Written smack in-between Huysmans' most famous works—his 1881 Against Nature, which came to define the Decadent movement, and his 1891 exploration of Satanism, Down There—A Dilemma presents some of Huysmans' most memorable characters, including Madame Champagne, the self-appointed Parisian protector of women in need, and the carnal would-be sophisticate notary Le Ponsart, who wages a war of words with the bereft pregnant mistress of his deceased grandson with devastating consequences. In its unflinching portrayal of how authoritarian language can be used and abused as a weapon, this novella stands as Huysmans' indictment of the underlying crime of the novel itself: a language apparatus employed to maintain the appetites of the ruling class.Earning a wage through a career in the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of different literary movements: from the grey and grimy Naturalism of books like Marthe and Downstream to the cornerstones of the Decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, the dream-ridden Surrealist favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate.

    Described here are the emotionally disturbed architectural plan for a palace of emptiness; the experience of snowfall in a bed in the middle of a Finnish forest; the memory chambers that fuel the marvelous futility of the endeavor to write; the beautiful woodland church, built of warm air currents and fog, scattering in storms and taking renewed shape at dusk, that gives this book its title. The Cathedral of Mist offers the sort of ethereal narratives that might have come from the pen of a sorrowful, distinctly Belgian Italo Calvino. It is accompanied by two meditative essays on reading and writing that fall in the tradition of Marcel Proust and Julien Gracq. Paul Willems (1912-97) published his first novel, Everything Here Is Real, in 1941. Three more novels and, toward the end of his life, two collections of short stories bracketed his career as a playwright.

    Composed in the tumultuous aftermath of World War II, largely in the Danish prison cell where the author was awaiting extradition to France on charges of high treason, the book offers a unique perspective on the war, the postwar political purges in France, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s own dissident politics.  The tale of a man imprisoned and reviled by his own countrymen, the Fable follows its character’s decline from virulent hatred to near madness as a result of his violent frustration with the hypocrisy and banality of his fellow human beings. In part because of the story’s clear link to his own case—and because of the legal and political difficulties this presented—Céline was compelled to push his famously elliptical, brilliantly vitriolic language to new and extraordinary extremes in Fable for Another Time. The resulting linguistic and stylistic innovation make this work stand out as one of the most original and revealing literary undertakings of its time. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) was a French writer and physician best known for the novels Journey to the End of the Night (1932) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936). Céline was accused of collaboration during World War II and fled France in 1944 to live first in Germany, then in Denmark, where he was imprisoned for over a year; an amnesty in 1951 allowed him to return to France. Céline remains anathema to a large segment of French society for his antisemitic writings; at the same time his novels are enormously admired by each new generation.

    Discovered by Colette, who arranged for the publication of his first novel, My Friends, Bove enjoyed a busy literary career, until the German occupation silenced him. During his lifetime, Bove’s novels and stories were admired by Rainer Maria Rilke, the surrealists, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett, who said of him that “more than anyone else he has an instinct for the essential detail.”Henry Duchemin and His Shadows is the perfect introduction to Bove’s world, with its cast of stubborn isolatoes who call to mind Herman Melville’s Bartleby, Robert Walser’s “little men,” and Jean Rhys’s lost women. The poet of the flophouse and the dive, the park bench and the pigeon’s crumb, Bove is also a deeply empathetic writer for whom no defeat is so great as to silence desire.[Source: http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints...]

    From the beach towns of Normandy to the streets of New Orleans, these thirteen vignettes introduce us to a covetous French painter, a sleepless wanderer of the night, a guitar-playing gypsy, and a host of others who yearn for and dive into the turbulent depths of romantic experience.

    A fair selection of the master's short story output. Roger Colet has written the introduction for the Penguin Classic edition..

    In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.

