Championed by Dadaists and Surrealists as the first absurdist drama, the play features a main character that is cruel, gluttonous, and grotesque the author's metaphor for modern man. This drama in five acts by Alfred Jarry is translated from the French by Barbara Wright, with two portraits of the author by L. Lantier and F. A. Cazals, and several drawings by Jarry and Pierre Bonnard, and 24 drawings by Franciszka Themerson, doodled on lithographic plates all followed by "The Song of the Dismembering," and concluding with two essays on the theatre by the same author and the same translator."

Called by some the French Borges, by others the creator of le nouveau roman a generation ahead of its time, Raymond Queneau's work in fiction continues to defy strict categorization. The Flight of Icarus (Le Vol d'lcare) is his only novel written in the form of a play: seventy-four short scenes, complete with stage directions. Consciously parodying Pirandello and Robbe-Grillet, it begins with a novelist's discovery that his principal character, Icarus by name, has vanished. This, in turn, sets off a rash of other such disappearances. Before long, a number of desperate authors are found in...

-- First paperback edition.
-- Formally inventive and utterly joyous, Grabinoulor recounts the fantastic adventures of its light-hearted, satyric, eponymous hero as he visits other planets, time travels, and finds poetry everywhere he goes.
-- Grabinoulor has been praised highly by authors as diverse as Apollinaire, Celine, and Queneau.
-- Albert-Birot founded and edited one of the first avant-garde book reviews, SIC, which published the futurists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists. Grabinoulor was first published in its pages.
-- First U.S. edition by Dalkey Archive ('87).