The daring, mischievous micro-essays of award-winning French humorist Éric Chevillard, published in English for the first timeÉric Chevillard is one of France’s leading stylists and thinkers, an endlessly inventive observer of the everyday whose erudition and imagination honor the legacy of Swift and Voltaire—with some good-natured postmodern twists.This ensemble of comic miniatures compiles reflections on chairs, stairs, stones, goldfish, objects found, st...

The classic Grimms' fairy tale of the valiant little tailor, as you’ve never heard it beforeOnce upon a time, there lived a valiant little tailor who killed seven flies with one blow—but who is this narrator who has abruptly inserted himself into the story, claiming authorship? He’s indignant: the fairy tale, borne carelessly along by the popular imagination, subjected to the transformations of oral tradition, was collected in a lamentable state by the Bro...

The narrator of Prehistoric Times might easily be taken for an inhabitant of Beckett’s world: a dreamer who in his savage and deductive folly tries to modify reality. The writing, with its burlesque variations, accelerations, and ruptures, takes us into a frightening and jubilant delirium, where the message is in the medium and digression gets straight to the point. In an entirely original voice, Eric Chevillard asks looming and luminous questions about who we are, the paths we’ve...

Eric Chevillard’s visionary play of word and thought has been compared to the work of Beckett, Michaux, and Pinget, yet the universe he spins is utterly his own. Palafox (Editions de Minuit, 1990), Chevillard’s third novel of eleven, explores the ecosystem of an unclassifiable yet enchanting protean creature, Palafox. A team of experts armed with degrees of higher learning is determined to label, train, baptize, and realize the elusive creature, while Palafox effortlessly and wordlessly de...