    It is a collection of short prose narratives that offer a blend of pataphysical humor and surreal nightmare: secret societies so secret that one cannot know if one is a member or not, music-hall acts that walk a tightrope from humor to horror, childhood memories of a man never born, and correspondence from countries that are more states of mind than geographical locales. Lying somewhere between Kafka's parables and the prose poems of Henri Michaux, Ferry's tales read like pages from the journal of a stranger in a familiar land. Though extracts have appeared regularly in Surrealist anthologies over the decades, "The Conductor" has never been fully translated into English until now. This edition includes four stories not included in the original French edition and is illustrated throughout with collages by Claude Ballare.Jean Ferry (1906-1974) made his living as a screenwriter for such filmmakers as Luis Bunuel and Louis Malle, cowriting such classics as Henri-Georges Clouzot's "Le Quai des orfevres" and script-doctoring Marcel Carne's "Les Enfants du paradis." He was the first serious scholar and exegete of the work of Raymond Roussel (on whom he published three books) and a member of the College de 'Pataphysique.

    Written between 1932 and 1940, Blanchot's first novel, here brilliantly translated by Robert Lamberton, contains all the remarkable aspects of his famous and perplexing invention, the ontological narrative--a tale whose subject is the nature of being itself. This paradoxical work discovers being in the absence of being, mystery in the absence of mystery, both to be searched for limitlessly. As Blanchot launches this endless search in his own masterful way, he transforms the possibilities of the novel. First issued in English in 1973 in a limited edition, this re-issue includes an illuminating essay on translation by Lamberton.

    An exhaustive catalogue of sexual aberrations and the first systematic exploration -- a hundred years before Krafft-Ebing and Freud -- of the psychopathology of sex, it is considered Sade's crowning achievement and the cornerstone of his thought. Lost after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, it was later retrieved but remained unpublished until 1935.

    . . . A very funny, intelligent book that can be read both for its politics and for its extraordinary depiction of a woman who revels in her bestial transformation."

    --from Coma The novelist and playwright Pierre Guyotat has been called the last great avant-garde visionary of the twentieth century, and the near-cult status of his work--because of its extreme linguistic innovation and its provocative violence--has made him one of the most influential of French writers today. He has been hailed as the true literary heir to Lautr?amont and Arthur Rimbaud, and his "inhuman" works have been mentioned in the same breath as those by Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud.Winner of the 2006 prix D?cembre, Coma is the deeply moving, vivid portrayal of the artistic and spiritual crisis that wracked Guyotat in the 1980s when he reached the physical limits of his search for a new language, entered a mental clinic, and fell into a coma brought on by self-imposed starvation. A poetic, cruelly lucid account, Coma links Guyotat's illness and loss of subjectivity to a broader concern for the slow, progressive regeneration of humanity. Written in what the author himself has called a "normalized writing," this book visits a lifetime of moments that have in common the force of amazement, brilliance, and a flash of life. Grounded in experiences from the author's childhood and his family's role in the French Resistance, Coma is a tale of initiation that provides an invaluable key to interpreting Guyotat's work, past and future.

    Writing in the intensely lyrical prose style that is his trademark, the man, Jean Cocteau, dubbed France's "Black Prince of Letters" here reconstructs his early adult years - time he spent as a petty criminal and vagabond, traveling through Spain and Antwerp, occasionally border hopping across to the rest of Europe, always trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities.

    Translated from the French by Brian Evenson. With the calm strangeness of dreams, and humor deepened by a hint of melancholy, these wonderful stories fool around on the frontiers of the imagination. All musical dogs, woolly crabs, children and other detectives of the not-yet-invented should own this book.--Shelley JacksonHumane, impossible, homely and alien, Draeger's extraordinary stories are as close to dreams as fiction can be.--China Mi�ville

    Vincent and his generation are contrasted with an older generation of retired teachers and petty crooks, and both generations come under the bemused gaze of the waiter Alfred, whose infallible method of predicting the future mocks prevailing scientific models. Similarly, Queneau's literary universe operates under its own laws, joining rigorous artistry with a warm evocation of the last days of a bygone era.