Winner of France's prestigious Prix Goncourt and a runaway bestseller, Jean Echenoz's I'm Gone is the ideal introduction to the sly wit, unique voice, and colorful imagination of “the master magician of the contemporary French novel” (The Washington Post). Nothing less than a heist caper, an Arctic adventure story, a biting satire of the art world, and a meditation on love and lust and middle age all rolled into one fast-paced, unpredictable, and deliriously entertaining ...

This is Breton's definitive statement on l'humour noir, one of the seminal concepts of Surrealism. In his provocative anthology of the writers he most admires, Breton discusses the acerbic aphorisms of Swift, Lichtenberg and Duchamp, the theatrical slapstick of Christian Dietrich Grabbe, the wry missives of Rimbaud, the manic paranoia of Dali, the ferocious iconoclasm of Alfred Jarry and Arthur Cravan and the offhand hilarity of Apollinaire. For each of the authors included, Breton provide...

A new translation of one of the defining works of the French surrealist movement, an energetic autobiographical novel that is at once both a tumultuous romance story and an initiation into the surrealism of everyday life.In Paris, during the fall of 1926, André Breton met a young woman from the provinces who called herself Nadja because, she said, "in Russian it's the beginning of the word for hope, and because it's only the beginning." Their love affair was brief,...

**A Best Book of 2023 by The New YorkerFrom the award-winning author of The Order of the Day, a piercing account of the lesser-known conflict preceding the Vietnam War that dealt a fatal blow to French colonialism.**How can a modern army lose to an army of peasants?Delving into the last gasps of the First Indochina War (1946–1954), which saw the communist Việt Minh take control of North Vietnam, Éric Vuillard vividly illustrates the attitu...

A single volume that gathers together three of the most remarkable novels from Jean Echenoz, the “most distinctive French voice of his generation” (The Washington Post), Three by Echenoz demonstrates the award-winning author's extraordinary versatility and elegant yet playful style at its finest.“A parodic thriller sparkling with wit” (L'Humanité), Big Blondes probes our universal obsession with fame as a television documentary producer tries to ...

In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the volume--Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin—represents a sterling example of the author’s originality and appeal, while Mark Polizzotti’s superb English-language translations capture not only Modiano’...

This is the first publication in English of the anthology that contains Breton’s definitive statement on l’humour noir, one of the seminal concepts of Surrealism, and his provocative assessments of the writers he most admired. While some of the authors featured in The Anthology of Black Humor are already well known to American readers—Swift, Kafka, Rimbaud, Poe, Lewis Carroll, and Baudelaire among them (and even then, Breton’s selections are often surprising)—many others are sure ...

**Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Boston Globe, and Literary HubWinner of the 2017 Goncourt Prize, this behind-the-scenes account of the manipulation, hubris, and greed that together led to Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria brilliantly dismantles the myth of an effortless victory and offers a dire warning for our current political crisis.**February 20, 1933, an unremarkable day during a harsh Berlin winter: A meeting of twenty-four German captains...

In a mythical African land, some shipwrecked and uniquely talented passengers stage a grand gala to entertain themselves and their captor, the great chieftain Talou. In performance after bizarre performance—starring, among others, a zither-playing worm, a marksman who can peel an egg at fifty yards, a railway car that rolls on calves' lungs, and fabulous machines that paint, weave, and compose music—Raymond Roussel demonstrates why it is that André Breton termed him "the greatest mesmerize...

**International Booker Prize FinalistThe Spectator (UK): Best Book of the YearFrom the award-winning author of The Order of the Day, a powerful account of the German Peasants’ War (1524–25) that shows striking parallels to class conflicts of our time.**In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation launched an attack on privilege and the Catholic Church, but it rapidly became an established, bourgeois authority itself. Rural laborers and the u...

In his own words, the novel is "a kind of encyclopedia made into farce . . . A book in which I shall spit out my bile." At the center of this book are Bouvard and Pécuchet, two retired clerks who set out in a search for truth and knowledge with persistent optimism in light of the fact that each new attempt at learning about the world ends in disaster.In the literary tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, this story is told in that blend of satire and sympathy that only genius...

Highway 61 Revisited resonates because of its enduring emotional appeal. Few songwriters before Dylan or since have combined so effectively the intensely personal with the spectacularly universal. In "Like a Rolling Stone," his gleeful excoriation of Miss Lonely (Edie Sedgwick? Joan Baez? a composite "type"?) fuses with the evocation of a hip new zeitgeist to produce a veritable anthem. In "Ballad of a Thin Man," the younger generation's confusion is thrown back in the Establishme...