In the foothills of the French Alps the narrator meets a shepherd who has quietly taken on the task of planting one hundred acorns a day in an effort to reforest his desolate region. Not even two world wars can keep the shepherd from continuing his solitary work. Gradually, this gentle, persistent man's work comes to fruition: the region is transformed; life and hope return; the world is renewed.

    Heartsnatcher is Boris Vian's most playful and most serious work. The main character is Clementine, a mother who punishes her husband for causing her the excruciating pain of giving birth to three babies. As they age, she becomes increasingly obsessed with protecting them, going so far as to build an invisible wall around their property.

    There are early letters imbued with the intensity of adolescent friendships; reports from the Orient that bring to life an exotic place where the picturesque, the sentimental, and the erotic gloriously coexist; and accounts of the writing of Madame Bovary that meticulously chronicle Flaubert's creative process. Letters to Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Ivan Turgenev, Emile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant offers a glimpse into nineteenth-century literary life; while those letters to George Sand bring to light a deep, abiding friendship. In the correspondence between Flaubert and his lover Louise Colet, Geoffrey Wall suggests in his Introduction, we witness an erotic game, a highly charged form of illicit intercourse.

    An obsessive questioning back and forth builds up Blanchot's narrative, with its sense--shared with Kafka's famous "doorkeeper" parable--that behind each question lies the spooky possibility of a further, more imposing, more insoluble question. Thematically, powerlessness, inertia, insufficient speech, weariness, falling, faltering--everything tied to a negative or nonexistent value in ordinary discourse--is given value here by its being articulated, moved into writing and thought. What's insignificant or worthless gathers weight through its troubling persistence, its failure to disappear. The "endless" conversation of Blanchot's writing turns "fiction" toward an experience of listening--a far cry from the storytelling most fiction (still) takes itself to be.