The first English translation of essays from one of the twentieth century's most intriguing avant-garde writers

Compiled from two volumes of Raymond Queneau's essays ("Batons, chiffres et lettres" and "Le Voyage en Grece"), these selections find Queneau at his most playful and at his most serious, eloquently pleading for a certain classicism even as he reveals the roots of his own wildly original oeuvre. Ranging from the funny to the furious, they follow Queneau from modernism to postmodernism by way of countless fascinating detours, including his thoughts on language, literary fashions,...

Winner of the prestigious Prix Medicis and a bestseller in France, My Big Apartment is a humorous and ironic look at the serious subject of growing up. Always accessible but never facile, Christian Oster's books tell of the endless human quest for love and equilibrium in the world. Oster's gift is to make this timeless theme new through deadpan humor, a slyly cerebral style, and a deeply ingrained sense of melancholy. Gavarine, the gentle but immature protagonist of My Big Apartment, is ambitious only in the search for love. When he loses the keys to his apartment, he loses much more than...

The Crab Nebula (La Nebuleuse du crabe) is comprised of fifty-two vivid chapters that provide startling insights into the existence of this nebulous man named Crab: his nightmarish-and none too solid-physique, his mysterious absence from the pages of history, his birth in prison, his never having been born at all. In his portrait of Crab, Eric Chevillard gives us a character who is genuinely strange and curiously like ourselves. A postmodernist novel par excellence, The Crab Nebula parodies literary conventions, deconstructs narrative and meaning, and brilliantly combines absurdity and...

On the Ceiling tells the story of a young man who wears a chair upside down on his head. He falls in love with a young woman named Meline, and soon he and his friends move in with her and her family. They are disappointed by the life they find at Meline s, however, and in search of something better they make the collective decision to move to the ceiling of her house, where they expect to find a more orderly, more rational, and less encumbered existence.

Eric Chevillard s trademark is inventing characters who have little choice but to dream up the most hopelessly outlandish and...

Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the author of more than thirty books and one of France's most admired contemporary novelists. Out of the Dark is a moody, expertly rendered tale of a love affair between two drifters. The narrator, writing in 1995, looks back thirty years to a time when, having abandoned his studies and selling off old art books to get by, he comes to know Gerard Van Bever and Jacqueline, a young, enigmatic couple who seem to live off roulette winnings. He falls in love with Jacqueline; they run off to England together, where they share a few...

Winner of the prestigious Prix Medicis and a bestseller in France, My Big Apartment is a humorous and ironic look at the serious subject of growing up. Always accessible but never facile, Christian Oster's books tell of the endless human quest for love and equilibrium in the world. Oster's gift is to make this timeless theme new through deadpan humor, a slyly cerebral style, and a deeply ingrained sense of melancholy. Gavarine, the gentle but immature protagonist of My Big Apartment, is ambitious only in the search for love. When he loses the keys to his apartment, he loses much more than...

These three short novels are the first works to appear in English by a remarkable contemporary French author, Marie Redonnet. Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycee before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry Le Mort & Cie appeared in1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works.

In translator Jordan Stump's words, these three novels, "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common. Redonnet sees the three...

These three short novels are the first works to appear in English by a remarkable contemporary French author, Marie Redonnet. Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycee before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry Le Mort & Cie appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works. In translator Jordan Stump's words, these three novels, "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common. Redonnet sees the three novels as a...

When Deputy Willy Bost arrives in the mysterious border town of San Rosa, he does not know why he has been sent there or what he will find. What he encounters, gradually, is an obscure network of private and public relations tarnished by corruption, ambition, manipulation, and deceit. Nothing is clear in the workings of this sinister city; and no one, including Willy Bost, is altogether innocent. Murder, bombings, deceptions, seductions-all come to the fore in this spellbinding portrait of a society that seems both absurd and real. Nevermore is Marie Redonnet's fifth novel. Her earlier novels...

Based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, who survived alone for almost five years on an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile, The Mysterious Island is considered by many to be Jules Verne's masterpiece. "Wide-eyed mid-nineteenth-century humanistic optimism in a breezy, blissfully readable translation by Stump" (Kirkus Reviews), here is the enthralling tale of five men and a dog who land in a balloon on a faraway, fantastic island of bewildering goings-on and their struggle to survive as they uncover the island's secret.