Informed by the author’s active engagement with the late nineteenth-century avant garde, this obscure novel illuminates the Impressionist milieu while presenting a timeless meditation on the bond of friendship and the volatile communion between madness and art.Originally serialized in the French literary journal L’Echo de Paris between September 1892 and May 1893, In the Sky remained unpublished until 1989 when preeminent Mirbeau scholars Jean-François Nivet and Pierre Michel edited and released the first standalone edition as an unfinished novella. Over a century after its initial publication, Mirbeau’s overlooked classic now appears in English for the first time.The present text has been faithfully translated by the American novelist Ann Sterzinger with assistance by Mirbeau scholars Robert Ziegler and Claire Nettleton, who also contributes an introduction.