In."

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Mygale MIG-uh-lee] n.: a genus of large tropical spiders. . . .

A highly successful plastic surgeon pursues and captures the man who raped his daughter. He is determined to exact an atrocious vengeance, and an ambiguous, even sadomasochistic relationship develops between self-appointed executioner and victim.

Swift and spare, suspenseful and thought-provoking, Mygale puts the gothic spirit back in the noir canon while introducing...

In sixteen ferocious short storiesFrench author Luc Lang encapsulates the brutality of everyday life. Each tale is an admixture of tragedy, comedy, ridicule, and pain. Compassion lurks somewhere, perhaps, but pity is conspicuous by its absence.

Lang s curt, agitated prose disassembles daily life with a swift, unflinching hand and examines it with a sharp, analytic eye. Skinning quotidian moments to bare, raw impulses, confusions, and the agonies underneath, the stories in Cruel Tales from the Thirteenth Floor show the mundane grind of the everyday forces that are fueled by...

Jean-Paul Clebert was a boy from a respectable middle-class family who ran away from school, joined the French Resistance, and never looked back. Making his way to Paris at the end of World War II, Clebert took to living on the streets, and in Paris Vagabond, a so-called "aleatory novel" assembled out of sketches he jotted down at the time, he tells what it was like. His "gallery of faces and cityscapes on the road to extinction" is an astonishing depiction of a world apart--a Paris, long since vanished, of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast--and a no...