“Echenoz is one of the contemporary literature's rare graceful magicians.” —BookforumJérôme Lindon is a genre-defying meditation on the friendship and working relationship between Jean Echenoz and his editor, the founder of Les Editions de Minuit, Jerome Lindon. Lindon published the work of Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, and Robbe-Grillet, among so many other giants. This voice-driven ramble recounts in candid, understated, and hilarious glimps...

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...

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 ...

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 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...

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 ...

In this seriocomic noir by a “master magician of the contemporary French novel” (The Washington Post), a low-grade film director is embroiled in troubles involving a rampaging elephant, an African militia, and the mystery of a naked man falling from a window to his death.A naked man plummets from a sixth-story window, nearly flattening Robert Bristol. But Bristol, semi-famous director of B-grade adventure flicks, hardly notices: he’s thinking about his nex...

An awardwinning cartoonist adapts the well-regarded French novella by Jean Echenoz in this taut and moving study on grief.A Parisian woman dies in a fire leaving her husband and son behind, bereft.The fire has destroyed all traces of her. The only reminder the men have is a multi-storey mural, a perfume ad, featuring the woman as a young model. In his grief, the son silently walks by the mural every day. The father is loud and passionate in his grief and th...

An intimate history of the famed Old West outlaw that plumbs the origins of power in America and the precariousness of democracy—from the Goncourt Prize–winning author of The Order of the Day.Henry McCarty, William Bonney, Billy the Kid. Born in 1859, orphaned at 14, he killed his first man at 17 and died at just 21. His story was written by his killer—the New Mexico lawman Pat Garrett, whose Authentic Life of Billy the Kid aimed to counter the gr...

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...

An analyst at the heart of the European Union revisits his past and anticipates the future after his father’s death, in this brilliant, nuanced novel of love, politics, masculinity, and memory.A European civil servant specializing in strategic foresight, Jean Detrez works on the future with scientific rigor. However, the unexpected seems to invade his life, both professional and personal. The Brexit referendum, the election of Trump, the separation from his partner...

A critically acclaimed #1 bestseller in France—a novel of art, desire, and time lost and regained, from Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano“Pithy and introspective. . . . Modiano delivers wondrous images of the tricks memory plays, sharply translated by Polizzotti. . . . Readers will savor this wistful narrative.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)Paris, 1960s. A young dancer and single mother, who might or might not be the narrator...